Duffel Bag

She turns her attention from the man knocking his head against the window to her duffel bag in her lap, to the task at hand. As she understands it, there are two kinds of pivotal moments in life. There are the ones that are thrust upon you, like the day a child gets killed by a drunk driver, the day a tornado splinters your house, the day the plane you're flying slams into the North Tower. And then there are the ones you thrust upon the world. Hers will be of the second sort, and what a thrust this shall be.
She runs the checklist through in her head. She opens the zipper just so, reaches in and inventories the items one by one by touch. Under normal circumstances, the whole scenario would be an impossible thing to attempt but for her, it's as natural as Darwinian evolution.
It's bitter fruit, it took time to grow, it was nurtured by good intentions gone wrong, principles imposed upon her as prison, guidelines enforced as law, opportunities to volunteer unmasked as obligations to serve. The church where she worshiped was ripe with promises - promises with a price. A lesson in service became a commitment to help out in what they called, Children's Church - a place where elementary school kids could go to learn about Jesus away from the more mature service that their parents attended. This service, she was told, would be seen by God as a seed that would reap a harvest of blessings - financial, social, spiritual, you name it. The transactional nature of the promised exchange was not spelled out in so many words but stripped to its essence, that's what it boiled down to.
And so she served in this ministry for which she had no passion, no aptitude, no experience. It was frustrating and stressful and when she made mention of leaving it became an exercise in guilt management, an exercise she was not able to win. And so she served. In the end she was only able to break free by simply not showing up. And so one Sunday morning she made the right turn to the mall instead of the left turn to the church. She turned off her cell phone and went from sale to sale and to stores whose wares were not on sale.
At home that night, there were five messages on her answering machine, thirteen on her cell phone. She deleted them all. When she finally got the call, she was not polite, she did not waste her time, she simply told them she was done, this was not a break, this was her telling them she wasn't coming back.
It wasn't like her to be so curt, but she was done placating them.
And the blessings never came. All the time, energy, and frustrations she had sowed, all the ink marks that wouldn't come out of her dress, the bruises from falling over misplaced toys, all the crow she had to swallow from parents with unreasonable demands. From all of that, she did not reap a harvest of blessings. Instead, she found she had grown a bitter tree. It reeked of disdain and scorn for the church. It was gnarled - it's limbs twisted in some awful macabre pose. There were no leaves, no flowers, no fruit save for one bright red bulb clinging to the topmost branch. She took and ate of it and the poison birthed the plans she was now carrying out. Step by step, note by note, wrong by wrong.