Mirrors Dimly

First Love, False Gods, and the Futility of Pressing Heaven

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I.

My head rested in her lap as the pickup sped down the Interstate. The metal ridges of the bed pressed into my back. Highway lights erased the stars and stitched white lines across the sky. Tires droned against the asphalt.

I looked up into her eyes and mistook the shades of blue for inevitability.

Speed without danger.

Closeness without risk.

Intimacy without cost.

She leaned down. The wind swept her blonde hair over our faces and sealed us in as our lips met.

Wanting fused with belief.

We were fourteen and fifteen, calling it love — naming a tide we didn’t know how to swim, one I thought would never recede.

A week later she asked me to meet her alone on a balcony at a party.

I slipped through the crowd and opened the sliding glass door. Cool night air rushed against my face.

It wasn’t working out. She didn’t say why. I didn’t ask.

That night I lay awake staring at the ceiling, replaying the week as if there were something I could adjust. The next morning, reaching for a soda in the garage, the memory returned with the hiss of aluminum opening.

I recalled something my father said during a sermon. If you prayed long enough — if you bothered God enough — He might give you what you wanted, even if it wasn’t what He wanted.

The idea lodged in me like a skeleton key. I tried to turn it.

Mouth dry. Stomach hollow. I prayed on the hour, watching the numbers on my Casio as if the digits were listening.

The church I grew up in expected God to act. People closed their eyes and waited for direction. Words were spoken in low voices and treated as maps. The last days were talked about as if they were already underway.

Seriousness meant sacrificing food for a meal, a day, a week, or a month. They called it fasting. I thought of it as proof.

The longer I tried to fast, the more I prayed, the clearer the logic became.

I had been taught that God stood outside of time, so I pictured Him as an author, every moment held all at once, like pages of a novel laid open.

If that were true, then the pain of rejection did not fade for Him. It remained — infinite in love, undiminished by time, compounded by every generation and each new face, even mine.

Yet He continued to love, not from lack, but from abundance.

And now I believed I could make Him bend.

He suddenly seemed more relatable when He started sounding like me.

I pitied Him.

II.

She still wanted to be friends. I couldn’t do it.

The large church in California we attended met in a warehouse. The homeless ministry occupied one side of the building. The small workout area in the back — a bench, a cable machine, a few mismatched plates — was tucked behind banquet tables lined with paper bags for the poor. The space felt provisional, everything arranged for service or improvement.

One afternoon she walked in.

I was doing triceps extensions, the cable whining each time I pulled it down. My arms burned. Sweat slid down my back.

“You look good,” she said.

She stood a few feet away. Calm. Not awkward.

A wall I hadn’t seen before was suddenly there. I heard myself say “Thanks.” She was already turning away.

She had offered something simple — conversation, proximity. A version of us that required nothing to change.

I wanted the old script. I wanted her to miss me. To reconsider. To step back into the place she occupied in my imagination.

I kept pulling the cable down, letting it rise, pulling it down again. Metal plates clanged softly.

It seemed easier than accepting her as she was.

Around that time, the air at church felt heavier too. Words like restoration and authority moved through rooms as if they had assignments. Apostles restored. Prophetic streams converged.

People spoke about cities and nations like generals studying a map, preparing to reclaim something already assumed to be theirs.

Years later I would find meeting notes from 1989—clean pages, untouched, outlining plans for twelve “strategic” metropolitan regions. I recognized the names and the apocalyptic register of their voices.

Back then, I inhaled the ideas that filled the air. I saw the individual parts, like shadows on a cave wall, but not what was casting them.

I carry those shadows inside me.

In the gym, sweating under the cable machine, all of it felt connected—the weight in my hands, the silence between us, and reality refusing to yield.

The rules seemed simple.

If resistance appears, increase force.

If force fails, claim authority.

If authority falters, redefine resistance.

And if authority could be restored in cities, why not in the heart of a girl?

The cable slid up.

I pressed the bar down.

III.

I didn’t tell a soul about my secret mission.

When my dad bought my brother and me popcorn at the movies, I accepted it. I pocketed handfuls into the pouch of my hoodie during the show and snuck out to the bathroom to empty it in the trash. I returned to my seat with butter stains on my sweatshirt and a hollow ache in my stomach.

I thought I was bargaining.

The notes from 1989 weren’t relics. They were a clean black and white prototype of what would follow.

In time, names surfaced in headlines. Different churches. Different cities. The details varied — spiritual fathers, private rooms, rewritten stories. Harm folded neatly into the redemption of those who caused it.

Around the six-month mark, I convinced myself God had given me the date she would come back. I don’t remember how I chose it. I remember the certainty.

One weekend, my brother went to Mexico with the youth group. I stayed home and waited.

That night I heard a sound in the yard and climbed out the window just above my bed.

I opened the back gate and stared at the empty space.

Nothing bent but the grass.

My brother came home a day later sunburned and telling stories about waves taller than houses.

I had passed up the ocean for an answer from the sky.

The key I thought I had inherited kept getting jammed.

The logic didn’t collapse all at once. It thinned.

I quietly stopped praying for her return. The hours widened. I never fasted again.

The images of God inside me were at war with one another. I couldn’t tell who was who. I had to sever them to see.

One fills rooms. Fickle as my desire. Propped up with new language: authority, alignment, covering.

He offers words that promise order.

Words that promise return.

Words that promise comfort without clarity.

Words that whisper to what is most primitive in me — and you.

The other God does not mistake fate for fortune. He does not override. He absorbs the blows and keeps moving forward.

Face set like flint; heart full of dread.

His strength revealed in a bargain that left him with nothing but a final breath of abandonment.

Or so the story goes.

Once, I believed the choice was between love and power. It isn’t so simple.

Power exposes the nature of the one who holds it.

When it is used to control, questions are suppressed, wonder stymied, institutions elevated.

When love governs power, it often takes the form of restraint—bearing what could be cast off, holding steady when relief could be summoned.

Love doesn’t violate. It anticipates rejection. It sees clearly when everything is broken.

As a boy, I had asked Love to violate love.

Now I have to ask: Did I just do something similar?

Blonde hair. Blue eyes. A sentence I can’t fully remember.

Did I reduce her to a symbol?

Again?

All that effort.

Not for love.

But for an illusion I created.