Charlotte and the Baby

he was sitting in the café.

It was a wet and miserable Monday afternoon and the sky was full of grey clouds. She had hoped for a break in the weather, a chink of bright sun in a gap between the clouds, but there was nothing. It had been like this for days.

And she was sitting there with a cup of tea that was fast getting cold and there was a baby crying at the next table and kicking its feet in its pushchair.

And she thought, ‘Why can’t I stop thinking about God?’

She was sick and tired of it. Were other people like this? She looked around the café at the people, saw that they were busy eating and drinking, chatting idly or reading newspapers. Were they trapped into thinking about God like she was?

To see them, she would think not. They seemed fully occupied in what they were doing.

But for her, she could never feel fully occupied with what she was doing. At the back of her mind – or rather, it felt like the middle, towards the front, because the thoughts were so painfully intrusive – she was continually self-aware of all the decisions she made and the feelings she had in the sense of what God would think of them.

For example, she was here, in the café. And she could say to herself, ‘Here I am, my name is Charlotte, I have my coat on, I am sitting in a café on a rainy Monday afternoon,’ but what was God’s opinion about it all? She could sit there, in her brown coat, with her cup of tea on the table, and never feel that she could escape from the fear that God was watching her.

And each thing she thought of, each thing she felt, noticed, reacted to, God was aware of it and responding to it.

So what was His response? Was He curious, angry, bored, happy, unhappy, judging her, what?

She wished she did not want to know what He thought, but she kept getting the uncomfortable feeling that she had to know. That He would be angry with her for not wanting to know His response, His judgement, His opinion, because by not wanting to know, He would see it as a rejection of Him.

How could she say she loved God when she was so uncomfortable with this supernatural Being who had access to her mind, when she felt so persecuted about this Being who knew and judged every thought she went through, every emotion, every imagining – a Being she felt watching her twenty -four hours a day – when she was getting dressed in the morning, when she was getting a bath, when she was watching the television, when she was chatting to her friends, when she was reading a book – she never felt she had her privacy, she never felt she was alone.

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