Is There Anybody Out There?

Complicate:  To modify so as to make something intricate or difficult.

Wednesday is a Big Book study.  We finished up the chapter We Agnostics today, experiencing the usual overwrought kerfuffle about why the whole concept is stupid and doesn't apply to the person who is - at that moment - bitching about the whole concept.  This is what we do: Complicate.  We object.  We explain why something that we don't like won't work for us.  In the Midwest people shot darts my way over my refusal to close a meeting with The Lord's Prayer  - here people are annoyed when I point out that they're working awfully hard to object to something that so many of us find important.

Damned if you do - Damned if you don't.

Anyway, a few of us continued the discussion outside the meeting, trying to come up with accessible and easily understood techniques for getting in touch with a Higher Power.  You know - do something nice for someone else, take the next right action, do what's in front of you, stuff like that.  One of my friends had to take his dad to the doctor today.

"There you go," I said.  "That's God for you today.  Simple as that."

As we were walking down the street to get to our cars we noticed that my wife's sponsor was watching a young man who just started coming to the meeting finish putting a spare tire on her car.  All of us thanked him for helping this elderly woman out on a rainy morning.  She handed him a sheaf of one dollar bills, apologizing that it was all of the money she had on her.  He refused the money.   I opened my wallet and pulled out a twenty, insisting that he take it.  His car wasn't anything to brag about so I assumed that the money would be appreciated.

He drove off.  My wife's sponsor put her money back in her wallet, bid us adieu, and also drove off.  I was laughing robustly at this point.  My intent wasn't to pay for this service, I don't think.  I believe I expected her to offer to repay me or at least give me the greasy one dollar bills wadded up in her fist.  I believe I would have refused her offer.  I also believe that I would have been even more impressed with myself than I was at that moment, and I was goddamned impressed already.

My friend did not say: "There you go.  That's God for you today.  Simple as that."

And for that . . . I am grateful.