October 3, 2006

A young, fresh-scrubbed, unnaturally cheerful young man in the café asked me, after I gave him his change, if I knew how good God was.
It might have been planned. Debated.Worked up to. Certainly I would’ve needed some “working up” before dropping that one on a complete stranger. But it came out almost casually, as if asking if knew how good the food at Oodle-noodle box was. There was, admittedly, a hint of nervous excitement, barely contained, behind his half-smile, a feeling as if he were leaning forward, ready to plunge off the edge. A vaguely mischievous sparkle in his eye.
He could have been me, 10 years ago. In Buffalo, on the UB campus. An odd role reversal, I the skeptical heathen, and he the earnest young believer. With a sincere, burning conviction that he had something inside that people needed to know about, searching for an intriguing opening line, a way to make the leap from the niceties of idle conversation between strangers to the awkward, but potentially vital dialogue of faith.

I found it difficult to meet his eyes. I replied, quietly, that, for me, the jury was still out on that question. Almost immediately, I wondered if I really meant it. I wondered if I was simply unnerved by his certainty, if I just wanted to see a flicker of doubt, some sort of crack in his quiet assurance. If I was just annoyed by his putting me on the spot, his dragging my personal struggles with faith out into the open, and responded in this way as an attempt to frustrate his plans. If I really, deep down, questioned God’s goodness. If my sense of myself, or humanity, as ill-used by their creator were not more of a fashionable skepticism, and less of a true personal conviction.

If my reply troubled him at all, he didn’t show it. He added, just as quietly, that he hoped I found out some day, smiled, and left.

And it worked. Because I’m still unsettled, and I’m still thinking about it.