Talking to God with my Communion Dress Pulled Up

I used to think I could talk to God.

When you are younger, having a conversation with God was easy because, like believing in Santa Clause, it was easy to have faith to consider the impossible.

My mother still shows, especially men that I bring home the video of my first communion. Not because she was so proud that day, but because I had the ability as a child to act like a complete idiot on what was supposed to be one of the most important days of my religious life. I wore the same white dress, gloves, veil, shoes, and yes, even socks that my sister wore two years earlier. I remember it was the only day that I actually enjoyed wearing a dress. (All the other girls had to too, so I didn’t stick out like a tone-death girl in a choir of angels.)

On the video, you can find me dancing around our dining room, singing a Disney tune and oh, yeah lifting the bell of my skirt—gravy stained from the meal earlier—to my chin, exposing the white underwear I had underneath to Jesse. My brother laughed every time the lace trim of the white fabric brushed his blonde hair. Religion and God were easy, fun. No one told you, “Hey, you might be wrong about this.”

After our dog Smokey died, I’d go out back into the cow pasture that connected our property with Van Egtern’s at the time, and sit beneath the branches of a blue spruce that grew over where my father had buried her. I asked God for a lot of things—a horse, Jenny letting me borrow a shirt, a snow day, things I believed were possible, for God was not a possibility; he just was.

As I got older, I stopped asking. Not only because prayers didn’t come true, but because I wanted less and less. I needed less and less. My mother would say, “You don’t have to need something to talk to God.”

“What do you say to him then?”

“You ask for strength to love. You ask for him to watch over the ones you love,” she’d answer.

“Well, isn’t that still asking?”

“Yes, but you’re asking for others.”

I have prayed for others, but it has taken me 26 years to pray for only strength, which I’m still unsure of what that means—strength. What I want is to know that God is still there if I returned to the blue spruce behind our house. That I could talk to him like a friend instead of a stranger.