Inner Fireworks

There we were, on Ft Bragg, like every year, enjoying the glorious military family atmosphere and my brother's bomb cheeseburgers and kabobs.

By total randomness, all the neighbors to the left of his house and down happen to be catholic. The neighbors to the right are protestant. Righties had their whole entire church over for the fireworks show.... they brought a tent, potluck, and a 17 foot water slide and bounce house with them. So naturally, all the neighborhood kids wanted to play. Because of Annika's broken arm, we couldn't play, so I stayed in the house and tended to the serving part. At one point during the evening, one of our friends who just returned from an 18 month deployment to Iraq (btw, Not so sure it's a hot idea to do fireworks on Bragg this year with nearly every soldier freshly returned, but that's another story.) was over at the bounce house with the kids. After a while, he came back in. He was kinda quiet, grabbed a beer, leaned against the and looked at me.
"Whats wrong?" I asked.
He told me that he had been over talking to some of the parents, and the conversation had turned to Jesus. Somehow, somewhere, during the conversation, they had discovered that he was a Catholic. The result? "Apparently," he said, "they think I'm not going to make it into heaven."
I was mortified. Afraid that I would be either too jaded in the conversation or too badmouthed towards the church folk out there, I just cheersed him and smiled and told him... "Well, you keep on trying."

This really bothered me. It really bothered HIM.. so much so that instead of sitting with the group, he and his family later moved their chairs back a bit and he brought the incident up a couple of times more with others... I could see he was looking for a resolution.
This is where it gets to the point that basically ruined my 4th of July.

Now this may be just me being paranoid, but it appeared as though word spread around the group that there were Catholics present. And all of a sudden we were bombarded by "nice" people, just making "polite" conversation, all the while steering it towards Jesus. It was almost like I was playing a game... I was not biting purposefully on all the questions the evangelicals were trying to bait me with to steer the conversation towards my salvation. It was so sad, and almost funny.
I thought about how that could have been me a year ago. *Facepalm.*

I thought about all the ways they were trying to bring the conversation to Jesus: asking about Annika's arm, talking about God's healing. Asking about being unemployed, talking about God's provision. Asking about how long we were married, talking about how important marriage is to God. On and on and on it went... like this vortex trying to get at "where I was with God."

Part of me admired the tenacity of it--- the women who were coming up to chat with me were genuinely concerned about my salvation. They wanted to make sure I'd be OK in the end, and were I still an evangelical, I would have been impressed with their zeal for souls! In fact, I'm still impressed! We need people who care.
On the other hand, I was disgusted. I thought about how vain and presumptious it was to assume that "because we were Catholics" we needed to hear the gospel, and how funny it was that most of these people, when they started talking about the church, had probably never set foot in a Catholic church in their lives and had absolutely no idea what was taught "inside."
The whole thing just turned my stomach. I questioned whether anyone there actually thought my daughter was really cute or they were all just swooning over her to get an "in." I questioned whether anyone really did like my casserole (it was mormon, btw! Thanks Deseret!) or whether they were looking to just bring me "spiritual food." I stood there smoldering with this plastic smile painting my face friendly, when inside I was feeling a combination of anger, frustration, and almost a desire to just laugh.

I admit, this is my paranoia settling in, but the look on my friend's face when he came in just broke my heart.
Nothing like being told your religion is dead to bring some real sense of community to a block party, right?

The craziest moment was when this woman was sharing her sheetcake recipe with me. She told me of it's success at church potlucks, etc, and I told her how delicious it was. She said she wanted to give it out at church on Sundays. She began talking about how much she loved going to church, and said that it was, for her, the "best day of the week."
I told her I felt the same way, only that we got to go to church every single day! I thought we could leave it at that--- her being appreciative of the fact that maybe I really loved getting close to Jesus and that that was a nice thing. We parted ways on friendly terms.

So imagine my surprise when I overheard her as I was running back indoors with my daughter once the fireworks started......(she was totally scared! Who knew?) talking to another woman from her church, obviously about me. I only caught the tail end of the conversation:
"isn't that sad? They go every day just to meet with no one."
"it's not no one," said the other lady. "we really need to pray for them."
I kept running.

you see why I'm having such a hard time with this??