The First Contact
I was a dreamy and imaginative child. The highlight of the week was our visit to the library every Saturday. Mom and I would stay for hours and finish by wheeling home a stroller filled with books. That is why there was nothing particularly strange about the event I later came to see as my first God-experience. I was three years old, sitting on the toilet. I had just had a fight with my mom and lost. I was trying to imagine how I had carried myself during the battle when suddenly it hit me that I didn’t look the way I thought. In my mind, I had seen something beautiful and graceful—a noble heroine forced into surrender by a dim-witted superior power. Now I realized that not only mom, but everyone except me, saw something else. And what was worse: they were right and I was wrong. In my head, I was quite tall and thin with hair reaching all the way down my back. In reality, I was a chubby toddler, and that was why my mom treated me the way she did. My first feeling was shame. ...