CREATIVE NONFICTION 43the pain in their hearts as they sifted through the
life behind them. Looking for purpose, searching
for signs of God himself. My father would often
comfort them with a soft word or a choice verse
from his cracked, black-bound Bible.
It wasn’t until I was older that I realized the
power in his words.
I remember, as a teenager, encountering an
old woman who took my hands one Sunday,
clasping them in a delicate, paper-thin grip. She
told me in Chinese that my father’s words were
a gift. That they had on many occasions moved
her to tears. That in the darkest time of her life
they had revealed to her the voice of God.
This happened again and again as I became
an adult and met other former parishioners of
my father.
I came to see the healing one could bring as
a minister, the difference one could make in
people’s lives. Eventually, I assumed, this would
be my calling as well—to go to seminary and
help others as my father had before me.
But it didn’t happen that way.
As a young man, I prayed, asking God if this
was my path, and was met with silence. I enrolled
in a class at a seminary, a course on the prophets
of the Old Testament. I thought I would feel
a natural kinship with these ancient men,
truth-tellers from eras past. But the course—like
much of seminary—was not what I expected.
It focused on the academic underpinnings of
theology rather than its application to the world
outside and how to help those living in it.
By the end of it, I was thinking hard about
what I knew was required from a minister’s
life—the sacrifice and humility—and came to
the difficult realization that I fell deeply short on
both counts.
And so, to my father’s and my own surprise, I
became a reporter.
three hours into our conversation, Jaime
notes with slight embarrassment the students
milling around us in the coffee shop.
At 38, with an entire other life and career
behind him, he is considerably older than most
of them, he points out. Now halfway through
his studies at the seminary, he will be 41 when he
takes his vows.
I ask him about that nagging feeling he felt at
Yale and how he came to believe it was from God.
During his work in the lab, he said, his
thoughts would often wander back to his
teenage years and the one time he had felt truly
alive: during a mission trip to Venezuela.
He remembered the anxiety he had over
leaving behind everything he knew. For a few
months that summer, he joined a group working
in an impoverished region several hours outside
Caracas. Before he left home, his mother forced
him to take a belt with a hidden pouch sewn into
it, where she had hidden $80.
Four nights into the trip, while sleeping in
an empty local school, his group was robbed by
men armed with guns. The men took all their
money and passports. One man even grabbed
Jaime’s shoes and jeans. But before slipping out
the door, the man left behind the belt Jaime’s
mother had given him.
Afterward, as he and another boy—clutching
Jaime’s belt, the only money they had left—
tried to get new passports at the U.S. consulate,
they were told the fee was steep: $80 exactly.
The whole thing could easily be explained
as coincidence, Jaime admitted, the way the
rational mind is always working to find meaning
and narrative in the chaos of life. But to him,
it felt like nothing less than a message from
heaven—that by sacrificing his home and travel-
ing to another place in search of God, he had put
himself in a position to hear him.
That feeling of providence, communion with
something greater outside of himself—that’s
what he felt was missing in his lab.when i began working as a religion
reporter at my newspaper, I thought I had finally
found my calling in life. The two halves of my
world, converging at last as one.
The work felt urgent, important, fulfilling. I
roamed the halls of churches, synagogues, and
mosques, talking to people as they searched for
God and confronted life’s deepest questions.
Often, I discovered, what lay at the center of many
people’s hearts was this central question: Why do I
exist, and what am I supposed to do with my life?
I wrote about a woman who heard God telling
her to start a church in the middle of a super-