Getting our needs met--a story (iii)

My wife appears at the back door in shorts and a cut-off sweat shirt. She stands there, her arms over her chest as if chilled, and she spots me sitting on this cold hard chair. "Keith," she says. "I got some hot water on."

And Sarai laughed too. Both of them must have looked up into a sky that probably looked almost identical, a sky where right then some distant star might well have fallen apart only to show up tonight--right now, as I'm sitting in my own backyard. "Crazy," they must have said.

"You'll catch your death 'a cold," my wife says. She's bare-footed, and I feel her cold toes in the grass as she walks over. "You want to talk about it?"

"You sound like a therapist," I say.

"What else is new?" she says. "I hear it was quite the meeting--Katy says Pedro really unloaded. She said she couldn't believe her father didn't explode."

"No kidding," I say.

"She says Pedro seems self-centered--"

"Really?" I say. "She say that?"

"She says he just talked and talked and talked--too much. Tough?" she asks.

So I told her about the stars and the absurdity of Abram's promise--all of these pinpricks would be God's people. "Look at 'em," I said. "There's millions of them."

"Millions," she said.

"They're not all alike," I told her. "Some of them wear grey fedoras."

"Every last one is different," she said.

"But if we believe the promise, they're all his," I told her, "every one of them."

"All of them," she says. And she grabs my shoulder. "Even Pedro?"

"That's a stretch," I tell her. "Abram and Sarai laughed too."

She looks up at the open blanket above. "They were old," she says. "What's your excuse?"

"So am I," I say. And then, "With a sky like this, it's not hard to believe in God," I tell her. "What I have trouble with is believing in his people."

"So does he," she says. "But the truth is, He loves us."

"More power to him," I say. "I couldn't."

"And isn't that wonderful?" she says. "He's a whole sky bigger than we are."

I reach for her arm and hold it. "Lucky thing for us," I tell her.

"Don't know that luck's got anything to do with it though," she says. "Come on in. The tea pot's blowing its lid."

Today is another day. And what I find myself saying, all day long, after reflecting on everything that happened last night, is that one of those millions of stars--meaning me--sure enough got his needs met.

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