They all filed out of the church; women in long smart dresses with feathers in their hats, and men in dark clean suits. They crowded out the doors into the hot sun in couples and families, talking politely with their heels crunching methodically on the dirt roads home. Squeezing between a young woman’s soft blue skirts and the doorframe, hurried a young boy in overalls and a grimy maroon shirt. He skipped to the sidewalk and seeing a large branch on the ground, he scooped it up and went on his merry way, tapping and whacking the fence posts and bushes as he went. The congregations disapproving eyes followed the boy as he headed home in a different direction from the rest of them.
As usual, the rambunctious young boy had hidden crouched in the back of the church, listening to what the pastor’s sermon was about and fidgeting loudly with a hymnal and Bible. He served as a constant distraction to the last three rows of pews, but week after week he had been showing up to hear what the pastor had to say. Something fascinated him about the church setting: the building so much bigger than his home, the people dressed so different from his family and the words spoken, so foreign compared to the conversation he heard between the workers on his father’s farm.
As he danced away from the church, oblivious to the opinions of the others, he thought about what the pastor had said in the church. The boy had only begun putting together his concept of God for a couple months now, and his thoughts worked hard to assimilate what the pastor had said today with everything he’d been hearing on previous Sundays. The pastor had talked about how we can’t see God, but if we seek him, than we’ll find him. The young boy pondered this concept as he hopped along. He began to work through the problem aloud. “How am I supposed to find a God I can’t see?” he asked no one in particular, bopping a pink flamingo on the head. The boy had played many a game of hide and seek, and considered himself quite proficient at finding hidden things, and so he found the prospect of this game with God enticing.
“Challenge accepted,” he said with feeling.
He began to search: behind rocks and underneath pots. He stood on his tip toes to glance at the rooftops and jumped around corners to catch Him by surprise. After looking over the side of a woman’s fence, a rustling in her hedge startled him from his search. He flinched away from the long hedge, looking to see what was there. He could hear the rustling of wings coming from inside the branches, and as he continued walking, the bird continued to flutter through the twigs, speeding up to get away from him. The boy was curious: he looked hard, but still the bird eluded his sight. The rustling began to get away ahead of him and he picked up his pace, looking hard to find it, but all he could see were leaves and sticks.
He caught up to the sound at the end of the long hedge, but it had gone silent. He leaned in, searching with his eyes. “I’m sure it was there!” He said to himself.
“What was there?” came a voice from behind him. The boy jumped and turned to see who was there. A woman was standing on the sidewalk behind him with a gentle smile.
“There was a bird,” he pointed into the hedge. The women curiously bent over to look into the hedge.
“I don’t see it,” she said quizzically, leaning in further to get a better look.
The boy rolled his eyes at her and with an exaggerated sigh said, “Well I could hear it and the bush was moving, so it was obviously there,” he replied, matter-of-factly. The woman laughed good naturedly, and the boy picked up an air of disbelieving courtesy in her tone as she nodded kindly and began continuing on her way.
“Well good look finding your bird, son,” she chimed, and continued on.
The boy felt seriously offended. How dare she treat him like a child. He began thinking her very unwise to not understand that you did not have to see something to know it’s there. The thought stopped him in his tracks. He looked back at the hedge and a birdsong high up in a tree came wafting down to him. He didn’t have to look to know the bird was there, interacting with the world, making hedges move and songs resound: showing its presence in the way it subtly changed the world around it. They boy gave up looking around corners and under pots on his way home. Instead he began to listen and smell and touch the world around him, curious in a new way about what he could learn by the impressions made by the things he could and could not see.
