I began to exist in a tension between wanting and not wanting–waiting for something I couldn’t even pin down in my most naked and honest moments. Waiting for a balance where I neither ached nor forgot, regretted nor accepted. Waiting for my heart to be light again yet fearing the implications of that same lightness. I suppose I waited for peace–an end to my own personal warfare. . . . Grandma and I stood hand in hand until the graveyard was empty and the rain had all but ceased to fall. Her lips moved faintly, and I knew she was whispering prayers for me. I couldn’t join her –I had forgotten how; the ability to pray had slipped out of my soul like the dirt had tumbled from my fingers. I wasn’t angry at God or anything–that would have been far too cliched. He just seemed irrelevant.
The narrator of this novel makes this self-observation in the aftermath of her father’s death, and in fact, our protagonist/narrator, Julia, is not only self-observant, but also somewhat self-absorbed. She has excuses: her mother was completely selfish and deserted the family emotionally long before she left them physically. Her beloved father dies after a long, painful illness at the beginning of the novel when Julia is only fifteen years old. Julia feels abandoned and rejected. However, she has a loving grandmother who picks up the slack and prays for her and teaches her to love God. So why is Julia such a mess?
She sees God as irrelevant. There’s an epidemic of that attitude going around. Is God irrelevant? Unconnected? Peripheral to my life and decisions at best? Sometimes I would have to admit that I, too, see God as an afterthought, or more accurately don’t see Him as central, vital, the source of all that makes life worthwhile.
By the end of the book, Julia has sown her wild oats, made some serious mistakes, looked for love in all the wrong places, and she’s in need of a God who loves and forgives and gives second chances. The resolution isn’t neat and tidy; Julia doesn’t have a Damascus road, five-star, turn-around conversion experience. It’s more as if the prodigal daughter comes home and realizes that her grandmother has always loved her and that God may not be so irrelevant after all.
