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At four years old, long before seat belt laws, I crouch down on the floor of my father’s dying Studebaker, pressing my left eye to the rusted floor where a convenient hole the size of my kneecap beckons.

From time to time I look up from the floor, spying Jim—I never call him father—who wears a thrift-store cap over a bald head, dark brown fringe curls spilling out. It’s the way our weekend visits go, an endless supply of quirky adventures with Jim at the helm. He nods at the hole, encouraging me with his smile to watch the street. I notice the wrinkles around his eyes.

I hover again over the hole while gray cement speeds past, blocks and miles whirring beneath my rapt gaze. I glimpse something of eternity—the ongoing universe passing me by, slowing to stop when Jim applies pressure to the brake....

Eye to the Studebaker’s rusting floor, I don’t know God. Something in my preschool chest longs for a God who controls the rush of the street below, who holds the world’s speed steady or brings it to an abrupt halt by applying pressure to a brake.

***

One ordinary fifth grade day, I am doing something rudimental like fractions or spelling or reading when the secretary’s voice blares over the intercom, “Will Mary please come to the office right away?” The undercurrent of alarm in her voice startles me. I pick up my things and leave the classroom. I meander, somehow knowing that at the end of the outdoor walkway a terribly dark secret will be revealed and my life will never be the same.

I walk alone down the hall, noticing the brick patterns, counting my steps. Nearly to the office, the thought occurs to me: My father has died. I’m not sure how or why I know this. Perhaps the brick-lined hallway is a thin place where the Almighty whispers me a tender warning. As soon as I see my mother’s face, I know....

I sit near the front of the church where his coffin looms, large and cold. I remember very little about the day other than hymn singing and everyone wearing black. Faceless people hug me tight while tears run races down their cheeks. My father’s widow has a hollow look, her pregnant belly nearly ready to give birth. For that day, people love me. Lavish attention on me. Hold me close. Whisper nearby. But it isn’t long until I face school again where the meanest teacher of my elementary career awaits me. She scolds me once for what she thinks is cheating, sending me into the hall. “I used to feel sorry for you because your dad died, but you should be over it by now,” she hisses. I come home to an empty house, do my homework, eat dinner, watch TV, and then cry myself to sleep....

When I walk to school alone, I look behind me, worrying a stranger will reach out from nowhere and strangle me. I run from invisible chasers. I lock the back door behind me when I huff in from school. I am convinced I am next. If God’s capricious finger has circled the fast-moving world and landed on my father’s bald head, surely He’ll summon me.

So I pray.

It’s a strange thing to equate my longing for God with the death of Jim. Jim’s casket makes me pray. Some primordial hunger inside me needs another Jim—someone to clutch me to his chest and tell me everything is going to be all right. That Jim, I hope, will be God. Late at night, with covers over my head because I still fear the boogeyman even at ten, I send little messages heavenward.

God, if You’re there, speak to me.

God, do You love me?

God, help me to be happy.

God, I need a hug....

***

...At nearly sixteen years old, I finish the journey I started under the Studebaker’s floor mat. I hear about Jesus from Young Life leaders who love me—how Jesus chats with ordinary folks, goes fishing, heals bleeding women (oh, how my heart bleeds), and guffaws the religious pious. I fall in love with Jesus when I realize He commands the wind and the seas yet stoops to love the likes of me—a girl who wants to take her life, to rid the world of herself. He is the One I’ve been muttering prayers to under the cover of my bedspread....

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Under a blanket of stars that twinkle one icy night, I weep a prayer.

Jesus, can it really be true? That You love me? And want to be with me? Come into my life, then. Take me over. I’m a mess. I hope You don’t regret it....

Jesus washes me that night with my own tears. Or are they His?...

My journey begins wide-eyed over a rusty hole. It continues when Jesus washes me in tears. And it marches forward still—after a quarter-of-a-century-long pilgrimage where joyful shouting comes and goes to the rhythm of this crazy, fickle life. I’ve come full circle, the wife of a man who is a doting father, who loves his kids well. And by some strange twist of God-irony, He gives me a daughter, my last, who looks just like me, and whose birthday, on some years, lands on Father’s Day....

[But still]...my daddy-ache comes back....It’s an injury that never seems to heal.

I am Jacob in times like this. Wrestling with God over my lack of a father, He injures me so I limp. The limp reminds me of God’s God-ness and my frailty—the most humbling thin place. Yet it’s this daddy-less thin place that reminds me that He is big enough to fill the need I’ve buried inside. Though I ache and will probably always carry a limp, I’m thankful the injury leads me back to Him.

Taken from Thin Places by Mary E. DeMuth. Copyright © 2010 by Mary E. DeMuth. Used by permission of Zondervan.