Under The Udala Trees

Pidgin was the language of amusement and relaxation, but it was also the language of conflict.

And to worry over it would be like pouring water over stone. The stone just gets wet. Eventually it dries. But nothing changes.”

All the things the boy will do, I promise to do better. In all the ways he can love you, I promise to love you better.

This must be married life: to sit in church with so much unrest, but at home carry on the pretense that all is just as it should be.

What kinds of things occupied Him up there in heaven and kept Him from answering our prayers? He probably didn’t sleep or eat, so what, then? What kinds of things were more important to Him than us, His very own children?

Maybe love was some combination of friendship and infatuation. A deeply felt affection accompanied by a certain sort of awe. And by gratitude. And by a desire for a lifetime of togetherness.

Humans double-deal. If it is true that we are made in His likeness, then does God double-deal?

Just because the story happened to focus on a certain Adam and Eve did not mean that all other possibilities were forbidden. Just because the Bible recorded one specific thread of events, one specific history, why did that have to invalidate or discredit all other threads, all other histories?

I wondered about the Bible as a whole. Maybe the entire thing was just a history of a certain culture, specific to that particular time and place, which made it hard for us now to understand, and which maybe even made it not applicable for us today.