Before the Rooster Crows

         What does it mean to be a hypocrite?  My father is the worst hypocrite I know, but on nights like this, lying awake in an armpit of a hotel room somewhere around the butthole of America, I can’t help but respect his sincerity and sacrifice.  Sometimes, I wish I could conjure metaphors like he does out of the clear blue sky and tell stories with his charisma and command a room like only he can do.
         And what’s he dreaming about right now?  He’s probably dreaming about life applications for Revelation Chapter 5 or what Gideon would be like if he was alive today.  There’s so much tension in the way he sleeps it makes you wonder.  Mom, Zoey, Sy, Josey – they all look so peaceful and serene, breathing quietly in the dark.  But Dad tosses and turns and grunts and mumbles like somebody else is controlling him.  His face looks so grieved and serious even in sleep. 
         When I was 15, I hated him for taking us out on the road, rambling over this god-forsaken landscape in a Greyhound bus, and for making us sleep in places like this, all huddled up like refugees in one ratty hotel room, playing rock/paper/scissors every night to see who gets the bed.  I hated him.  And it was easy to hate him.  My world back then was black and white.  I loved or I hated and mostly I hated.
         But one day in December before I turned sixteen, my whole world tilted and everything looked different to me.  It made less and less sense.  And I remember that day.  It all happened with one look from my Dad.
         It was an average day at an average church with average people and average pictures of Jesus on the stained-glass windows.  This particular church, though, was above average in two significant ways.  One, it had a secret hallway (for what purpose I never really stopped to consider) that connected the pastor’s study, the baptismal, and the choir loft.  And two, the pastor’s daughter was a gorgeous 17-year-old girl with a pixie’s nose, graceful eyelashes, and braided blonde hair.  I remember the way her green eyes lit up the dark of that secret hallway and how it went black when she closed them.  Her name was Emma.
         In the dark of that hallway, the world was only touch and sound, and all my thoughts evaporated into the walls.  I remember the little popping sound the buttons of her sweater made and the crackling sound of our jeans rustling together like leaves, swelling and fading, speeding and slowing, scraping along asphalt in the wind.  And the sound of her breath rising and falling.  I remember her fingers raking through my hair and her body wriggling and the pearly smooth feel of her skin and the way it tensed under my fingertips. 
         Then came the faraway sound of loafers on the carpet and the flick of a lightswitch.  The hall lights shocked on like God showing his face in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve first realized they were naked.  It was Emma’s father with thick, handlebar eyebrows that arched to the top of his forehead and eyes that popped out of his skull and spun around like a cartoon. 
         I leapt to my feet.  My fingers unlaced from hers. And I bolted for the baptismal.  I heard his heavy footsteps behind me, his angry wet breath, and the hellfire rage in his voice.  I ran.  I hopped out of the baptismal into the choir loft and nimbled from pew top to pew top, my undone belt buckle flapping against my hips, clanging like a broken cowbell, until I reached the altar.  Every head in the sanctuary turned.  It was a Wednesday night Bible Study.  I paused to look back at Emma’s father struggling out of the bapistry after me and spouting curses to fill the empty air.
         I turned and tore off down the aisle into the Narthex where I paused again in front of the exit.  And there was my father.  And that look that I will never forget.  It wasn’t the anger that I expected in my world of black and white and fire and brimstone.  It was heartbreak.  My world shifted right then, because this wasn’t about just right and wrong.  It wasn’t just that my actions had been wrong in some cosmic sense and that God was judging me.  The work that my father does truly matters to him, and I had betrayed it.  On the one hand, I knew my father’s secret.  I saw him for the hypocrite and liar that he is.  But on the other hand, I finally realized in that moment the depth of his sacrifice.  And I never looked at a girl the same way again.