I WAS walking home from work one afternoon, the hot air clinging onto my skin like a second shirt, when I noticed across the street a bevy of young women wearing pastel blouses, long skirts, and closed-toed shoes, and I wouldn’t have flagged any of their outfits as “unusually modest” if there had only been one of them, but there were three, and so I immediately thought, hmm, maybe they’re part of a group, and true enough, when I crossed the street and our paths converged into the vertex of the sidewalk and the crosswalk, one of the young ladies — the tallest, with straight brown hair that hung just past her shoulders like undisturbed curtains — asked me how I was, and I murmured “good” without looking at her, my eyes fixed on the sidewalk with determined neutrality, and the young lady said, “Good, so, we’re inviting people to come worship Jesus Christ this Sunday, are you interested?” and I didn’t stop walking, but I shot her a glance and I smiled and I raised my hand in a vague flutter that could mean either “sorry I’m not interested” or “sorry I don’t speak English,” to which the young lady replied, still pleasant and unruffled, “No? Okay, I hope you have a great day,” and I kept going, the brief conversation evaporating behind me as I walked the rest of the way home.
I JUST finished making dinner, which I also portioned into glass containers for tomorrow’s lunch — ginisang ampalaya, fried bacon, jasmine rice with roasted nori strips, and cheese-stuffed jalapeños — and my mind, after having spent over an hour in the kitchen rinsing, chopping, sizzling, stirring, and plating, is just beginning to stabilize from the culinary chaos but alas, as minds typically do, it loops back to that moment when a young woman asked if I was interested in worshipping Jesus Christ, and I wonder if it was not just a random moment, if it was actually God reaching out to me, his proverbial hand extending to where I was via a young missionary because, to be honest, I had been talking to Him, or Her, or They, these past few months, by which I mean I had been praying, primarily in the form of supplication as most prayers tend to be, but occasionally I express gratitude too, because I have anthropomorphized God or Whoever It Is into someone who would appreciate manners, and surely any entity with the alleged power to rearrange lives would also notice the lack of a simple thank you, but now maybe God or Whoever It Is also wants something a little more intentional from me, not just whispered gratitude right before I sleep but also singing songs at church and wearing long skirts and surrendering my Sundays to worship, which is why He or She or They led the three young ladies down the sidewalk towards which I happened to be walking on a hot afternoon, and even though I am far from being religious, and maybe this is just my people-pleasing instinct trying to spiritualize a pang of guilt, I still feel a quiet bout of paranoia because I might have humanized God a bit too much that I wonder if He or She or They is vindictive enough to hold against me my rejection of a divine offer, my waving “no” to the young lady with brown hair, who, I now remember, was also holding a thick book in her right hand that could have very well been the word of the lord.
WHETHER I believe in God or not is beside the point — and whether God exists or not is a debate I couldn’t care less about — but I believe in my mom, the most spiritually grounded person I know, and last week, when we were talking on the phone, she told me that she was feeling overwhelmed because my brother was going through something and he kept unloading his feelings on her, pouring out his confusion and pain until my mom’s emotional cup started to overflow with feelings she couldn’t name, which was why she called me, her voice a little unsteady, and I assured her that she’s a good mom, the best, the greatest, and I told her stories about the mothers of some of my friends, also children of immigrants, whose mothers crashed under the weight of their own displacement, who lashed out at their children and weaponized the language of sacrifice, reminding their kids over and over of what was left behind, of communities and careers and comfort zones on the other side of the equator, of how crossing oceans was not just a journey but a wound, and even though my mom had handed me the phone countless times growing up to talk to Customer Service on her behalf because English was clunky and cumbersome for her, not once did she make me feel like her struggles were my fault or her exhaustion was tied to her kids, and so on that call, I reminded my mom of her strength, how she has always borne everything with grit, how I love her and admire her, and then my mom cried, not loudly but with a quiet release as if she’s been holding it in for days, and she told me that she recognizes her strength too, she knows it’s there because even in her lowest moments, even when she was heartbroken or broke or both, she never thought about giving up, as if some part of her just knew that she could handle it, that her heart could take it, and my mom thinks that her strength comes from her spirituality, not necessarily from any single religion, but from something steady and invisible inside her, a current of belief that needs no name, so I didn’t ask her whether it’s her belief in God or her faith in the Cosmos, because in the end I think it’s her belief in herself, and I know my mom is not Jesus Christ but I still consider myself her disciple, her follower, her witness, and my belief in her is not up for debate.
sure. wait. what? 
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