You’re eighteen and one day you really listen to your pastor for the first time. You’re really looking at him, not just past him and at the mural in the baptismal. You’re hearing him, and what he’s saying is true—or what he’s shouting, rather. You see the sweat and it seems real, you imagine yourself sweating and the last time you sweated was when you really thought you were going to die. And you think, I could do that. But you don’t just think that. You feel it. You think, I want to do that. I can do that. All of a sudden you’re looking for three different colors of pens in your dad’s desk and you’re scribbling nonsense all over the pages of Ephesians and one day you flip through those five or so thin pages and they are completely soaked, saturated in yellow and yellowish pink. You make sure your three points rhyme or all begin with the same latter or all end in ‘ation.’ Propitiation, sanctification, obliteration. Now you’re nineteen and suicidal because you have to memorize the four hundred different endings of any one Greek verb. And you’re behind on vocabulary. But then you remember homiletics class, how your prof told you, “You’re really good.” “I think you have a gift.” “I think God has his hand on you, I think you’re good looking and well dressed,” or things like that. And you remember when your pastor let you preach on Easter Sunday and how everyone shook your hand afterward and said such nice things. And next thing you know you’re in these baggy dark priestlike garments walking across a stage in front of a few hundred people and you’ve gotten through seminary. You barely remember graduating college. You have two children and one wife. Sometimes you wake up and think, when did all this happen? There’s sunspots on your ears now and your forehead is bigger than you remember. You’ve preached now before thousands—well, eight thousand six hundred and thirty seven. That’s a lot. That’s a lot, isn’t it? A very young girl, Lila, and a very old man, nameless, have told you they were saved because of one of your sermons. It was the same sermon, one you reused every Christmas with some cosmetic changes to prevent detection by the homiletically astute. But then one week your eldest is caught smoking marijuana at school, and you recall that stark smell as you sit in your office, sniffing the air. And there are three couples on the cusp of divorce, all of whom haven’t been attending very long and whom you don’t really know well. But they come, one couple at a time, to your house after it is dark and they sit in front of you, on different ends of the same couch, and they ask you, what have they done wrong? They ask you if it is wrong to divorce, they ask if you see what everyone else does, the irreconcilable differences. And you get a phone call and it’s Joanne, a single woman in retirement who lives with her mother and she is sobbing, you cannot understand what she is saying and it’s her mother, who is probably not dead, you think, and there you are on the stained carpet of your childhood bedroom, reading something by Charles Spurgeon, his letters to youthful orators, and your heart is racing and you wished you had stopped. Why didn’t you stop then. Because a prophet should not choose to be but be chosen, and for years now preaching has felt like reciting a Scripture verse you never wanted to memorize. You’re emphasizing all the wrong words, and pausing where there are no periods, and your mind is always elsewhere. You’re studying the mural once again, except this time it’s you who’s preaching. And you’re wondering, as you call upon souls to repent, why the river is such a bright blue. Rivers aren’t like that.