The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

You turn up for your family where we’re from. But turning up is a two-way street.

Think about how being a “Christian” has so little to do with acting Christ-like now, especially these days, and especially in America.

I don’t know if there’s a PR team in heaven, but can you even imagine the crisis management team they’d need these days? What with people like these idiot girls with bright eyes and dull hearts, not a hair out of place but hearts in the wrong one. Girls like them who bat their eyes as they pick and choose from the Bible to create a world they’re comfortable to exist in.

“I think your mom’s in heaven,” I tell him. He flicks his eyes, amused and maybe a little caught. “She was a Buddhist.” He gives me a weak shrug. “She doesn’t fit the bill.” I squint at him because it’s all I can do to keep myself from touching him. If I look at him properly, I’ll have to touch him, I’ll just have to; he’s too beautiful not to. “I think in the Bible, the point is that Jesus paid the bill.”

“Here’s what I think.” And I sit up to tell him. “People read the Bible wrong. It’s a diary of normal people, like us, from thousands of years ago, trying to make sense of the God they’d heard of from their ancestors. They didn’t write it for us to read it now. And I think people read it without the true social or historical context, and they bring their own instead.”

There are a lot of kinds of love in the world, and not all of them make sense all of the time.

I don’t think you just stop loving someone once they’re suddenly gone. I think that’s what makes it hard.

It took me a long time to realize that something doesn’t have to always feel wrong to be wrong.

Debbie goes to church on Sunday. Debbie reads the Bible. She goes to Bible study and prayer group and the women’s meeting, and she thinks these things qualify her to tell people—perfect strangers, like Sam—about the gospel, but I don’t think that’s true. I think the only thing that qualifies you to talk about the gospel is admitting you need it.

I don’t shy away from people because they’ve made mistakes. Mistakes make you human. The worst thing you could ever be to me is a liar.

I take a photo in my mind, let history rewrite itself for a second. It doesn’t erase it, but it scribbles over it a bit in a louder color.

have nothing comforting to say to my brother beyond the trifling “we don’t need them” shit I’ve thrown him too many times before, which is both true and irrelevant all at once. We don’t need them. But we would like them.

I don’t think a pilot would forget. They’re like Horse Girls, but men. They don’t fucking shut up about their planes and their flight times and their craziest landings.

And I think to myself, wouldn’t it be so lovely if we viewed ourselves through the same lens as the people who love us?