My Testimony: Part 2

“God Loves You” (continued)

9 o’clock came pretty quickly. I tossed my apron into the hamper, clocked out, said goodnight to the chefs and my coworkers, and I walked out the door. The girl and her three friends were in front sitting on a ledge. I smiled and greeted them, and they finally introduced themselves. The girl who God supposedly spoke to was Cindy.

They all talked a little bit about their backgrounds: They were third years, didn’t know any first-years really, weren’t part of any kind of on-campus religious club. And I talked a little bit about mine.

“Do you believe in God?” Cindy asked.

“I used to not to,” I answered. “But, you guys caught me in this period where I just don’t know anymore. You guys have come at a really strange time for me, not just because of that. You know how you said I needed to be healed? You’re right, and I don’t know how you’re right.”

They asked me to tell them about it, and, surprising myself, I confessed my family’s situation to them. “My dad’s nephew, who lived in Vietnam, died in a motorcycle accident. He was nineteen, my age. It happened last Tuesday. My mom told me through email. She wrote that the loss is really hard for my dad, and in all their years of marriage, she has never seen him cry until now.”

I paused to reflect, and then I continued, “I still haven’t talked to them on the phone about it. I owe them a call, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. Among all this stress about finals and a research paper and so many other things, calling them has been on the very back of my mind.”

“My condolences to you and your family. God will help you all through this,” Cindy reassured me. “Would you like us to pray for you now?”

“Alright, I’m almost ready,” I said, “but first, can you explain to me again how exactly God talked to you, Cindy?”

She was happy to. “We were sitting upstairs in the dining hall eating. And when we prayed, God just spoke to me. He said a guy in glasses who worked here needed to be healed, both him and his family. And he told me your name, Brian.”

Guy in glasses... Guy. In. Glasses. This phrase struck me somehow.

“Are you ready?” Cindy asked.

“I am.” Each of the four laid a hand on my shoulders, two on each side. I watched them close their eyes and slowly drop their heads down; I followed suite and listened to their prayers, but sometimes I couldn’t help but distract myself. Guy in glasses. Why couldn’t I get that phrase out of my mind?

A sentence of their prayer stuck out to me: “God loves you. He created you the way you are.”

Guy in glasses. I couldn’t get it out of my mind because it definitely rung a bell.

“You may be confused about where you are in your life now, and you may be afraid of the future. But remember that God is there for you, to see you through all this. Let him open your heart to new possibilities, new adventures. Do not be afraid of the future.”

Motherfucking guy in the motherfucking glasses. Where the hell did I know this phrase from?!

“God is waiting for you, and he will happily come to you when you are ready to open your heart to God.”

They stopped. I open my eyes. “Is that it?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I couldn’t deny it, I felt somewhat calmer and at ease, except for the, well, you know, GUY IN GLASSES.

They then asked me if I wanted to convert, to which I said that I wasn’t ready. I was still skeptical. Cindy repeated the bit about how God would welcome me with open arms when I decided it was time to “receive Jesus.”

Before parting ways, I declined exchanging numbers, but we agreed to find each other on facebook. I shook each of their hands and thanked them again for the prayer, and we slowly broke our circle to head back to our homes.
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Walden and I arrived back at the Fullerton apartment with a pound of “XXX spicy” shrimp (“porno spicy” shrimp, as Walden likes to call it) and a pint of gumbo from Boiling Crab. We spread it all out over the kitchen table and dug in with our fingers. The gumbo was delicious, but porno spicy shrimp was disappointingly not spicy. Still all good though.

“So,” I said, “ever since my dance interview yesterday, I’ve wanted to write a thank you note on Facebook to some of my friends who have really helped me with my dancing, but I’m not sure if I should do it.”

“Why not?” Walden asked.

“I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything.”

“What are you talking about? How’d the interview go yesterday?”

“I don’t know, Walden. I think it went pretty well, but I’d say that I’m still as likely as I am unlikely to get onto the team. Right now I’m just going crazy and hating life because the final roster won’t be posted until this Sunday, the 17th.”

“Why are you hating life? You should be happy and proud. You got an interview! Damn, you knocked like fifty other people out!”

“I don’t know, Walden. I’ve been trying to believe that the interview means something, but it’s hard for me. I’ve only been able to focus on the wait, which has been torture, and sometimes I feel like I would’ve been better off without ever getting that interview. At this point, I’m so close. I have to go all the way or else everything leading up to this will have been in vain.”

“Can’t you just appreciate that you’ve made it this far?”

“I don’t know. I just doubt myself. Full of doubts, like always.” I took a sip from my gumbo.

“Brian,” Walden said as he licked the spicy sauce off his fingers, “you are a great dancer. The fact that I’m saying it and the fact that you got an interview are enough to make it true. You can believe it. Believe me.”

“I guess...my problem is I don’t believe in myself. I don’t believe others. I don’t believe, period.”

“It’s time to start believing Brian. You’ve grown so much since I first saw you in my summer intensive session. Why don’t you believe?”

“Because every time I believe,” I paused to wipe some gumbo off my hands, “I get fucked over. I get hurt.”

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“God Loves You” (continued)

Finally understanding the significance of the “guy in glasses,” I retreated back into the dining common’s kitchen and strode straight to the conveyor belt where all the students dropped off their dirty dishes. On the wall next to the belt hung a bunch of feedback cards. Why were the feedback cards my main interest?

Last week, despaired over the little amount of hours I had been working each week, I asked my friend Mary to get a feedback card, write something nice about me and demand that I get more hours.

I searched the wall for that feedback card, and it didn’t take me long to locate it. And there it was in the first sentence of Mary’s comments: “The guy with glasses and earrings who was cleaning tables today was really good!” Okay...However, Mary didn’t write my name. How could’ve Cindy figured out my name?

The next section of the feedback card, under “Our [Manager’s] response,” had the answer. Again, the first sentence gave it away. “Brian is our dining room attendant...”

I gazed. I gazed long. And hard. At the card. This was it. This had to be the answer, no doubt about it. It was how they knew my name, and how they knew what I looked like. But then again, to go up to a stranger and start getting all God-crazy and extremely personal with them, that is pretty damn ballsy. Cindy was so forward, so unashamed. I saw it in her: She definitely believed in God. But did God really tell her about me? If I was her, and if God didn’t actually talk to me, I would not have the balls to pursue a name that I read in a dining hall’s feedback section. But maybe she was just fucking crazy.

And the whole thing about my family needing healing? Well, that was probably just her sales pitch. I mean, don’t like ninety-nine percent of college students have some kind of problem with their family? For me, it was probably more obvious that I did. I was after all working at my school’s dining common. My posture probably doesn’t convey positive messages about myself either. At the very least, Cindy probably thought that she could hit a poverty nerve in my family. (And hell, there is one. My dad’s been laid off and out of a job for a while, and I’m working at Pippin because my parents can’t afford to give me one hundred dollars a month for groceries anymore.) All this was like a horoscope, y’know? Horoscopes are made to be extremely broad and applicable to anyone, and anyone who wants to believe, believes too much.

[...]

When I got back to the hall, the first thing I did was I called my parents. They were happy to hear from me. We chatted a little bit about work, my schoolwork, my parents’ life at home, and probably drawing from his pain toward the motorcycle accident, my dad reminded me to always drive very carefully. I promised him I would.

Last but not least, I went on Facebook, and I looked up one of Cindy’s three friends, John. There he was. UCI class of ‘10. His profile was decked out with his love for God and a bunch of religious sayings. My mouse hovered over the friend request button, but my finger couldn’t make contact. I gazed long and hard again at his picture, his profile, and all the amazing things he had to say about God and what God had done for him.

Fuck this. I hauled my mouse off the friend request button and signed the hell off Facebook.
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It was another typical morning in lecture, except this time I didn’t sleep straight through the entire thing. I booted up my laptop, and with a blank note open on Facebook, my fingers went to work on my keyboard:

This interview is the closest I’ve ever been, so close that I figured I had to get in, or else all I’ve done so far would’ve meant nothing. But after the interview, and after talking to a few friends, I’ve learned to appreciate what I’ve already accomplished. And what I’ve accomplished, I think it’s enough to warrant a small thank you entry, something I’ve wanted to do for a while but never found the occasion to. Right now I just wanna thank a few people that I think had a really huge impact on my dancing, the ones who have been an inspiration and a great help. I might write thank you’s to some more later. But for now, I’d like to say thank you to...

The roster comes out Sunday.