God Tried to Win Me Back

It wasn’t a sermon.
It wasn’t a miracle.
It wasn’t even a deathbed conversion.
It was a dream.

A stupid, half-lucid dream in a shitty rental bed in a Missouri town that smells like wet gravel and disappointment. I was grieving. I was exhausted. I was probably dehydrated. But none of that mattered, because He showed up anyway.

God.

Not in fire. Not in thunder. Not in scripture.
No, the fucker sent my dad.

In the dream, I was sitting on a pew. You know the kind: over-varnished, poorly cushioned, designed to punish the spine into reverence. The church was some hazy mashup of every evangelical hall I’d ever stepped foot in—high ceilings, pastel carpeting, faint odor of potluck regret. I didn’t want to be there.

And then he walked in.

My dad.

Not the decaying man I last saw in the hospital bed. Not the collapsed, confused body fighting sepsis and sorrow. But him. Young-ish. Brighter. Solid. Wearing one of those dumb polo shirts he always bought on sale at Kohl’s.

He smiled. Sat next to me.
Said something like, “Thought we could go to church together.”

I didn’t protest.

In the dream, I sat there, listening to a preacher whose voice I can’t remember. I didn’t roll my eyes. I didn’t crack a joke. I just… sat. And then, at some point, I started crying. Quietly. The way a man cries when the war has gone on too long and the white flag is stained but still waving.

That was it.

I woke up the next morning and stared at the ceiling for an hour, teeth clenched like someone had robbed me.

Because I knew what it was.

That was God’s Hail Mary.
The last pitch. The final gambit.
He didn’t send an angel. He sent my old man.

He didn’t offer forgiveness or proof. He offered sentiment. He offered nostalgia.
Because even God knows that logic’s a lost cause on me.
He wasn’t playing the Bible.
He was playing my father.

And you know what?
It almost worked.

Almost.

Because for a moment, I thought:
“What if he’s up there?”
“What if that was real?”
“What if this pain is part of the plan?”

But then the light hit the motel blinds in just the wrong way.
And I remembered:

There is no plan.
Only chaos.

My father loved God. And I loved my father.
But I don’t believe in God.
Not in the kind that sits on clouds and watches kids die of leukemia.
Not in the kind who needs praise louder than a stadium and more constant than a toddler.

I believe in art.
I believe in grief.
I believe in the moments that look like miracles but are just chemistry and timing and the unbearable fragility of memory.

That dream? That wasn’t God.

That was love, dressed up in a language I used to speak.
And even though I don’t speak it anymore, I still understood it.

I didn’t go back to church.
I didn’t “reconsider my faith.”
But for one night, I let myself pretend.

Not for me.
For him.

Because he believed.
And sometimes love means holding someone else’s beliefs like a warm coat on a cold night.
Even if it doesn’t fit you anymore.