I Am Edmund. Alexandra Glynn

      Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man,” I said. “Amen.” The congregation began to sing a hymn. I moved from behind the pulpit to the central path between the pews, found an empty seat towards the back in the middle of a bench, and sat down. The trembling in my hands slowly subsided as I held the songbook and sang along with the congregation.

      Through the window to my right I could see the trees just beginning to bud leaves on the trees right outside the building. I remembered my garden for a brief second and pondered if I should weed it tomorrow after work. Then the organist pulled out more stops for the last verse and I was pulled back into the music and the sermon of the words in the hymn. When the hymn ended a mother of five children who sat near me leaned over and greeted me. “Can I speak with you?” she asked. She had brown hair and was wearing a brown suit. She dug into a yellow and orange plaid diaper bag next to her and gave a pacifier to the one-year-old she held on her lap.

      “Sure.” It seemed this was to be my first counseling session in this congregation. I said a quick prayer for help as I straightened my suit coat.

      The woman hesitated, bouncing her one-year-old on her lap. “Even though you’re our brand new minister and we all want to be welcoming, I have a difficulty I’d like discuss with you.” She laughed nervously and tried to pry her necklace away from the child in her arms. “But I don’t want to scare you away when you just got here—it’s my sister, my older sister. She lost faith and she comes to me with so many questions. I want to help her and encourage her to freely ask questions. But I can’t get her to agree to come to services and get answers in the congregation and from the preached Word of God.” The woman moved over to the edge of the pew, stood up, and began pushing the stroller in the aisle. I moved over too. In the woman’s stroller there was a three-year-old asleep. We watched him sleeping for a moment. Then I got up too and went to stand by the wall in front of her, leaning on it, waiting for her to continue. Finally she said, “She agreed to talk with you. I told her we’re getting a new young minister from a small town.” She smoothed her brown hair back with one hand and patted her baby’s head with the other. “I mean, everyone has been talking about it for weeks.” I took the stroller handle from her and began to push the stroller back and forth. She looked at me hopefully, “Will you visit her?”

      “Of course.” I fished out a notebook and pen from my inside suit coat pocket. “What kinds of questions does she ask?”

      “Oh, ever so many. She asks about gossiping, drinking wine, abuse, sports. She has a friend who is in some church Bible group and so her friend gets her asking all kinds of questions about the Bible.” The woman paused and we waited for a crowd of teenagers to go by the narrow aisle between us. I nodded and smiled at them though they were all unfamiliar to me. The mother I was speaking with knew almost all of them, and greeted them all. After they had all gone by she said, “Oh, sorry, I suppose I should have introduced you.”

      “That’s okay.” I watched the teenagers filing out of the church. I had a few relatives in the congregation and one of the teens had looked familiar so maybe I knew one of them. I would be getting to know them all well in the coming weeks, I thought, because I planned to visit the homes of each family in the congregation as soon as I could. I turned back to the mother, “Is there anything from the Bible that you can tell me to look at beforehand?”

      “Yes, she says the Bible is full of passages that are anti-woman.”

      “Ah,” I said. In my mind I went through my bookshelves at home. I had gotten quite a few books on different religious topics from an ordained pastor friend of mine who had given them to me when I became a speaker of the Word. Some were about women. But I had not read almost any of them.

      “You are Heidi, right?” I asked the woman.

      “Yes.”

      “Heidi, I’ll be glad to visit your sister. What is her name?”

      “Amy.”

      “She has perhaps been reading feminist interpretations of the Bible.”

      “It seems like it. What should I tell her? I mean, she said she would visit you, but she has backed out of these things before.”

      “Tell her to read the Bible itself, rather than commentary on it written by those who write without the Spirit. And look in Corinthians where it says that the matters of faith are to be spiritually discerned. For example, I might not be given to understand why at the end of Judges a concubine is hurt. But I do know there is a spiritual lesson in that text, and that it is only discerned by the Spirit. But woe to me if I ascribe evil to God. God never advises or authorizes evil in his Word, so if we don’t understand a text, we tip our hat, give glory to God, praying in the Spirit.”

      The mother dug in her diaper bag. “Ok. Let me write that text down. What did you say?”

      I got out a pen and wrote it on one of the pages of my little notebook and gave it to her. Sometimes I wrote messages to myself on my smartphone instead, but usually I forgot about it and went with pen and paper. I wrote the text, plus my phone number and gave her the slip of paper. “How old is your sister?” I asked her.

      “Thirty-two. I’m thirty-three. My husband’s name is Erik. You and I are the same age, actually.” I remembered being told that someone had done a brief bio of me and printed it in the church bulletin.

      “Everyone knows me already then, but I don’t know many people here. Introduce me to your children.” Heidi did and we chatted about children and growing older for a few minutes. We made plans to try to meet at a coffee shop while the kids were in school next Wednesday. Heidi said she would text me one way or the other.

      Heidi’s one-year-old had settled down and Heidi said, “Here I am monopolizing you. Everyone’s looking our way, wanting to get to know you.” She began to walk me down the aisle towards the back of the church to the people standing around visiting there. She introduced me to so many people that I finally took my notebook back out and started taking names. Sometimes I took phone numbers too if I got invites. I ended up with almost a half dozen invitations. When there were only a few people left in the back of the church, one of the elderly women I

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