God's Last Hope — Religion or No Religion, He Remains Undeniable

The Shower

The water was still warm when I started crying.

I did not plan this. I did not step into the shower that night with any intention of talking to God. I had just come from one of the best freestyle sessions of my life - the kind where your friends are looking at you like you just pulled something out of thin air, because you did. A Nas beat had come on and I rode the whole thing alone. Every word. Every bar. Nobody jumped in. When it was over they went crazy. A few of them asked if it was pre-written. The ones who knew better knew it was not. But nobody - not a single person in that room - knew how close I came to falling apart on every line.

I ran out of words a quarter of the way through. The rhyme I needed was not there. My mind was empty. And then, half a second before I would have fumbled - half a second before the whole thing collapsed - the right word arrived. Not from my memory. Not from my vocabulary. From somewhere else. It just appeared, like someone slid it under a door right before I needed to walk through it. And I delivered it. Right on time. Clean. As if I had known it all along.

Then it happened again. And again. And again. Every time I was about to go down, the word showed up. Every time. For the rest of the beat. A quarter of the way through I had nothing left and yet I made it to the end without a single stumble. Nobody in that room knew I was a half-second away from fumbling the entire time, because it never sounded like it.

I was still riding high off that experience when I got into the shower later that night. Still semi-high off the feeling of what had happened - the kind of high that has nothing to do with what you smoke and everything to do with what you just lived. And without planning it, without thinking about it, I started to pray. Quietly. But out loud. The way I had been told to do in church that day when the old school member with the one gold tooth told me to talk to God out loud so He could see I was trying to reach Him. The way Joel Osteen said to do it - find a quiet place where no one is around, so you know the only person you could be talking to is Him.

I thanked God for my talent. I gave Him all the glory for what happened during that freestyle because as far as I knew, I was just buying time, waiting to finally mess up. But He kept giving me the right words with barely enough time to process them. I was grateful. Deeply, painfully grateful. And gratitude has a way of melting into something else when you let it run long enough. It melted into repentance.

I started saying I was sorry. Not in the way they teach you in church - the scripted kind, the kind that sounds holy but costs you nothing. I started apologizing for real. For the things I had been doing while running the streets. For the sins I kept committing even though I knew - I knew - that something greater than me existed. I had already been told. I had already felt the tug. And still I went back. Still I ran.

✦ ✦ ✦

I was talking to God out loud in my parents’ shower, alone, water running down my face, and the joy of the conversation mixed with the guilt of the confession and created something I had never felt before. A pressure in my chest. A fullness. Like my heart was trying to say more than my mouth was willing to let out.

The apology was still flowing through me, and so was the gratitude.

The feeling of wanting to cry came over me again, like it was that day in church. And this time, since I was alone - since there was nobody to see me, nobody to judge me, nobody I had to perform strength for - I bowed my head and let it come.

But it did not come. In the same instant that I bowed my head to let the tears fall, the feeling went away. Just - vanished. Like a hand reached inside my chest and pulled the emotion out before it could land.

And before I could fully process the feeling disappearing - before my brain could even ask the question - something happened that I have spent years trying to understand.

I heard my own voice. Inside my head. But not like a thought. Not like the quiet voice you hear when you are thinking to yourself. This was loud. As loud as if I had spoken with my fingers in both ears - that echoing, resonant, unmistakable sound of your own voice bouncing around inside your skull. I heard myself ask:

“You want to cry?”

And my instant response - out loud, without hesitation, without thinking - was “Yeah.”

And that is when the waterworks started. I could not see my own face but I know it was ugly. I mean the kind of cry where your mouth is wide open and nothing is coming out at first. The kind where your body bends at the waist like someone punched you in the soul. I had to look hideous. Mouth wide open. Eyes shut. Bent over in a shower in Miami, crying silently at first and then not silently at all.

But then something shifted. The atmosphere in the shower changed. It went from an ugly cry to a powerful cry....