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you're recovering from a cocaine addiction or a messy divorce, come to our church and you'll be welcomed. And that's how it should be.
    But it doesn't always make for good dating grounds. (Then there is the other side—the guys who attend church but aren't entirely committed to living their faith, guys who try to explain their theological understanding that sex is acceptable anywhere there is love, whatever else the Bible may say about it.)
    It seems as well that there's something about modern evangelical Christianity in America that can encourage a kind of overspiritual weirdness. I went to coffee with one guy, and he prayed loudly for our coffee time together and then asked me questions like, “So what is the Lord teaching you?” which were popular in my high-school youth group but I've since come to loathe, particularly from near strangers.
    Modern Christian America is plagued by the sacred/secular dichotomy. If we are talking about the Lord, singing about the Lord, listening to music by other people who love the Lord, wearing T-shirts or bracelets about Jesus, calling a plumber who also loves Jesus, those are good things. Other things, regular, normal things, are suspect. All of which may make for Christians who fear and cannot relate to the world in which they live. The church is full of guys who believe this. I could never go out with them, and they probably think I'm not a very good Christian anyway.
    So at thirty-three I sit on the love seat in the sunroom from time to time and pray for an amazing guy—someone normal, someone who loves God with all his heart, someone who will adore me—believing that it's nearly impossible, but that God specializes in those kinds of things when he so chooses.

    As someone who's far from a morning person, eating breakfast at 8:00 a.m. in a roomful of strangers is my idea of purgatory. If I could, I wouldn't talk to anyone ever before 10:00 a.m., best friends included. So when I came downstairs wearing my fun pink pleated skirt with the flip-flops that match exactly, I was praying that no one would notice me.I would have given anything for an invisibility cloak, actually. Most especially, I didn't want to admit the possibility that something romantic could exist here, at least not before I'd had coffee and a decent plate of something substantial.
    When I walked into the room, the fire alarm went off. The whole room smelled of toasting bread (alas, no bacon or eggs to be had). Jack was sitting right by the door, looking very good and incredibly awake. He smiled at me and said, “You walk in the room and bells ring. You did good getting up early this morning.” I thought to myself,
Crap, he's still here
,and like a schoolgirl I couldn't eat my toast.

Four
Austenian Faith and Love
    I feel, alas, that I am dead

In trespasses and sins.
    —W ILLIAM C OWPER , “T HE S HINING L IGHT ”
    I've not always believed in the grace of God. Actually, since I was roughly three, I've believed in the big, eternity-changing, salvation sort of grace. That was when I asked Jesus into my heart, childlike and beautiful, I imagine, during evening prayers in my brother's room. My brother and I knelt on the shag carpet with our hands folded on his seventies comforter. He laughed. At least that's what I tell myself because, actually, I don't remember that anymore. I just used to remember and told myself that version of the story for so many years that now it's fact, even if it didn't actually happen.
    As a child in Baptist schools, I prayed that prayer over and over in chapel, at Vacation Bible School during the summer; everyone wanted to know in those days the date and time I prayed the “sinner's prayer.” I was never entirely sure which one stuck.
    Then in college I wondered if I really believed any of it—God, Jesus, the Bible, the need for salvation. I took two years to feel my waythrough doubt. I still knew, in some way that I'm not sure I can explain, that God was with me, that he guided me