The Chaplain's Daughter Read Online Free Page B

some of them are) but you have a relationship with God whether you ever go into a church or not.  You’re a child of God!  You are who you have been all along!  Have you been plugging your ears every Thursday night, man?”
     
    Toby looked at John with a certain measure of alarm.  This was different than the kindly older gentleman that talked about Kobe Bryant and LeBron James with Toby in the visitor’s room.  John had a flame in his eye when he talked about God.
     
    “I don’t know, John!  God has never talked to me!  My whole life has been one screw up after another.  I know that some of it is my fault, but a lot of it is just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Where has God been when I was hurting, or lonely, or scared?”
     
    John sat back in the chair and looked at Toby with a look that was equal parts compassion and incredulity.  John pursed his lips before answering the lost soul who was seated across the table.
     
    “Don’t you see, Toby?  That’s where you’re mistaken.  Let me see if we can look at what has happened to you through a different lens.  The things that you think have happened to you by accident haven’t been accidents at all.  There is no such thing as a coincidence.  That’s what you have to know if you want to see the little miracles in the world.  That’s what you have to know if you want to hear the voice of God as he speaks to you every nanosecond of every day.  It wasn’t an accident that you were in the car that night.  It came about through the choices that you made with respect to the company that you keep.  It wasn’t an accident that you weren’t driving that night.  It was God protecting you from further trouble.  It wasn’t an accident that when you came to Pierce County Jail you were put in a tank that I come to every week.  That was God making sure that we met, and became friends.  None of it is an accident Toby!  There are no such things as accidents!  It’s all in God’s plan!”
     
    John fell silent, waiting for Toby’s response.  What John had just shared with Toby was the crux of John’s belief system.  Most inmates heard some of it, but he had dropped the whole shootin’ match on Toby at once.  He hadn’t necessarily intended to do it in in one gulp the way that he had, but he had opened his mouth and the words poured out until there were no more to be said.  “Well,” John thought to himself, “That was no accident, was it?”
     
    Toby looked at John without blinking.  John half expected Toby to say he didn’t want to see John anymore.  He thought Toby might laugh about John spouting such utter nonsense.  “No such thing as coincidence!  What a crock of CRAP!”
     
    Instead Toby swallowed, and swallowed again.  As he sat in the chair across from the chaplain who was so compassionate on one hand and so passionate on the other, Toby Allen Jacks began to realize the depth of the loneliness inside him.  Toby was a young man that had a “posse” and “some bitches” on the outside, but didn’t have any friends, inside or out.  He had lived a life, so far, that had yielded him nothing but loneliness.  He knew that society considered him to be trouble, and society was now able to point to a rap sheet that would grow who knew how long?
     
    That day, June 30, 2013, Toby Jacks’ eyes were opened, perhaps for the first time in his troublesome 20 years.  As they opened, they also filled with tears.  At first the tears pooled in his eyes, but the longer that he sat in silence, the more that they rolled out of his eyes and down his cheeks.  He didn’t wipe them away.  They were the liquid reality of the life that he had led to this point.  He let them flow until his face was streaked with so many rivers of shame and grief.
     
    “Oh God,” Toby said at last.  “What should I do now?”
     
    This was the moment in John’s professional life that meant the most to him.  Over the years since he had