Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome by Reba Riley

Author:Reba Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Books

17

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Miracles

The following week, my cell phone rang.

“Reba Riley?”

“Speaking.”

“I’m a recruiter for a position at Orange Tiger Industries.”

My heart beat faster. I knew this company well; it was Fortune 500. Back before we’d relocated, I used to confide in Trent that I would change teams if Orange Tiger ever called.

“We’d like to interview you for a territory sales position that just opened. Are you available for a phone interview tomorrow, and—provided that goes well—could you fly to Houston next Tuesday?”

I had to sit down.

“Yes,” I said, trying not to sound like a teenage girl in the front row of a concert. “I can make that work.”

I flew to three different cities in as many weeks for interviews. How the Sickness allowed me to do this without falling asleep on the wrong plane and waking up in Albuquerque is a mystery. Drooling in window seats, I dreamed about how this new job would change my life. A promised land of blissful employment beckoned to me from my possible future, promising a small geographic territory, customers and products I already knew, and a company car with brand-new tires. No more backwoods West Virginia with lumberyard owners who kept their scary dogs and scarier hunting rifles in the stock room and suggested with lascivious winks that if the snow got too bad, I could just, “Stay the night at my house, Honeybun.” No more sleeping at rest stops. No more lubricated nails, ever.

“Sick or not sick, you are the best person for this position,” I told myself in my compact mirror in bathroom stalls. I visualized the dusty sales awards hanging in my home office, all won while my mystery illness strangled me behind the scenes. “You can do this. You can rock this.”

I got the job.

“Excellent!” exclaimed the Urban Monk when I told him the good news. “External circumstances are realigning to reflect your internal change.”

“How is changing jobs a spiritual event?” I asked, perplexed. In my mind, a dichotomy existed between my mornings with the monk and what I did to pay the bills.

He laughed. “Everything is a spiritual event. Did you think you would undertake a yearlong spiritual journey and find things unchanged?”

“I imagined changes, but . . . my voice trailed off as I considered what I’d hoped this year would bring: spiritual healing and—maybe—physical healing (if I could find the right diagnosis). “I guess I never thought life would change like this. It kind of feels like a miracle—just not the one I was looking for.”

“Continue on this path and everything will change,” he foretold. “Miracles will swirl around you.”

The Urban Monk talked a lot about miracles. He often challenged me to think about the relativity of time and space, to consider that perception does not equal reality. “Miracles are not only possible,” he said one day, “they are happening around us continually. We need only open our eyes to see them.”

On one particularly bad day for the Sickness, when I had felt the weight of my mystery illness in every word, I’d answered his miracle-talk too sharply.

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