The two eleven year old girls lay in the sunshine, yards away from where the above ground pool sat, not quite ready to be filled. It was only May and the weather was not yet warm enough. Instead, they looked up at the sky and imagined what the clouds were shaped like and tried to make each answer more interesting than the last.
The first girl suddenly pointed up at a particular cloud that struck her interest. “That looks like Jesus!”
The second girl squinted at the cloud and tried to quell the shaky feeling the topic of God produced within her. “Yeah, I can see that,” she agreed, hoping that her friend wouldn’t push the subject. She used to believe in God when she was in preschool that was held in a church. But in the years that followed, after too many people had been unkind, she decided to keep her belief in what she could see and touch.
“God is real,” the first girl said in a gentle tone. She looked over at the pool. “God could make it rain only in the pool if He wanted to.”
The other girl thought it over. “Really? Only in the pool?”
Her friend nodded. “Really.”
Years later, the second girl would think back on this day and mark it as the beginning of her search to believe again, a search that was eventually fulfilled with joyfulness and childlike faith.
Etcetera 