The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

Because—honestly—neither party is great these days, and when you personalize something to the extent many people do in politics, any time anyone questions something the party does, it can feel like they’re questioning you, and that’s just plain unhealthy.

The idea that it ends—that it all ends—that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath.

You can tell yourself you don’t even really want to be wanted by people like them anyway, but it isn’t true because the same way parents are supposed to want their kids, kids have a genetic predisposition to want to be wanted by them.

But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive. It hides under the pews in the back row of the church. It gets caught in a pile of sheets no one knew what to do with.

“Yeah, well, neither do you. It’s bullshit,” I tell him. He gives me a dubious look. “What?” “There’s no such thing as an addictive personality; it’s a psychological myth and a nice way of saying you struggle with neuroticism and that you have poor impulse control.”

“They go to your church?” I ask. “Um—” She cringes. “I mean—we go to the same church.” She pauses. “I don’t think we know the same God.”

The concept of the gospel is counterintuitive and much easier to digest if you adhere to a strict regimen of shallow perfectionism, like Debbie does, or my mom. It’s in this hollow I think most of the church resides, but I think the place God would like us to be is in the gutters or the libraries asking questions about why a good God would make a world so fucked up.