St. Peter’s Brewery :: a sneak peak

I’m at roughly 70% of the way done with my nanowrimo novel. I’m wondering now if I can wrap things up in 15,000 words or not. Maybe it will leave room for a sequel for 2009 :-).

Either way, thought I’d share a passage I’m working on right now. As always, the comments are open so feel free to critique, give suggestions and so forth. I won’t be making any changes to the text as of now – editing comes later – but I’ll take the suggestions into consideration when that process begins.

So here ya go ::

Jimmy was startled that he had revealed so much. He had only revealed that part of the story a few times before. And those folks had always ended up leaving him as well.

“Wow! That’s tough stuff,” Josh said. “It sounds like you’re beginning to understand your mom’s perspective. I’ve found that it’s so easy to cast judgment on someone when we just look at surface issues. It’s like we see a flesh wound and ignore everything that might be going on underneath. We either cast them away or try to fix the surface issue, never dealing with the disease or root of the problem that might be growing underneath the skin.”

“Hmmm,” Jimmy thought. “Explain that a bit more.”

“Well, let’s take prostitution as an example,” Josh continued. “We all want to be angry at the prostitute or the women who are sold into the sex trade industry. We want to cast them out and say they’re in the wrong. We don’t want to be around them. It’s like they have a contagious disease that we might catch if we spend too much time with them. Yet rather than being angry at the women, we should be mad at the men or women who likely abused them in their past and made them turn to prostitution. We should be mad at the people and companies who make between five billion and nine billion dollars a year encouraging and trafficking these women around the world.”

“Or here’s another issue close to my heart,” Julie spoke up. “Let’s look at abortion. My mom almost aborted me because she was dirt poor, living on the street and had no help. She couldn’t support and care for herself, let alone another human being. She didn’t want to abort me simply because she’s was an evil person, she just didn’t know what other options she had.”

“So what happened,” Jimmy asked.

“Well, obviously she didn’t abort me,” Julie said with a grin. “My mom ran into a lady who found out about her situation and agreed to adopt both my mom and ultimately me into her family. She cared for my mom all during the pregnancy and then cared for me like I was her own daughter or granddaughter. She helped my mom get her GED and then get an associate’s degree at Austin Community College. She even set up a college fund for me along the way. It was the ultimate example of getting to the root of the problem and not just dealing with one individual symptom. I think it’s provided a great example to me as to how we should treat issues systematically rather than just treating individual systems.”

Jimmy was genuinely stunned at how open Julie was.

“I found out later that that’s very similar to what Mother Theresa did in India,” Julie added. “She offered grace to those who really needed it. And rather than condemning someone for their mistake – or the mistake of others – she offered grace and would adopt numerous mothers and their unborn babies. She would welcome them into her home and care for them till they could make it on their own.”
The group mulled these ideas over with several other questions, explanations and ideas. Jimmy had never been a part of a group as open and sharing about their lives, their pasts and their faith. They simply had no qualms telling someone else where they may have messed up, or where someone else might have hurt them, or where they might have hurt someone else.

This struck Jimmy as something totally different than anything he knew about so called Christians. He saw glimpses of it in Capt. Matthie and his wife, but found it easy to question the authenticity and genuineness of their kids. Perhaps like Jimmy, they were simply drug somewhere they didn’t feel a connection with or a desire to be at.

The other Christians he knew growing up all came across as living a plastic religion. It wasn’t very solid. It looked great on the inside but was usually hollow or weak when tested. They made a big deal about attending church on Sunday, Wednesday and Fifth Quarter Celebrations on Friday nights but many times their lives just didn’t match up with what they claimed to believe in. Other times they may have done everything possible to do what was good and right, but it was obvious their heart was never in it.

It was just repetitive actions done out of duty. They were always trying to add more good deeds to some magical scale that God holds somewhere in heaven – like Lady Justice. The good deeds were added to one side of the scale with the hopes that they would be able to outweigh the bad deeds on the other side.

These new friends seemed to be living for something more.