Page 19 of Redemption
And what then? Who would I become?
I can never be my brother. I can never pretend I haven’t been the boogeyman.
Where does that leave me? Where do I go from here? What the hell am I supposed to do now?
I don’t recognize myself any longer. I don’t feel like me. I don’t know who I am anymore.
The inky-black depths of despair and grief are calling to me, inviting me in, urging me to give up and drown myself.
A small, quiet voice comes from within me. “You aren’t Lachlan Mount. You never were. It was an identity you assumed out of necessity for survival. You survived. You survived to meet your brother and your mother. You have a wife and a daughter and everything to live for. A new day is dawning, a new life?—”
I ruthlessly shut the voice down with more truth: I don’t deserve any of this goodness in my life. No one else can possibly understand how much I don’t deserve it. No one but me knows what I’ve done.
The voice gets louder. “God knows, and still, he blesses you with his favor.”
“Why would He do such a thing?” I reply aloud.
The priest thinks I’m speaking to him. “Why would who do such a thing, my son?”
I take in the man before me, dressed for funeral rites in his black cassock and white collar, with his Bible in hand.
“Why wouldn’t God strike me down instead?” I ask him, uncaring that I’m revealing weakness—something I rarely do.
Father Thomas performed my wedding and has known me longer than most, so he’s not surprised by the question.
“Because the Almighty isn’t done with you yet,” he answers as though it’s a simple matter, except it feels like anything but. The priest continues, “He still has a purpose for your life. That’s the only reason you’re still here. God uses us all in mysterious ways, just as He has used you.”
I open my mouth, as if wishing to correct him that it was my mother’s prayers that kept me alive this long, but my lips lock together once more. I’ll share my mother’s existence with no one but Keira. I would never endanger her life.
Instead, I reply along a different vein. “God used me to commit violence and take lives? That was the Almighty?” I can’t stop my questions.
Father Thomas is a man of the cloth, who actually takes his vows seriously and doesn’t diddle little kids or get drunk on the wine—the major reasons why I’ve continued to trust him all these years.
I may have no answers, but perhaps he does.
“Did you commit violence for fun? Take lives for pleasure?” The questions he throws back at me stop me cold. “Did it give you joy?”
“No,” I reply with a sharp tone and shake of my head. “Never.”
“Were they innocent lives you took?”
In a moment, their faces flash before my eyes.
“Never.”
“God works in mysterious ways, my son. He also forgives all in an instant.”
Confusion sets in. This is one part I’ve never understood. “How? How could He possibly?”
“Because that is His nature.” The priest continues as if he discusses these matters every day, and maybe he does, “Do you repent? Will you change your ways? Will you eschew death and violence and choose to live another way?”
Fucking hell. This is not the conversation I wanted to be having this morning. But when has my life ever gone according to plan?
I drop my guard and tell him the truth. “I feel like I’m falling apart, Father. I feel like it’s all slipping away.” My voice sounds hoarse and not at all like me.
“This is why we’re told not to build a house upon sand. This is why we’re told to build it upon rock.”
“What does that even mean?” I ask with a harsh laugh upon my lips.
