Jesus freaks

An airplane flight relationship is neatly circumscribed: about four hours from the Sea-Tac Airport to Cincinnati. My companion for that slice of eternity was a woman from Louisville, Kentucky (Hi, Ceil, if you remembered my name and the magazine's, and did a ten second search.) She told me about her business in Seattle and then asked about mine.

I told her I had gone to speak at a women's annual Christmas brunch. She inquired about the topic and I answered "the Bible." That characterization might have satisfied most people, but God knew it was trash.

Ceil took up the religious digression and added her own trivia: she has a friend who wrote a book about the feminine side of God.

Fine. We moved on to another topic but I didn't feel good.

I remember when Anne Lamott was a guest on her friend Marty Feldman's radio program "What Do You Know." He asked if she was a Christian and she said she prefers to think of herself as a Jesus Freak. I wish I had recalled that somewhere over Montana.

As we started our descent I said to my ship-passing-in-the-night friend, "Look, when you asked about the reason for my visit to Washington, I told you I went to speak about the Bible. The truth is I spoke about relationship with Jesus."

There, I just wanted to apologize about all this.