My Dinner with Heidi

[Res Ipsa]

I blame my hat. I have only one hat. It’s got a wide brim that protects my face from the sun that does its best to inflict basal and squamous cell carcinomas on my poor face. It’s nylon and faded green and fits my head like a glove. With any luck, I’ll be buried in it.

TL/DR I love my hat.

Except for the fact that it seems to want a divorce. It hops off my head and hides every chance it gets. Which is a ton of chances. And so, when I hopped the light rail Wednesday for a de-escalation training, my hat was nowhere to be found.

As a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, I began to eliminate the many places that the hat could be hiding. After eliminating all the most convenient places it could be hiding, the one that remained was a restaurant 20 minutes north on the Everett waterfront. I’d had lunch up there a couple weeks ago after walking 6k. After an eternal hold (it was a beautiful, sunny afternoon in February and everyone was out and about), a nice young lady confirmed that the miscreant was indeed hiding in the lost and found. So, off I went.

I swear that the hat looked kind of happy to see me. Maybe there had been a pair of stinky socks in the lost ands found. I plopped the hat onto my head and set out on a glorious afternoon stroll along the waterfront.

The Everett waterfront is in a redevelopment phase from old industrial to new mixed use retail and residential. The first phase added a a nice walking path, so it’s a great place for a stroll. Lots of folks had the same idea.

When I finished, I was ready to eat. Sunday is eat what you kill dinner day in the Ipsa household, so I stopped for dinner at a restaurant on the waterfront. The bar was empty, so I hopped up onto a stool and ordered dinner and an adult beverage. I’ve been on a Philip K. Dick kick, so I pulled out my phone and resumed reading Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. The TV was showing curling, so I was in Res Ipsa Heaven.

While I was waiting for a slice of cheesecake, I heard a voice say “Is anyone sitting here.” It was a woman pointing to the stool beside me (the others had been taken). “Nope,” I said, “it’s all yours.”

Now, I love to talk to strangers. Yesterday, I spent half an hour talking to a former New Yorker who was hanging a brand spanking new Seahawks flag on his porch while I was supposed to walking a 10K. People are infinitely interesting to me, and I have had incredible conversations that started with chatting up a stranger.

The woman introduced herself as Heidi. She had a little problem getting onto her stool because she was holding a half-full glass of wine. “I brought my own alcohol,” she joked. I laughed and asked her “from where?” “From the hotel across the street,” she said.

Open carrying a glass of wine isn’t legal in Washington, so I was guessing she wasn’t from around here. She was from Reno and had driven up to visit her grandchildren.

We proceeded to have a pretty typical bar conversation: spouses, children, grandchildren, careers, etc. I gradually realized that she was a pretty serious Christian. It was also pretty easy to carry on a conversation, as she did most of the talking.

At one point, she said something like “God won’t give us more than we can handle, right?” And I said, “Well I can’t really agree with that.” When she asked why not, I replied “I’m not a believer.”

The next hour passed with her telling me about how she knew there was a God. Not just any God, but the Christian God. She had been raised JW, but had been kicked out. (I never asked why.) Every day she spent some quiet time with the Bible. She closed her eyes and opened the Bible to a random page. And it had a message for her every day. She thought about the message God had for her. Then she would kiss her Bible (New King James — no other version would do) after she closed it.

She had three other books about Jesus that she would repeat the same action with. Random page selection from all three books, and they all would form a meaningful, coherent message that was just what she needed. That was her evidence — such a thing could not happen by coincidence day after day.

Now, that was not the basis of her belief. Her belief was based on faith, personal witness from the Holy Spirit, and an intense personal relationship with God. Rather, that was her argument to me, an atheist, for the existence of God.

When our conversation first took its theological turn, I consciously decided that I was not going to argue.I was genuinely curious and wanted to hear what she had to say. Besides, it was a bar that was by then full of people. About 15 minutes in, a couple already looked uncomfortable.

I’ve been in lots of great conversations with believers about their religious beliefs over the years. This conversation was the most intense of them all. You see, she told me that, when she drove up from Reno to visit her grandchildren, she always asked God who she should talk to. And, apparently, that person was me. She was on a literal mission from God to bear witness to me. This wasn’t an abstract discussion for her — it was deeply personal. God was personally challenging her to testify to me.

Just to give you an idea of her beliefs: JW’s, Mormons and yours truly were absolutely going to hell where we would suffer eternal torment. She adamantly insisted that I could not possibly understand how awful that torment would be. Satan was a literal personage (but not Satan’s Brother). She always prayed silently to prevent Satan from overhearing her prayers and plotting to trick her. She had been abused as a child and viewed her Heavenly Father as her only father and the person in the world she was closest to. She was certain we are in the last days and warned that I could literally wake up in hell tomorrow. She also said that I could be a literal demon.

Like I said, intense. This experience was deeply personal and spiritual for her. She teared up at several points in the conversation. But it was a narrow kind of personal. She asked me a couple of times why I didn’t believe, but I only got a word or two out before she was off talking about why she believed in God. At one point when she was tearing up, I said that I hoped she wasn’t sad because I was not accepting God. She responded by saying she wasn’t really concerned about my choice — she was simply called to share her beliefs. It was odd for me to hear a person communicate her religious beliefs with such passion, knowing I was heading for eternal torment, yet not really caring about what happened to me.

The other main impression I came away with was how defensive she was. I was basically practicing active listening techniques the whole time. But she once asked if I was “challenging her.” A couple of times she interpreted my smiling and nodding as laughing at her. And, after I had asked for my check, the bartender asked if she wanted hers. She responded “Are you asking us to leave?” Before I left, she said she hoped I wasn’t going to laugh at her after I’d gone.

It certainly was one of the oddest conversations I can recall. I came away feeling like I had listened and had learned a great deal about her beliefs, especially those that were deeply personal and most important to her. I don’t think she learned anything about my beliefs or what is most important to me other than the absence of a belief in God. Once she knew I didn’t believe, she expressed no interest in anything I might have to say. It left me despairing over how to find any common ground at all.

I wonder how she will tell this story about the stranger she met in the bar. Will it be a miracle story of witnessing to an atheist. Or the story of encountering a demon who laughed at her witness. I don’t particularly care for either.

But at least I got my hat back.

[msnobody]

Interesting story. I’m glad you got your hat back. I guess she felt like it was her job to share the good news (I’m assuming that is what she shared), and not her job to convince you. If that were the case, she’d be right. It probably would have been a good thing to reciprocate listening and really taking an interest in what you had to say. Maybe she was feeling an urgency to get her words out or in a time crunch.

[Res Ipsa]

Interesting story. I’m glad you got your hat back. I guess she felt like it was her job to share the good news (I’m assuming that is what she shared), and not her job to convince you. If that were the case, she’d be right. It probably would have been a good thing to reciprocate listening and really taking an interest in what you had to say. Maybe she was feeling an urgency to get her words out or in a time crunch.

Hi Msnobody,

And I still haven’t lost it again.

I’m still puzzling over the conversation. I’ve had lots of good conversations over the years with folks about their religious beliefs. I’ve never had one where the believer was so defensive. Maybe she felt threatened being in such close proximity to an atheist. Maybe she was dead serious about the demon thing. I dunno.

At one point she said something like: “How can you not believe in God. What has science ever done for you?” It was a little jarring because I’d never said anything about science. It was if she thought I worshipped science. I started to say that I don’t worship science, but I only got a couple of words out before she was off and running again.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

This is a really interesting interaction you had, RI. I’ve had more than a few of those throughout my life, too. One in particular that comes to mind was when I was still LDS and just starting my military career I was at a service school and was sharing a room with a guy who wanted to be a preacher some day. He was intrigued by the fact that I served a Mormon mission and had, well, all sorts of things to say about Mormons, Mormon theology (if there is such a thing any more), and my lack of Biblical literacy. So, he took it upon himself to bring me to his version of Christ.

Needless to say, like you, I did a lot of listening. His questions to me were simply platforms upon which he could performatively explain his thoughts and ideas about Christianity, politics, social conventions, history, and everything in between. He was fervent with his preaching, and incredibly pissed at me because I was essentially intractable in my own beliefs, though I came away from those conversations understanding that I didn’t actually know the first thing about biblical scholarship. Mormons are so, so bad at it.

Anyway, yeah, it always ‘fun’ to be on the did-I-agree-to-this-conversation receiving end of a zealot’s personal mission. Ugh.

- Doc

[I Have Questions]

At one point she said something like: “How can you not believe in God. What has science ever done for you?”

I confess that conjured up in my mind the "What have the Romans ever done for us" scene from Monty Python's 'The Life Of Brian'.

[Dr. Shades]

I’ve never had one where the believer was so defensive.

As Morpheus said, "Some people are so hopelessly dependent on the Matrix that they will never be free."

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

At one point she said something like: “How can you not believe in God. What has science ever done for you?”

I confess that conjured up in my mind the "What have the Romans ever done for us" scene from Monty Python's 'The Life Of Brian'.

It’s like asking us what has addition and subtraction ever done for us?

[Limnor]

I got caught up in the hat as metaphor. Res searches for what he knows is missing, while Heidi believes she is sent to find what she believes is missing in him. I’m not sure if that was an intentional within your story, but I’ll think about it all day now lol

[canpakes]

“How can you not believe in God. What has science ever done for you?”

… she said, while holding a glass of wine.

[Res Ipsa]

“How can you not believe in God. What has science ever done for you?”

… she said, while holding a glass of wine.

Noah got drunk long before there was a science. Checkmate, scientists!