No Ordinary Human Love

And then, the young woman kept on. Remember our Sunday mornings? Never missing a single Disney movie matinee in that dinky community theater at the corner right across from the Albanian bakery shop.  

Oh, gosh! I forgot all about that! The father interrupted, They had the best rice pudding in town. We always stopped there after the movie.  The owner knew our orders before we even reached the counter. I can still smell that cinnamon. He closed his eyes, breathing in deeply. They stood in silence, the scent of a different era tickling their nostrils like the sprinkled cinnamon.

But inside the movie theater, with the lights out and the soft buzzing of the projector, l would sneak peeks at  you and  watch you  wipe your tears in the dark, weeping  together with the dwarfs when Snow White laid beautiful and dead surrounded by all the mourning birds and bunnies and the little baby fawns? I thought that was the end of the story... The End.

I didn’t realize you noticed, said the father almost ashamed, as if caught in some wrongdoing, still a little boy with his hand reaching into a cookie jar.

The fact that you cried made me love you all the more. The girl whispered.

And with that, something seemed to crack inside the boy. Something bigger and deeper than his childhood wounds bubbled up engulfing them all. And this God, whom he saw, whom he understood as the God-Who-Takes-Away-Christmas-Ham became... became...

... the God-Who-Weeps-With-His-Children-in-the-Dark. 

The God-Who-Drags-His-Children-on-His-Shoulders-Out-of-the-Deep-Waters-into-Safety. 

The God-Whose-Heart’s-Not-Much-Different-From-an-Ordinary-Father’s-Human-Heart.

And the self-proclaimed atheist was accosted from the inside-out by this heavenly Father who begun to love the little boy back into His fatherly heart.