For the Storms That Will Come...

We listened to the humming of an old engine and shook with the consistency of rumbling car vibrations while driving to a Columbian bar. I was in the passengers seat of my boyfriend’s white 87 Acura watching the monotonous streets of West Columbia pass by. The streetlights blurred together to make green and yellow streaks stopping only for run-down buildings and the ruins of a once booming ninetieth century economy. I caught a glimpse of a heavy, older black man resting in a chair next to a flickering “Open” sign, stroking his chin, staring at the road with unseeing eyes. We drove past with increasing speed, toward the venue to see the show, and I lost the treasure of his mystification.
The scenes flashed like the story of someone’s life; someone who had been through much and learned very little. Above the cracked brick walls of a half dilapidated house rested a leaf infested roof furnished with deep depressions in the middle where nothing was left to support it. Vines curled up drain pipes and around weather-worn once white window frames that were aesthetically pleasing at some time but now just faded into overall indifference. The porch jutted out to imply that integrity was once a defining architectural trait, but now dignity was a mere memory too painful to recall for long. The visual legacy of storms cast about the house in chipped paint and bent wooden planks seemed to make it invisible. It stared at me, as to warn me to stop calling on the storms, to stop temping the billowing clouds. It cried of mortality and threatened my sense of invincibility. We drove past.
There was a certain repetition that could be noticed; cheap paint overlapping cheap paint overlapping cheap paint. Years and years of disdainful weather, blundering sleet, relentless heat, and vicious winds tearing at the walls of meticulously planned but hastily erected buildings. Ambiguous ambition stood too sensitive, unplanned for the aches of time and irregularity of fiscal fortune. Sad attempts at saving the mislaid homes and family stores were often seen from the road, yet they appeared to just be amusing and feeble redemptions endeavors, like trying to fix a foundation with super glue and duct tape. Crumbling neighborhoods disappeared into a horizontal infinity adjacent to my journey. The loneliness on each doorstep was vainly lit by a patient dim light. It hung from the brick front and waited every night for the clunking of devoted fists that never seemed to knock.
The engine quieted as we approached a red light. We sat parallel to the pews in a church to the right of us. The wall closest to us bore massive windows revealing the audience to a sermon we could not hear. They sat still, hands folded in their laps, staring toward the front of the building whose inward delicacy was hidden from me. I could feel the liveliness of an active God moving through the rubbish of decay in the neighborhoods we had just past. The hunched over people in the streets behind us carried a burden only God himself could lift. It was as if in the brokenness God could be found more genuinely than in the Sunday suits and hair spray. The music playing in our car burst from the wires, forced its way through the speakers, and screamed praise that I had to believe was more honorable that the ennui of the night-time hymn singing Lutherans. I thought, God must be bored out of his mind with us. Until the light turned green, I scratched at the eerie feeling of vacancy that irritated my sense of spiritual decency and itched the gut of discomfort.
What God is found in dishonestly? Certainly not mine. I would rather be a house that once was, than a church that never will be. Amongst the fallen homes and worn out places stood a church, vulnerable to the outside world, whose occupants vomited creeds and slept through prayers. I find God more prevalent in the older man under the “Open” sign who is thinking on his own for the first time. I see Him in the testimony of barely existing houses which have been unoccupied for years apart from the weeds, somnolent plants, and frivolous mice that now eat away at the decay. That is just God’s way, to take something that is ruined, and recreate it in a way inconceivably creative and baffling to humanity. Inside the four walls of plaster, steal beams, wood lining, and the stained-glass nativity scene, a vacuumed sealed out all possibility of God. A God as infinite as the sky simply cannot fit in a box as small as a building. A God as raging as the ocean cannot be quiet enough to fade in with the congregation’s whispers.
The thundering of bass rattled our bodies inside the car. It had been raining for months and I was tempting the heavy clouds with my strength against the seas that they should lash out and flood to the top. Each decrepit strip of closed down stores seemed to beg me not to fight, but I knew that I must. The light flickering from my eyes sent out an SOS call, like a lighthouse in the eye of a hurricane that believes it will be saved. They say that it is faith, but it may just be hope I am too scared to doubt. I have as much of a fighting chance as an abandoned house left to fend for itself against the hungry gnawing jaws of termites and suffocating vines. I leave the light on so that God can find me, let the locks loosen so that when He comes knocking, He can get in. A house is only as living as its occupants. After the show my voice is strained from out-screaming the thunder, my hands are burned from catching direct rods of lightning, and my skin feels like melted and smoothed out plastic. Beneath a slightly convexly bent door I notice my hanging porch light still flickering rhythmically against the storms, and I know from the streets of wreckage, that it will be okay.