Bethany Pierce

If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.

The sun was up, the neighborhood waking. I wiped my face clean with the back of my sleeve, the warming air soft on my wet cheeks. A prayer welled up within me, a new kind of prayer. I was done begging God to forgive me for being too bitter, too needy, too egotistical, too tired. Repenting one day for being too much, the next for not being enough.Now I clearly understood my real offence against heaven: the stubborn refusal that every failing that I had__rom the first__ad been forgiven.

My reflection followed me mercilessly in mirrors, car doors, shop windows. I lived in a world of circus mirrors, the grotesque distortion of my body looking back at me everywhere.

I__e always been fascinated by science__natomy, quantum physics, space and time theory. I don__ understand these things, but the mystery is a part of what attracts me to them. That the world I live in now is complex beyond my understanding only encourages me to believe that there are wild possibilities in creation beyond even the things of this dimension of time and space. If this universe has alternate dimensions outside of our understanding, isn__ it possible that we might exist in a life beyond this one, in another kind of dimension that is fuller and more alive than the one we know?