DADDY, WILL YOU go to church with me?”
“Daddy” directed his attention downward to the little pig-tailed pixie-princess tugging at his bathrobe.
The question caught him by surprise. And from almost anyone else, it might have prompted a different response, but now it brought on one of those “long conversation with yourself in about two seconds” situations before he answered.
He loved the little princess with the question on her lips. And he loved her mother. Of that there was no doubt. And he was an honest man. No one had ever doubted that either.
For his wife and daughter to go to church every Sunday morning had always been fine with him. Why didn’t he go with them? Hard to say. It was a decision made not so much by fault as by default, made now each week by force of habit more than by conscious thought. He just didn’t go, though he was genuinely happy for them to.
But this morning’s out of the blue question made him think.
“Pearly-gate” scandals and slick “hold onto your billfold, the circus is in town” TV preachers aside, he didn’t mind admitting that a world in which most people took time to bow would be a better place. In a dark alley, he’d surely rather meet a big man coming from prayer meeting than one coming from a bar.
Yeah, he had some real doubts about organized religion, but he had to admit that with all its faults it had accomplished more practical good than the “unorganized” Jesus-and-me-and-the-TV variety.
He’d jump off a bridge for this little one, throw himself in front of a car, stare death in the face . . . but would he go to church for her?
Was that honest? To go for someone else?
If what he’d read about Jesus was true, he knew Christ had not an ounce of sympathy for fake religion, but he also knew that He never turned away an honest doubter.
What would he tell his waiting princess-daughter? The thoughts raced through his head, and he bent down, and he said . . .