The wine tasted like salad dressing. Later that night, wracked by guilt, I confessed to Rachael that I had had a sip of alcohol. I made her promise not to tell Mom, and she agreed not to on condition that I would ask God for forgiveness right then and there and promise never, ever to do something like that again. Because, as she reminded me, “You never know whether you’re an alcoholic or not until that first taste. Then if you have alcoholic tendencies you just drink and drink. It ruins your life and takes you far from the Lord.” I knew she was right. I felt far from the Lord already. That one sip had put a “spiritual wedge” between me and God. How could the Roman Catholic family ever come to be Christians if all they saw when they looked at me was an example of depraved alcoholic worldliness? A drunk. Someone who had given himself over to the pleasures of the flesh as they had. Now having had this sip of alcohol, I was living a lie. My parents had trusted me to go and be a light unto those Italian children living in darkness—after all, we were missionaries. Mom had even said she would pray that the Lord would “open the door of opportunity” so that I could share the Lord with those poor deluded children who thought they were saved by works and by wearing pagan saints’ medallions, when they were actually lost because the True Church was the Early Church and that was what we belonged to, because in the Reformation all the dark side of paganism had been swept away by brave Reformers whom the Catholics burned at the stake, and now I was drinking wine just like the Spaniards did while they laughed and swore and tortured real Christians because they would no longer worship Mary, whom we know was an ordinary girl, not anything special, but they worshiped her because they were pagans who served the Pope not our Lord. Now I drank wine too! I was backslidden and needed to recommit my life to the Lord. And I would, too, as soon as the vacation was over.

Jennifer came over and joined the Italian family along with me. She was an only child. In England they were mainly Protestants, so they did not have such huge families like the unhappy Italians who were in slavery to Rome and superstition. Jennifer and I played with the Italian children, digging deep holes in the sand until they filled in with seawater. Then the more you dug the more the sides of the hole caved in until all you were doing was just maintaining the hole you had started, not getting it any deeper.