I remembered that I had went into my ‘cubby’ and became as still, silent and observant outwardly as I possibly could. “God, I need you. They hurt me. Are you there even, like church tells people?” Surely God would answer a small child who had recently been raped by four grown men. Raped from behind with the family he loved dearly providing assistance, encouragements and their cruel torments instead of their love and protection, right?

I listened intently for any ‘sign’ I could hear, feel or see. It was almost pitch black when I had entered, but in seconds my young eyes had grown their night vision quite well and good. The little bits of light that beamed in through the slats in the wood provided an eerie light that was somehow not annoying at the same time. The light beams were just bright enough to see bits of dust floating in the air, the same little bits I must be breathing in without knowing because there isn’t a ray of sunlight right in front of my face to tattle on them…the floating culprits that head straight for my two nostrils at ease with my inhalations assisting them all.

“God… if you really are real can you let me tell you something that happened to me. My mom…all the other people and my own sisters too…I got taken to a…”,

“I Am Here.”

Wait! I know that I just heard somebody right in the middle of asking God if I could tell Him about what had happened. It had interrupted me right in the middle of thinking about what I was praying.

“Is that really you?, I asked silently and waited for a similar experience.

“What is it you want? I am here. Come. Speak.”

This time I knew I had ‘heard’ God somehow. It was a deep voice, just loud enough to have me concerned about others overhearing what I had heard. Strangely, it then became somewhat of a visual occurrence. It seemed as if I were both sitting still and silent in my cubby still, but also in a semi-dark, unexperienced open realm where I somehow knew that God was up ahead and waiting for me to come up there. I didn’t budge at first. But then I knew I needed to speak to God. I started slowly walking up to speak to God, trying to stall a little bit just to think what I would even say at first. On the way up to meet God, the small hurt boy that I was realized that if God really did exist, and people just didn’t know it really yet, then everything was going to be alright after all. God would surely help me and protect me from the violent threats and actions of the grownups and my sisters and cousins. All the bad people will get punished someday! Too bad though…

Now I had a dilema… if everything was going to be okay now then I didn’t have to tell God about anything so I didn’t even have to ask for help. What was I supposed to say now that God came for nothing? I was more that half-way there walking with my head still down appearing just as sorrowful and tormented as when I’d first started walking up to God when I got a great idea. Well, I thought it was great anyway, even if it was sort of silly and maybe a waste of God’s time. At least it was something. I knew that God would either laugh good at what I had in store, or He would get angry because He just had actually proven Himself to a little kid when He didn’t need to. I was almost there now.

“God…God…I…I…”, and that’s as far as I got. Out of God’s own mouth I heard, “PBBBBTTT!!!”, and I recognized the familiar childhood sound all us children make with our tongues and mouths. Then I grew a big smile and laughed right out loud at God’s good joke on me. God had just did what I was going to do to Him, but He had secretly known it and He had simply done it to me first to tell me He loved me!

“WHAT”S SO FUNNY IN THERE!!! YOU LAUGHING AT ME AND I’LL BURY YOU IN MY BACK YARD, HA, HA, HA!!!”

As if a light switch had been flipped on in my cubby, God was gone. The last thing I was left with was a feeling that God had somehow said it was “all okay”, and “just do the best you can on your own without hurting anybody else, like they all hurt you”.

That was my first attempt at real prayer, real honest seeking out God serious prayer and not just “God bless Mommy, Daddy, Grandpa and Grandma” style one. The second time I felt like I could have met with God was not me trying to approach God, but God coming to me in a dream while I napped one afternoon before dinner. I had shut out the whole world, had recently been violently abused and had focused only on falling asleep where it was safe(sleeping targets are not fun to hit on because they don’t know they’re being hit after all).

I fell asleep and dreamed…

“Why do people like being bad so much? Do you have to just let them?”, I asked God. He was walking right beside me on my right, just beyond my peripheral vision. I could still see some ‘edges’ that kept ducking away every time I tried to secretly peak over to get a look at God. Then I could tell God was growing upset by my trying to look over, so I stopped trying to. I had seen ‘something’ solid and bigger though, at least the edges of something I knew was there. Then, I heard a deep voice as if hearing a person speaking. It was exactly like when I had my earlier prayer. It went something like this…

“Because of heavenly reasons you could never even understand now, things have to stay like this. Every guardian angel allowed to save provides a fallen angel an equal opportunity at receiving a desire. If there were more blessings, there would have to be more curses upon the earth as well. That is because I and my adversary, Satan, have a wager. Let Me explain. My second, then first created humans disobeyed me. Sadly, I had to send them out into the world to decide for themselves who each person would desire to become. Satan claims that he can destroy all people, all just as easy as getting them to disobey and eat from a forbidden tree like he did once before. I have a plan that will eventually someday destroy him and all evil. They will be destroyed for good. Good and evil is like a game that can have only one winner recognized. It is all being played out right now, has always been since the fall, rarely with interference. The wager has certain rules to make it all fair and open to all in heaven to observe so all can then see and decide for themselves also. It will decide once and for all if I am who I claim I am, and if evil has any real power over me, or whatever I chose to create and love. Now…look.”

I knew exactly what God wanted me to do. He wanted me to look right over at the lines of dim lights I kept on glancing over at quickly, hoping God wouldn’t notice. They were on my left, only observed by looking completely away from God. There were so many lines; they were so long, and they went on and on for as far as my eyes could see. I could just barely make out that some lines in back had to be miles away, at least. The lines looked sort of like gentle waves rolling towards a shore, a sore hidden from view down below, with myself being up on a small plateau unable to see the beach because of my being away from the edge of a small in height cliff. But strangely I couldn’t hear any waves when I listened very good for them for some reason. Then I grew very, very curious to see just how the small waves were crashing below on the beach so silently. Looking down, expecting to see a beach, I was amazed to suddenly see my own Mother! She was in the middle of a row of people like in a movie theater, only everyone was standing up instead of sitting down. She had a very scared and worried look on her face, and she was pleading up at me with her eyes. She was holding both her arms up as if pleading to me for something I couldn’t tell what, maybe begging for me to jump down into her arms, but then maybe not that even. She spoke not a single word. Her eyes just kept pleading to me. I saw that her uplifted hands had a small dim light shining from each of them. They seemed to glow a light from inside of her palms, but then fade away as if their batteries were weak. I then realized that the lines I had seen as being waves were not waves at all, they were all people, lots and lots of pleading-eyed people with uplifted hands with lights that were begging up toward where God and I now was.

Then I looked beside my Mother and saw my older Sister. She was pleading and begging also. My younger Sister was right beside her. Same thing. Then my three cruel cousins and my supposed Aunt were there next in the row. All were looking right up at me it seemed, and pleading as if their lives were depending upon it, probably more than that even, I’m still little so I don’t understand stuff yet. But every time I looked away I had watched the face I had just looked at change from appearing loving but distraught into appearing as if an angry, violent wolf person. The faces they all had made at me were exactly like a ‘human wolf’ face would look like too. Back and forth the faces would turn from wolf to begging to wolf again each time I had made eye-contact but broke away to look at the next person too. It was them not getting looked at constantly, not receiving what their eyes and arms begged for that got them to turn into an angry wolf. It was as if they didn’t even have enough loving patience to see if the answer not provided yet was going to be a “yes” or a “no”, was upset it wasn’t the “yes” already, and that they had to keep begging while merely wanting to ” just get it over with and say ‘okay’ already, so we don’t have to trick you into doing it with all this sincere-styled, hard-to-pull-off emotional ‘poor innocent me’ pleading!”

Yes, sadly that is what I saw and saw quite easily. They were turning right into wolf faces without even waiting for a “yes” or “no” because they knew they were probably going to be lost anyways and that they weren’t ever going to get a helping hand out from the pressing waves of people right there in back of them, yes, each person there in the begging upwards sea of humanity having their own agony of the pushing against them from behind.

“I want to help my family, I love them so much,” I pleaded to God as I stared down at my mother changing faces back and forth.

“Grab love and pull it up, but you don’t have to. Or you can walk away if you desire.”

I smiled down to my Mother and reached my small hand for hers. My mother’s face grew a surprised face, and then changed into the most loving face of hers that I had ever seen or been shown.. Her own son, that she had treated so miserably, still actually wanted her to be saved and even still be there with him! She reached for my and took hold, trusting I could handle her weight without any problem. So did I. I pulled my mother up with ease because of our strong love helping us it appeared. “Grab love and pull it up, Mom!”, I said to my distracted-by-pure-love Mother. For a short time she had forgotten where she was, or that there were all those other people still there. She looked down and saw my big sister, her oldest Daughter and first born child. Her hand flew to her while holding onto my hand tightly with the other one. Once she knew she had her good and secure, she told her to “grab love and pull it up!” too. I watched as my oldest sister took my youngest’s hand, and then as she happily passed on the beautiful “Grab Love Too” message to her. Then my cousin, and another and another until it came to the cruel taunting ‘Aunt’ that had been the instigator on many ocassions. She grabbed onto her smallest child’s reaching out arm before she was even asked to, or even waited to hear what the happy message we were all passing on was. Her youngest, a mere small child still, saw that and grew worried about her. I could see it on his face and all the others too as they watched behind them who was being pulled up in the chain of people. After his turn to be offered a hand up onto the chain of happy people being lifted right up out of the sea of misery, his mother jumped up and flew herself to his other arm. But then quickly her over-confident grip had slipped when she happily started flapping her free arm and both legs while laughing with her eyes closed. I remember that she was holding onto her Son’s hand like everybody else, but attention-grabbing flapping as if a holiday flag and saying stuff about getting to see and sing for “Elvis”, and now she was going to perform songs for everyone in Heaven. That’s when she had slipped off her son’s best attempts at support and then landed back down below into the sea of people…

That’s when I woke up from my nap and realized I was still in my tiny, cramped cubbyhole. “Oh no, I’m not there, I’m only still here!!!”, I said to myself sadly. “Wow, but I’ve never had a dream like that before…I got to tell them all about it!”, I thought…

Time passed bringing a long line of it’s distracting things that we call “time” and “history”. I had grown up to become a man, then an older man and an even older one. That old man had suddenly, out-of-the-blue, very recently recalled the forgotten prayer and ten nightly dreams. I pondered. Could I have gotten the idea from watching “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” on tv, where at the beginning and the end the father walks and speaks words of wisdom to his young boy? And could the lines of lights in all the people’s palms just be from Galveston, when I was only 3 or 4 and my older sister had pointed out the lines of mullet that were all riding the lines of small waves to shore, and them having all their eyes staring as if at me, their bodies and faces all lined up too? Could the ‘pulling love up’ thing be only from those times of needing a helping hand up on top of my cousin’s bunkbed, when I got to visit the boy’s room? Could the wolf faces only been from a movie I’d seen or possibly some comic book I’d read, but forgotten all about? Could it have actually been a creator of humanity, a God that came to speak with a tormented, injured, innocent small boy? Could so small a boy even have had(without any special help) so sage and elaborate a dream, or rather set of dreams with there being a very, very similar-experienced nightly dream and with being the ten involved, no more, no less? Seems sort of odd to me. After all these forgotten years, would it still feel so God-provided a dream-reality? Would a dream, and prayer, both so utterly-forgotten be remembered so vividly, or even remembered at all? Does violent trauma happening upon small child who cries out sincerely to God allow for God to actually come for a time, and in the ways and means of His own choosing such as a dream?

So much to ponder over without any clear answers to solidly rely on. How about maybe there being an answer such as having God send out a convenient guardian angel to pop right in happily and say something sweet and helpful. Sometimes having faith is having to hold on tightly to only a future mystery without any clues or answers whatsoever. Sometimes ‘faith’ has to become thought out and decided if real enough to probably believe in, or it just isn’t even faith, and “Isn’t” isn’t very good at all. It’s a vast ocean of people, and the lined up waves all have wolf faces riding upon them indeed. Grab love and pull it up… pass it on!