LOVING THE UNLOVELY

Chapter Four:  The Question

by Tricia K. Brown

It had to have been the Lord’s plan.  It would never have worked out any other way. 

Hos woke G up with a cup of coffee and breakfast.  Surprisingly, she didn’t depart as quickly as most of the prostitutes did.  In fact, she lingered there at the back of the church, as if she was soaking in the warmth, the protection. 

She and Hos began to get to know each other, to talk about where they had come from, what they had dreamed of as youth.  Her story was surprisingly common—childhood abuse, teenage runaway, a guy she thought would rescue her. At one point, she thought she might become a school teacher, but that was when she was very young.

Hos’s life wasn’t that unpredictable either. He was the son of a third-generation pastor, played sports in high school, thought he might become a professional football player but got injured his senior year.

“That’s when God really got hold of me,” he told G. “Laid up in that hospital bed, with all my dreams in pieces, for the first time, I began to really understand the love of God. I had a lot of time on my hands, and I started reading the Word. Stories I had heard all my life began to take on new meaning. They became personal. I heard God speaking to me, calling me to Him.”

“So,” she said between bites of toast. “That’s when you decided to become a preacher?”

“Well, not exactly. But I guess that was the beginning.”

Hos had learned a long time ago to avoid churchy words like “salvation” and “repentance” and “conversion.” He tried to speak simply, but he could tell that G didn’t understand. It wasn’t a matter of intelligence. Behind the heavy eye make-up and dark circles, he could see that G wasn’t dumb. No, it wasn’t a lack of mental capacity that kept her from understanding. It was layers of a lifestyle of sin, the sins of others as well as her own.

Several hours had passed before they realized the time. When Hos casually mentioned that he needed to get busy working on this week’s sermon, she glanced at the wall clock and almost dropped her cup of coffee.

“I have to go,” she said jumping up.  “He will be looking for me.”

Her pimp.  She had to return to her pimp, to give him her night’s earnings. 

Hos felt almost sick. Sitting there, on the wooden pew, with the sunlight streaming through the stained glass window above the pulpit, he had almost forgotten who she was, what she did for a living. Sitting side by side, with their plates in their laps and their coffee cups in their hands, just listening to the sound of her voice, he could almost imagine that she was an old school mate, a childhood friend, anyone except who she really was.

Then, he felt that uncomfortable nudge again. 

He tried to push it away.  He tried to justify his indecisiveness.  He tried to imagine how he could possibly be misreading this message from God.  But God wouldn’t let go, and Hos knew it.  As G sat her cup on top of her plate and neatly placed her folded blanket on top of the stack by the door, he blurted it out.  Before he had time to think or argue, he just said it, brusquely, without emotion, without logic. There really wasn’t any other way of doing it.

“Will you marry me?” 

He said it in one swift breath. 

“I mean, well, I mean, will you marry me?  I know that we don’t know each other really, but well, I don’t think you will understand this. I don’t think I understand this, but I think, I know, that, well, God wants me to marry you, and well, no offense, but it isn’t like you have that great of a life right now.”

He cringed at the sound of the words coming out of his mouth.  What kind of proposal was that?  He had been looking at the floor as he spoke, and when he glanced up at G, she looked, amazingly, unfazed. 

“I guess she’s heard some pretty unbelievable things in her lifetime,” he thought.  “She must think I am just another crazy man wanting to take advantage of her.” 

“I’m serious,” he said as he looked at her for the first time, really looked at her, stared at her face, looked into her deep green eyes.

“I know,” she said.  And she turned and walked out the door.