Eden Mine by S. M. Hulse

Author:S. M. Hulse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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I can’t read. Can’t eat. Can’t sleep. I sit beside her and watch her and wait. The only time I turn on the television is at 3:30, when The Galaxy’s Funniest Animals comes on, and I watch it for her. Sometimes I bring the newspaper or buy a magazine in the gift shop, but I don’t open them; they pile up on the bedside table. I keep my Bible in my hands, the one my father gave me when I was a boy, run my fingertips along the scuffed and softened leather at the edges of the cover. I spend hours paging through it, though I hardly need to. I know so much of it by heart.

My hands find the chapters I don’t preach anymore, the stories I don’t tell. The Book of Job: I know what I’m supposed to see in these verses, the theological lessons I’m supposed to absorb and impart, but when I consider them now, I see only cruelty and a heartless suggestion that one’s children can simply be replaced. The story of the Flood, which seemed righteous enough when I wallpapered Em’s nursery with pastel animals filing two by two into the ark, but seems brutally harsh now. The stories of Isaac, whom You saved, and of Jephthah’s daughter, whom You didn’t.

I don’t linger on those stories, let neither my eyes nor my mind rest on their words. (If I must overlook so many of Your words, so many of Your deeds, do I still believe? Should I?) Instead I seek out those that still bring comfort:

Leadeth me beside the still waters.

Be strong and of a good courage.

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul.

I save the most comforting stories for the latest hours, the darkest moments. I read of the healing promise of God, the promise I know is there because I have seen it, I have felt it, You have shown it to me. The blind man, the woman with an issue of blood, the man sick of the palsy. I don’t have to believe in these stories, don’t have to burden my wounded, wavering faith with them, because I have one of my own. It is knowledge, not faith, and perhaps that makes it lesser, but I am grateful to You for it now.

Always, in the end, I turn to a story I never thought much about before the bombing, a story I want to avoid as much as I want to turn to its page and never leave. A healing left too late. (You are Lord; nothing is too late for You. I know this. I do.) I can’t bear the backstory. Jairus falling at Your feet. The declaration of his daughter’s death. The laughing crowd. Instead, I skip to the end. To the most important line. I read it over and over, a prayer unto itself. I whisper the words aloud, again and again until they dissolve into incantation, though You only had to say it once.

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