I won�t let them take God from me

 

I won�t let them take God from me, although I am not a God-fearing man the way my father was, and my brother.

I did what I did to honor God the way all boys my age did.

But I was a boy with my eye on the world, someone who truly believed I could become whatever I wanted regardless of the blood others said ran through my veins.

Others, of course, made it clear I could become only what they said I could become, and so I became that, learning to accept what I could not change, learning to thrive on less so that I might thrive at all.

And then that took even that, calling me greedy for clinging to only what I was told I could have, and this, too, I accepted, and did still with even less.

When they told me we had to live here, I even accepted my shrinking world as inevitable, until I found it had shrunk to a bunk six of us must share. But by that time, I had shrunk, too, my rattling bones fitting into half the space I thought once as necessary.

Even this was too much and they found a way to make us even smaller, marching us to showers that were not showers, from which many of us emerged, not cleaner, but as dust.

Many of us wonder why our God let this happen to us � why He did not save us.

In the eyes of those who herded us, I saw, if not heard, laughter and knew at last that this was what they wanted most from us, to give up our spirit as well as our flesh, to turn away from a God we believe in so that we might turn to dust without hope.

I will not let them have that. And they can�t make me.