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. Then I decided it didn't matter that I had been so wrong about myself, because no one but me knew about it.

The next moment I was struck by wonder that I was even sitting there thinking about myself and how I looked. I thought it wasn’t strange that I felt so different from the toddler my mom and everyone else saw. Children—and maybe especially I—were much bigger than they looked. And I knew I would never forget this moment—the moment I realized I was me.

At that very moment, I had what felt like a premonition. Suddenly I knew there was a reason I would never forget this moment, a reason that was waiting for me somewhere in the future. I also knew that one day, in the future, I would be so important that the world would care about what I had been thinking on the toilet when I was three. Yes, anything happening in my life now, when no one suspected I was special, could turn out to matter in the future when I had become what I was meant to be.

And without noticing it, I had my long, slender body back and was sitting on the toilet as beautiful and graceful as a fairy-tale princess, with hair hanging all the way down my back.

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