Excerpt: Saving Faith

Caroline sits next to her cardboard shelter in the rain.

How long should she wait for an answer from God, she wonders.
Her faith has faltered in the past few months, there is no question about that.
She wonders if God even listens to her anymore. She has cried out to him so many times in the past that her plea today seems redundant.

" I just need someone to listen to me." She pleads for the tenth time that night.

Her eyes are swollen and show the remnants of dry tears streaked with dirt, which indicates at least six hours of crying, maybe more. She can't remember when she started. She only knows that she can't stop.

" I just need a helping hand." She breaths between sobs.

All Caroline has ever wanted is to be loved. However, these days, the only ones who appear to love her in any way are those who love her body and nothing else. She has clung to them for some time because they used to make her feel good about herslef, but now she knows that there is more to her than her looks. She always hoped that one of the men she met would see that and love her for it.

Caroline is fed up with the men in her life. She had a fiancee for awhile... that was two years ago, and he left her because she had told him she was pregnant with his child. She had also had a lover of sorts; he met her online and found her in her favorite coffee shop nearly six months ago and had seen her with the baby in her belly and fled, just as any sane man she'd ever known or expected to know would. Men always act strong but she beleives they are the weaker sex. When it comes to responsibility and real emotion, they can't seem to hold their own. One sign of anything that could cause them stress and they're out the door.

Clenched tightly in her hands is a photograph of the child she gave up for adoption just two months ago. The child was named Adelaide and she was one year and six months old at the time Caroline gave her up. The decision to give up her daughter was the hardest that Caroline had ever had to make in her life up to that point; and now she felt remorse and regret so deep that she wondered if there was any way she could be saved from herself.

Giving up Adelaide had been right. She knew that. Caroline could barely take care of herself and pay the rent for the dimly-lit room she rented above the bar around the corner back then. Once the bar owner told her she was going to be evicted from the room, child or no child, she knew that Adelaide deserved better, and she called child services the very same evening. The woman she spoke to didn't even wait until daybreak before coming to confiscate the child. She came in the middle of the night and eyed Caroline like she was garbage, scolding her with her eyes for bringing a child into the world and into such unsanitary, unsafe conditions. Caroline had cried herself to sleep that night, and it was the last night she spent in that bed. The box next to which she now sits has been her home for the past two months, and she fears it will be her home for a long time to come.

As she sits, chilled, soaked and sobbing for God to help her, she realizes that she wants her child back and she wants her life to change but she doesn't see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, she isn't sure there is a tunnel for her anymore. Caroline feels as if she is destined for a cave instead. Such a harsh existence for a fifteen year old girl to bear. She wonders how she has ever gotten into this place in her life. More importantly, she wonders how she will ever get out.

Quietly, she tucks the photo of her daughter into her inside coat pocket.
Still weeping, she lays down next to her box and waits for the rain to drown her.