JESUS NATION SEX REBEL, mini-chapter 18

18. NEARER TO GOD

Eve was praying, urgently but silently. Whatever happens to me in the world of men, God, please don’t abandon me. I don’t want my struggle with them to become a struggle with You.

Maybe it was not an abandonment of God to take up with men again. Maybe men were His agents on earth with whom women were privileged to consort in order to raise themselves nearer to God. Eve asked the Lord for His blessing again. However, dear God -- if You are against me meeting men, I promise to submit humbly to You if You choose to condemn me to Spinsterhood -- a proper punishment for my free-and-easy Single Female days.

She asked; He would decide; she would abide by His decision.

If she gained His blessing, she would feel better about her wish to feel equal to men. Meanwhile, there was a man in front of her, the Transgressor, his body being consumed by a harbinger of hell itself. Face in flames, eyes popping.

God’s palpable answer to sin.

Her own body was rigid, her eyes riveted. She saw all the misfits there, burning, all her patients, all the detritus outside the high walls of Jesusland. And she felt something new. A great sorrow. The perfect society rose on a mountain of corpses. Most of them Female. Like the poor Suicide Spinsters. Flames had to burn to purge the unworthy. She thought of Rachel, how her best friend feared the Scarlet “A” that she’d have to wear if she were reclassified -- to live in a hell of being shunned by everyone around her. The unthinkable: she, Eve, would become one of those who had to shun Rachel.

A flame would consume an important part of her if she had to give up her best friend. There was sorrow in being a Female. A particular and peculiar sorrow. A sorrow never experienced by men, such as the man sitting beside her. When this was over, she would have to work on finding a way to banish this sorrow from her soul. It scared her. It made her feel unequal. And it was very Non-Sanctioned. This unknown man beside her –- did he have it in him to help her over her sorrow? Did any man?