After high school graduation,  I was working in a department store in a somewhat distant city. It necessitated a long bus ride. One afternoon after my shift, I boarded the bus and was greeted by a classmate I hadn't seen for nearly two years. We chatted on the way back home. Two things had changed about her.


1. She was breathtakingly gorgeous. Since high school she had lost any excess weight and she had grown her hair long. Her attire had also grown more feminine. Her beauty was natural and totally without makeup. She now put any of the former beauty queens, and acknowledged high school beauties, to absolute shame. I'm not going to mention her name. My former classmates are free to speculate on her identity.


2. She had joined the Jehovah's Witnesses. I don't know if she had been religious before her conversion to this faith, but I'm certain she wasn't Mormon during high school.


On the trip home we inevitably started discussing religion. She was a biblical scholar. I was impressed.


She seemed intent on proving some things to me. We discussed amicably a couple of points. Shifting to a different subject, she found a passage in the Bible, read it to me, and asked me what it meant. I wasn't immediately able to place the passage in my mind. I said, "Let me read it in context and I'll tell you what I think it means." She handed me the book and I spent a few moments reading the verses before and after the passage. I handed it back to her and told her what I thought it meant.


She looked stunned for a moment and then said, "Yes, that's exactly what it means."


Maybe we are not really so far apart after all.



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