been comrades in discontent, united by the bitterness we felt at the way our mother often treated us—her wavering between incredible kindness and unjustified cruelty. She could be so very abrasive, provoked into a fit of rage by the smallest infractions: a flash of anger across our face, an edge in our voice, any sign of hesitation or displeasure at what was being required of us. These were unmistakable signs of rebellion that she simply could not abide, and her lack of patience for our wayward emotions was one of the great hallmarks of our upbringing. But over time, I’d come to see things differently, in a way that Josh had never seemed to. I understood our mother’s hardness to be a painful necessity, not unlike our picketing: an expression of love manifesting as a harsh warning against sinful behavior. That was her duty as a mother.
It was a hard-won perspective, one that I had arrived at only after years of battling with my mom and with myself—but all the while, Josh’s heart had apparently been drawn further and further away. Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. He was an Esau, our enemy, doomed to eternal destruction. I felt so sorry for him, and so grateful to have been spared. As Josh and I had walked through the years of our teenage rebellion, he had missed the lesson that had become so clear to me: that happiness came only through submission—to the people and the circumstances and the limits that God had set for my life. The bounds of my habitation.
With that realization had come a peace with my mom that I had never thought possible. Just a few weeks before we lost Josh, she and I had walked in lockstep one afternoon, arm in arm like the close confidantes we had become. We were picking up Gabe and Jonah from the elementary school—the same one I had escaped to as a child. The spring sun was so warm on my face and the world was green and coming to life again, and I felt such a surge of joy and gratitude for my place in it that I started to cry. “Oh, what is it, sweet pea?” Mom asked, rubbing my arm soothingly with her free hand.
“I’m just so content,” I sobbed, clinging to her. “So happy and so grateful and so content. I don’t ever want that to change. I’m so afraid that it will. I don’t ever want the Lord to be mad at me for being ungrateful for my lot. I want to always love this life.”
My mother shushed me reassuringly. “The Lord has blessed you with so many wonderful talents, and you use them to serve Him. But more importantly, He’s given you a heart to know Him, and to love Him, and to love and serve His people. All we can do is trust Him and keep doing what He’s put in front of us to do.”
I pushed my sunglasses up and brushed the tears away.
“I love you, little girl.”
3. The Wars of the Lord
Three days after nineteen hijackers crashed four commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania, a lamentation sounded forth from Westboro Baptist Church pastor Fred Phelps. It was not a mournful cry for the thousands who had been murdered. It did not echo the grieving prayers sent up by thousands more whose loved ones had perished in wreckage and rubble. It did not reverberate with the near-universal horror that overtook the world, nor with anguish at the unspeakable atrocities that human beings are capable of visiting upon one another. To my grandfather, such sentimentalities were entirely beside the point—and therein lay his grief. For three days straight, the American media juggernaut had been a continual dirge, wholly devoted to the “caterwauling” of preachers, pundits, and politicians alike. Of all the “backslidden, hypocritical” preachers and “self-aggrandizing” politicians whose words were filling the airwaves, my grandfather insisted that not a single one was speaking a word of truth as far as the Word of God was concerned. And the truth was that in the council halls of eternity, God Himself had issued the command, sending those airplanes like missiles through time and space, casting down these symbols of American strength and vitality in punishment for her great sins: homosexuality, adultery, fornication, idolatry, rebellion.