THE MEETING: Part Four: Face-to-Face
The ten minutes was indeed a long time for Alex Woods. Impatiently, he flipped through the pages of his Bible, but couldn't decide what passage to read. He felt like getting up and pacing, but didn't know if he should. Some prisons were so strict in their rules regarding visitors that even something as simple as getting out of the assigned chair could result in immediate termination of the visit. He wasn't sure of the rules of this prison, but he would rather have been safe than sorry.
Frustrated, he closed the Bible. He had the sudden urge just to get up and leave. He would simply tell everyone that he had changed his mind. No one would question such an action. He didn't want to be alone with the monster who had murdered his daughter. But he wasn't alone; he knew that. The Lord was with him. And he knew that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people praying for him at that moment. He closed his eyes, took a deep, stomach calming breath, and joined them in prayer.
"Lord Jesus," he whispered, "please, please help me through this. I don't know if I can do it. I don't want to do it. Please, Lord, help me. Help me to forgive this man. Help me to love him as You love him. And, Lord, I know that You do love Vincent Hynes. Help him to know that. May there be another celebration in Heaven for him tonight. I pray for him, Lord. Be here today. Speak through me. And, Lord, please calm my nerves."
He ran out of words early, but kept on praying anyway. He knew that God didn't need his words to get his message. One word just kept repeating itself in his mind, and it summed it up perfectly: Help!
After a few minutes, the door to the visitation room opened and in walked Vincent J. Hynes, flanked by two uniformed officers who may as well have been transporting a dead dog by their expressions. Lt. Mark stood behind them with his arms folded across his chest and his face a mask of disgust.
As Hynes came in, Alex found himself surprised to see an actual human being. He had spent so long demonizing this man in his own mind that he had almost expected to see an apparition from Hell in a prison jumpsuit. But Hynes was just a man, not a monster. The face that had haunted his nightmares seemed to have aged twenty-five years in the past ten. His hair, which hung just past his shoulders, was more gray than brown and he had grown a very scruffy beard, but Alex still recognized the man from the mug shot. He wearing a dingy yellow jumpsuit, leg irons, and handcuffs that held his bound wrists in front of him.
The C.O.'s forced him forward and he shuffled towards the waiting chair.
"My officers will be standing outside the door," Mark said from the hallway. "All you have to do is call them and they'll be in in seconds. Do you have any questions?"
"No, sir," Alex said.
"Good," Mark said. "Then we'll leave you alone."
The two C.O.'s turned and walked out and the door shut behind them with a loud clank. Alex was left alone with Hynes. The two men sat across from each other for an excruciatingly long moment, neither one wanting to be the first to speak. Alex had often fantasized about the moment he would meet his daughter's killer and what he would do to the man. Very few of these fantasies involved prayer and Bible reading.
Say something! he silently told himself. You didn't just come here to stare at the man!
But it was Hynes who finally broke the silence.
"Thank you for coming, Reverend Woods," he said shyly. "I know you didn't have to."
"Yes," Alex said. "I did."
"How have you been?" As soon as the question was out, Alex could tell Hynes regretted it. It was such a stupid question to ask someone who had spent the last decade mourning his daughter; especially in you were the one who killed her.
Alex almost snapped at him, "How do you think I've been?" but thought the better of it. That was not how he wanted to start off this meeting.
"I'm doing well," he said instead. "Not great, but well. I won't ask you how you've been."
"I think that's pretty obvious," Hynes chuckled, raising his hands for emphasis.
How dare you laugh? Alex thought. My little girl will never laugh again thanks to you! How dare you?
"I was surprised by you letter, Mr. Hynes," Alex said. "I didn't expect to hear from you."
"I think I was more surprised by your letter, Reverend," Hynes replied. "I've never heard of anything like it in my whole life. If I were you and somebody killed my little girl, I don't think I could ever forgive them."
"Yeah, well..." Alex trailed off. He didn't want to lie to the man about having forgiven him. Not again. But he didn't want to admit to him that he hadn't. This whole meeting was based on the assumption that the forgiveness had taken place. If he admitted now that he never really did it, he might as well just get up and leave.
"I know it doesn't mean much right now," Hynes went on, "but I am very sorry. What I did was... awful. I didn't apologize ten years ago, but I'm apologizing now, for whatever it's worth."
"Believe me," Alex said, "it means a lot." And it actually did. It was easy to hate a man who showed no remorse. It wasn't as easy to hate one who was genuinely sorry.
"If I could tell all the other families I'm sorry, I would," Hynes said. "But you're the only one I knew how to contact. Besides, if they come next week to my execution... I'll say it then."
It was like torture trying to think of what to say to this man. Alex couldn't say what he wanted to say because he was here to help Hynes and himself. He couldn't say what he knew he needed to say because he thought that his mouth would betray him and he would end up blurting out what he was trying to hard to hide.
He sent up another prayer, quick and silent: God, help me. I don't know what to do!
* * *
Aimee and deputy Michaels, whom she found calling "Bill" to be quite easy, had taken a little walk. It was at Bill's insistence. He said he knew a place where they could sit, talk, and pray and the nosey reporters wouldn't dare follow after his little speech. They ended up sitting on a bench near the highway. It was on a pleasantly landscaped corner near the prison parking lot designed specifically for people to "escape the images of this awful place," as Bill put it. It faced the highway and the snow capped mountains beyond it, and away from the towers, walls, and barbed wire of the prison.
"Guards come here on their breaks sometimes," Bill explained. "It helps to get a new perspective on things. Staring at those walls and bars can be depressing, even if you get to go home at the end of the day."
"I fell sorry for the men who don't get to go home," Aimee remarked. She glanced back over her shoulder at the imposing structures of the prison. "I can't imagine living in that place... Or dying there."
"They deserve it, don't they?" Bill asked. He sounded amazingly cold, especially considering how friendly Aimee had thought he was. "They all earned their punishment."
"Yes, but..." Aimee trailed off. She was about to say, "but what about mercy," but something struck her so suddenly that she fell silent. For a moment, she had almost forgotten that her daughter's killer was behind those bars. Almost... She could feel sorry for an abstract number of men, most of them condemned to die in the place, either by lethal injection or the passing of their hundred or so year sentences. But then she thought about Hynes. She thought about how her daughter’s life had ended in that cold dark forest at that monster's hands and she thought that dying in this horrendous place was better than he deserved. "Victimless" crimes didn't receive a death penalty and very few of them garnered life sentences either. Every man in that prison had hurt someone or killed someone. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people like her, forever trapped in a prison of loss and grief. The killers in the prison had earned their punishments.
* * *
They had sat there staring at each other for nearly a minute, neither of them speaking. It felt more like and hour and Alex began to wonder what he was really doing there. Hynes was looking expectantly at him.
"I think," Alex began, grasping desperately at straws, "we should begin with a prayer."
"A prayer?" Hynes repeated.
"Yes," Alex said. "We're here to talk about God, right? Let's start off by asking Him to be here with us."
"I know He'll listen to you," Hynes said, "but I doubt He'd pay much attention to me."
Alex thought about that for a moment. Would God heed Vincent Hynes's prayer? The Bible says that God doesn't hear the prayers of those who harbor sin in their hearts. If that was the case, had God even heard Alex's prayers for the past decade? Hadn't he been harboring the sin of unforgiveness?
Alex had even preached on that subject once. He had come to the conclusion that there was one prayer that the Lord heard no matter who uttered it. That was a prayer of repentance. It was a prayer of a man truly seeking God. After all, the conversion experience was invariably preceded by what was traditionally called "the sinner's prayer." If the two of them, both harboring sin for so long, honestly came together and asked the Lord to cleanse them of it, if they asked for His guidance and redemption, He would listen.
"Tell me one thing, Mr. Hynes," Alex said. "Are you truly willing to seek after God today?"
"Yes," Hynes said, "I am."
"Then He'll hear you." Then he added, more to himself then to Hynes, "He'll hear both of us."
"Okay, then," Hynes said. "Let's pray."
Vincent Hynes put his cuffed hands out on the table and opened them as best as he could. As difficult as it was to come here and see this man, it was much more so for Alex to reach across the table and grasp the hands that had choked the life out of his little girl. He did so, and he held them tightly. Hynes bowed his head and closed his eyes, but Alex did not.
"Lord," Alex began, "we pray that You be here with us today. We are here to seek Your will and to find Your forgiveness. Father, we ask that You guide us through this difficult meeting and that Your will be done. We ask that You help us to see the things in our lives that we need to repent of and that You enable us to do so. Let Your Holy Spirit be in this place today. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen."
"Amen," Hynes repeated. He released Alex's hands and Alex resisted the urge to wipe them on his pant legs.
"So," Alex said, "why don't we begin with why you decided to write to me after all these years?"
"I'm gonna die in a week," Hynes replied. "Something like that really makes a guy think, you know? It's easy when you're sure you got years left the forget about the state of your soul, but when it's down to months, or weeks, or days you begin to really think about it. Like I told you, I read your letter every day. I have it memorized. When I was notified six months ago that my execution date was set, the words you wrote seemed to mean so much more, and I knew I needed to talk to you."
"So you want redemption?"
"No," Hynes said. "I told you, I'm not worthy of it. I just wanted to make peace with you before I die. There's no chance of making peace with God."
"Don't say that," Alex told him. "There's always a chance."
"The Bible says, 'No murderer has eternal life abiding in him,'" Hynes said. "I'm a murderer."
"So, you've read the Bible," Alex said.
"Parts of it," Hynes replied. "I don't understand much of it, but that part was clear. There is no hope for me."
"Are you so sure of that?" Alex asked, knowing that he had his own doubts. "Remember Moses? David? Two great men of God right? I mean, they wrote huge chunks of the Bible!"
"So what's your point?"
"They were both murderers," Alex told him. "Moses killed an Egyptian. That's why he ran into the desert. David stole a man's wife and had him killed. Would you say there was no hope for them?"
"That's different," Hynes said. "They only killed one person. I've killed a lot more than that. And I did other things too."
"I stole a stick of gum from a grocery store when I was eight," Alex said.
"Yeah, and?"
"And for that, I deserve to burn in Hell for all eternity."
"For stealing gum?" Hynes looked doubtful.
"For sinning," Alex replied. "Every sin, no matter how minor it may seem to us, is enough to separate us from God. We are no different in His eyes. We are all sinners in desperate need of salvation. Nobody can say they aren't going to Hell because their neighbor is a worse sinner than they are."
"If God'll throw someone in Hell over a stick of gum, what hope is there for anyone?"
"Let's look at that," Alex said, opening his Bible. While the pain of his daughter's loss, his hatred for Hynes, his reluctance to be there, and his doubts that there was any hope for this man all remained, he had hit his stride and he found it easy to speak. He was a gifted preacher. As long as he could detach himself from the immediate situation, as long as he could "preach" at Hynes instead of talking to him, this might actually work.
"Let's look at Luke fifteen," Alex said.
Frustrated, he closed the Bible. He had the sudden urge just to get up and leave. He would simply tell everyone that he had changed his mind. No one would question such an action. He didn't want to be alone with the monster who had murdered his daughter. But he wasn't alone; he knew that. The Lord was with him. And he knew that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people praying for him at that moment. He closed his eyes, took a deep, stomach calming breath, and joined them in prayer.
"Lord Jesus," he whispered, "please, please help me through this. I don't know if I can do it. I don't want to do it. Please, Lord, help me. Help me to forgive this man. Help me to love him as You love him. And, Lord, I know that You do love Vincent Hynes. Help him to know that. May there be another celebration in Heaven for him tonight. I pray for him, Lord. Be here today. Speak through me. And, Lord, please calm my nerves."
He ran out of words early, but kept on praying anyway. He knew that God didn't need his words to get his message. One word just kept repeating itself in his mind, and it summed it up perfectly: Help!
After a few minutes, the door to the visitation room opened and in walked Vincent J. Hynes, flanked by two uniformed officers who may as well have been transporting a dead dog by their expressions. Lt. Mark stood behind them with his arms folded across his chest and his face a mask of disgust.
As Hynes came in, Alex found himself surprised to see an actual human being. He had spent so long demonizing this man in his own mind that he had almost expected to see an apparition from Hell in a prison jumpsuit. But Hynes was just a man, not a monster. The face that had haunted his nightmares seemed to have aged twenty-five years in the past ten. His hair, which hung just past his shoulders, was more gray than brown and he had grown a very scruffy beard, but Alex still recognized the man from the mug shot. He wearing a dingy yellow jumpsuit, leg irons, and handcuffs that held his bound wrists in front of him.
The C.O.'s forced him forward and he shuffled towards the waiting chair.
"My officers will be standing outside the door," Mark said from the hallway. "All you have to do is call them and they'll be in in seconds. Do you have any questions?"
"No, sir," Alex said.
"Good," Mark said. "Then we'll leave you alone."
The two C.O.'s turned and walked out and the door shut behind them with a loud clank. Alex was left alone with Hynes. The two men sat across from each other for an excruciatingly long moment, neither one wanting to be the first to speak. Alex had often fantasized about the moment he would meet his daughter's killer and what he would do to the man. Very few of these fantasies involved prayer and Bible reading.
Say something! he silently told himself. You didn't just come here to stare at the man!
But it was Hynes who finally broke the silence.
"Thank you for coming, Reverend Woods," he said shyly. "I know you didn't have to."
"Yes," Alex said. "I did."
"How have you been?" As soon as the question was out, Alex could tell Hynes regretted it. It was such a stupid question to ask someone who had spent the last decade mourning his daughter; especially in you were the one who killed her.
Alex almost snapped at him, "How do you think I've been?" but thought the better of it. That was not how he wanted to start off this meeting.
"I'm doing well," he said instead. "Not great, but well. I won't ask you how you've been."
"I think that's pretty obvious," Hynes chuckled, raising his hands for emphasis.
How dare you laugh? Alex thought. My little girl will never laugh again thanks to you! How dare you?
"I was surprised by you letter, Mr. Hynes," Alex said. "I didn't expect to hear from you."
"I think I was more surprised by your letter, Reverend," Hynes replied. "I've never heard of anything like it in my whole life. If I were you and somebody killed my little girl, I don't think I could ever forgive them."
"Yeah, well..." Alex trailed off. He didn't want to lie to the man about having forgiven him. Not again. But he didn't want to admit to him that he hadn't. This whole meeting was based on the assumption that the forgiveness had taken place. If he admitted now that he never really did it, he might as well just get up and leave.
"I know it doesn't mean much right now," Hynes went on, "but I am very sorry. What I did was... awful. I didn't apologize ten years ago, but I'm apologizing now, for whatever it's worth."
"Believe me," Alex said, "it means a lot." And it actually did. It was easy to hate a man who showed no remorse. It wasn't as easy to hate one who was genuinely sorry.
"If I could tell all the other families I'm sorry, I would," Hynes said. "But you're the only one I knew how to contact. Besides, if they come next week to my execution... I'll say it then."
It was like torture trying to think of what to say to this man. Alex couldn't say what he wanted to say because he was here to help Hynes and himself. He couldn't say what he knew he needed to say because he thought that his mouth would betray him and he would end up blurting out what he was trying to hard to hide.
He sent up another prayer, quick and silent: God, help me. I don't know what to do!
* * *
Aimee and deputy Michaels, whom she found calling "Bill" to be quite easy, had taken a little walk. It was at Bill's insistence. He said he knew a place where they could sit, talk, and pray and the nosey reporters wouldn't dare follow after his little speech. They ended up sitting on a bench near the highway. It was on a pleasantly landscaped corner near the prison parking lot designed specifically for people to "escape the images of this awful place," as Bill put it. It faced the highway and the snow capped mountains beyond it, and away from the towers, walls, and barbed wire of the prison.
"Guards come here on their breaks sometimes," Bill explained. "It helps to get a new perspective on things. Staring at those walls and bars can be depressing, even if you get to go home at the end of the day."
"I fell sorry for the men who don't get to go home," Aimee remarked. She glanced back over her shoulder at the imposing structures of the prison. "I can't imagine living in that place... Or dying there."
"They deserve it, don't they?" Bill asked. He sounded amazingly cold, especially considering how friendly Aimee had thought he was. "They all earned their punishment."
"Yes, but..." Aimee trailed off. She was about to say, "but what about mercy," but something struck her so suddenly that she fell silent. For a moment, she had almost forgotten that her daughter's killer was behind those bars. Almost... She could feel sorry for an abstract number of men, most of them condemned to die in the place, either by lethal injection or the passing of their hundred or so year sentences. But then she thought about Hynes. She thought about how her daughter’s life had ended in that cold dark forest at that monster's hands and she thought that dying in this horrendous place was better than he deserved. "Victimless" crimes didn't receive a death penalty and very few of them garnered life sentences either. Every man in that prison had hurt someone or killed someone. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people like her, forever trapped in a prison of loss and grief. The killers in the prison had earned their punishments.
* * *
They had sat there staring at each other for nearly a minute, neither of them speaking. It felt more like and hour and Alex began to wonder what he was really doing there. Hynes was looking expectantly at him.
"I think," Alex began, grasping desperately at straws, "we should begin with a prayer."
"A prayer?" Hynes repeated.
"Yes," Alex said. "We're here to talk about God, right? Let's start off by asking Him to be here with us."
"I know He'll listen to you," Hynes said, "but I doubt He'd pay much attention to me."
Alex thought about that for a moment. Would God heed Vincent Hynes's prayer? The Bible says that God doesn't hear the prayers of those who harbor sin in their hearts. If that was the case, had God even heard Alex's prayers for the past decade? Hadn't he been harboring the sin of unforgiveness?
Alex had even preached on that subject once. He had come to the conclusion that there was one prayer that the Lord heard no matter who uttered it. That was a prayer of repentance. It was a prayer of a man truly seeking God. After all, the conversion experience was invariably preceded by what was traditionally called "the sinner's prayer." If the two of them, both harboring sin for so long, honestly came together and asked the Lord to cleanse them of it, if they asked for His guidance and redemption, He would listen.
"Tell me one thing, Mr. Hynes," Alex said. "Are you truly willing to seek after God today?"
"Yes," Hynes said, "I am."
"Then He'll hear you." Then he added, more to himself then to Hynes, "He'll hear both of us."
"Okay, then," Hynes said. "Let's pray."
Vincent Hynes put his cuffed hands out on the table and opened them as best as he could. As difficult as it was to come here and see this man, it was much more so for Alex to reach across the table and grasp the hands that had choked the life out of his little girl. He did so, and he held them tightly. Hynes bowed his head and closed his eyes, but Alex did not.
"Lord," Alex began, "we pray that You be here with us today. We are here to seek Your will and to find Your forgiveness. Father, we ask that You guide us through this difficult meeting and that Your will be done. We ask that You help us to see the things in our lives that we need to repent of and that You enable us to do so. Let Your Holy Spirit be in this place today. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen."
"Amen," Hynes repeated. He released Alex's hands and Alex resisted the urge to wipe them on his pant legs.
"So," Alex said, "why don't we begin with why you decided to write to me after all these years?"
"I'm gonna die in a week," Hynes replied. "Something like that really makes a guy think, you know? It's easy when you're sure you got years left the forget about the state of your soul, but when it's down to months, or weeks, or days you begin to really think about it. Like I told you, I read your letter every day. I have it memorized. When I was notified six months ago that my execution date was set, the words you wrote seemed to mean so much more, and I knew I needed to talk to you."
"So you want redemption?"
"No," Hynes said. "I told you, I'm not worthy of it. I just wanted to make peace with you before I die. There's no chance of making peace with God."
"Don't say that," Alex told him. "There's always a chance."
"The Bible says, 'No murderer has eternal life abiding in him,'" Hynes said. "I'm a murderer."
"So, you've read the Bible," Alex said.
"Parts of it," Hynes replied. "I don't understand much of it, but that part was clear. There is no hope for me."
"Are you so sure of that?" Alex asked, knowing that he had his own doubts. "Remember Moses? David? Two great men of God right? I mean, they wrote huge chunks of the Bible!"
"So what's your point?"
"They were both murderers," Alex told him. "Moses killed an Egyptian. That's why he ran into the desert. David stole a man's wife and had him killed. Would you say there was no hope for them?"
"That's different," Hynes said. "They only killed one person. I've killed a lot more than that. And I did other things too."
"I stole a stick of gum from a grocery store when I was eight," Alex said.
"Yeah, and?"
"And for that, I deserve to burn in Hell for all eternity."
"For stealing gum?" Hynes looked doubtful.
"For sinning," Alex replied. "Every sin, no matter how minor it may seem to us, is enough to separate us from God. We are no different in His eyes. We are all sinners in desperate need of salvation. Nobody can say they aren't going to Hell because their neighbor is a worse sinner than they are."
"If God'll throw someone in Hell over a stick of gum, what hope is there for anyone?"
"Let's look at that," Alex said, opening his Bible. While the pain of his daughter's loss, his hatred for Hynes, his reluctance to be there, and his doubts that there was any hope for this man all remained, he had hit his stride and he found it easy to speak. He was a gifted preacher. As long as he could detach himself from the immediate situation, as long as he could "preach" at Hynes instead of talking to him, this might actually work.
"Let's look at Luke fifteen," Alex said.
posted by Arthur Brokop II at 2:26 PM
3 Comments:
Now I see why you expected I might comment on this one, as once again you are leading the way towards several points I take issue with.
I went back and read this again before responding, just to make sure I didn't get myself in trouble again. Not that I think this is a foolproof way of avoiding that.
That said, I will reapproach a couple of issues that are even more prominent now that we have this meeting. The Reverend is beating himself up as he is facing this man, as it is even more clear that he has not forgiven him, and is praying for the strength to be able to do so.
What monstrous God is requiring this of him? Even in the forgiveness requirement, why would he be required to face the man who caused such horror and pain in his life? Could he not forgive at home, eventually? If he couldn't, I ask again what the problem with this is. Some things are unforgiveable.
Now I know that this statement is anathema to all of those professed sinners. Have I crossed the line? You forget one thing. While it may be my responsibility to save my fellow man, I haven't the power to work a miracle to hold death at bay for one who would certainly be lost otherwise. God might. I don't. Does it limit God that this is beyond my power? Of course not.
I would say that the fact that the Reverend isn't leading protests in front of the house of this man's family members shows that he has attained the level that would be required of us. To look a man in the eye and say, I forgive you for killing my daughter? No. This is too much.
This is where the major flaw comes in with teaching the importance of forgiveness so strictly and foolishly. Now you have a man who is tearing himself apart, because gasp he can't bring himself to forgive this man for tearing his world apart with one selfish action. Is this what God wants? For us to look at our limitations and use them to beat ourselves the rest of the way to death because of them?
If God grants him the ability to forgive this man, what does he give him? What does that change in his life? His daughter is still dead, the man is still on death row. Nothing changes. Except perhaps a holier-than-thou complex derived from this absurd accomplishment.
As for his conversation with Hynes. The stick of gum part. I understand the claim that God sees all sin as equal, but do you really think that God could possibly weigh those two actions as one and the same? And deserving to burn in hell forever? This whole concept that "I exist as a creature, who by his very existence deserves eternal torment" sounds like an extremely vicious BDSM mentality. It also, if accepted as true points to a God unworthy of worship.
I could go on, but this isn't exactly a new topic for us, so I will leave it at that for now. I think I am approaching the point where my comment might be longer than your post anyway.
You're right, that is exactly what I expected you to say, and even though you sound angry and like to tear my points apart with apparant glee, I forgive you. (j/k).
Anyway, the points you make are the same others have made when the subject comes up, and the fact that you understand the crisis facing the reverend in the story, even though you don't think the crisis should exist means that you are getting the point of my story. As I said before, this story is far from over, both in the fact that there are quite a few pages to go, and that I haven't even finished it yet. But yes, God is a God of justice who cannot look upon sin, no matter how minor we may think it is. But (and bear with me here, because I am going to branch into an area I know you have trouble with) God seeing stealing gum as tantamount to murder (though, if you look back at the story, you will see that I don't equate the sins, but the sinners, and while God may view the sins differently, both are acts that separate us from God)the fact that justice requires punishment for even the most minor of infractions doesn't make God a mean and spiteful God unworthy of our worship, but it proves His love as a God willing to make the ultimate sacrifice so that He could look down in love on His children as He desires to do. The blood of the Cross, the sacrifice made to cover our sins, allows us to approach this God unashamed and unafraid. Our punishment is already taken care of, by God HIMSELF, and we have our freedom and forgiveness in that. I know it sounds like foolishness to you, but to me it's beautiful!
I am not arguing my best here, nor am I putting as much time and thought into my response as I would like. There are two reasons. One, I just woke up, haven't yet had any coffee, and am barely coherent enought to type this, nooing thhat wen eye luk bak att itt latr, they're wil bee mooore misstakes then eye wood evver mak wen eye amm fuly conshennns.
Secondly, the story is not finished yet. Hynes makes a similar objection to yours when he says, "If God'll throw someone in Hell over a stick of gum, what hope can anyone have?" The context is different, but he's saying the same thing. The chapter ends with Alex preparing to answer, and so I must now end this comment in the same way.
And yeah, based on this little discourse here, I do expect another call soon. Hopefully, I'll be more awake by then, though I know you'll be half asleep, which will probably work to my advantage!
God Bless,
Arthur B Roberts
I thought about calling this morning, but I was way too exhausted. We will see how I am doing when I leave work today.
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