“A person lets Jesus carry his burdens. In theory, it sounds great, Elysian even, but in practice, I’m not sure I understand how it plays out, especially since Christ told his disciples that they had to take up their crosses to follow him. How do you do both at the same time? Let go of a burden and lift one up?”

Although Christie believed that sometimes God worked in mysterious and even ironic ways, the fact that he would lead Pat to ask her such a question—one that she herself needed an answer to—was almost too much.

“You look deep in thought,” Pat said.

“Yeah, it’s just . . . It’s nothing. I’m not sure what to tell you. I think God wants us to bring him our cares and burdens, but”—she tapped the rose stem—“he’s also saying that it won’t be a bed of roses to follow his ways.”

“All too often, this world turns on its saviors.”

“Yes, it does.”

“And their followers.”

“In some cases. Yes,” she agreed. “Even casting our cares onto Jesus doesn’t mean we won’t feel pain. This is a fractured planet. Too much grief. Too much death.”

“I can’t argue with you about that.”

++++

I waited.

Christie said nothing in reply. Both of us ate in silence for a few minutes, then found somewhat obligatory compliments for the meal, but it was like something significant had shifted, like an invisible wall had settled in between us.

I wondered if she’d taken my questions about Jesus the wrong way and if maybe I’d offended her. I was trying to come up with a way to address that when she said, “Did I ever tell you about the turtles struggling to get to shore?”

“The turtles?”

“When I was maybe eight years old, I loved turtles more than any other animal. For most of my friends it was dogs or kittens or ponies, but for me it was always turtles.”

“I knew you liked them. I didn’t know you liked them that much.”

She nodded. “Well, one night I was watching a documentary on sea turtles and how hard it is for them to survive, to get safely to the waterline after they hatch on shore.”

She paused.

“What happened?”

“The filmmakers showed a shoreline spread out with hundreds of sea turtle hatchlings. Seagulls were circling around them, I believe, or carrion birds of some kind. They were swooping down and snatching up the baby turtles as they tried to make their way to the water. I had a stuffed turtle with me that I’d been watching the documentary with, and I held my hand over his eyes so he wouldn’t see, and I screamed, ‘Why don’t they stop them?!’ ‘Who?’ my mother asked. ‘The people filming it! Why don’t they stop the birds and help the turtles!’”

“What’d she say?”