Prologue - Dear God...

The third young woman, Darcy, is fighting a continuous battle with the entity she wants to believe is God, and to release herself from the expectations she believes He places on her to be worthy.

  There was a raucous out in the hallway. Darcy Gleeson lay wrapped up in her doona as she stared at the luminous numbers on her alarm clock�"eight o'clock. Her nose was red raw and her eyes were stinging. She shut them again. There was a big ball of phlegm lodged in her throat but she didn't have the energy to spit it out. It would only come back.

Her head was fuzzy and she just wanted the noise outside to stop. The problem with her dorm room being opposite the staircase meant she got the metal clanging of feet racing downstairs every morning. Usually she wasn't fazed by it as she was typically an early riser, but this morning she couldn't handle it, not when she felt like she'd been hit by a bus, then a car, then a truck all in succession.

She was going to miss her eight thirty lecture and that bugged her but there was nothing she could do. It was either drag her sniffling, hacking self to the lecture hall or watch it later online. As much as she hated missing the atmosphere of the lecture, she didn't think she'd be very welcome there today. Plus the fact that she didn't have the energy to even get herself out of bed.

She rolled onto her back. 'So God, if you're sitting up there with your coffee this morning just watching me slowly wither up, I could really do with some sympathy today, yeah?'

She suddenly felt a sore spot in her back and flipped back over onto her stomach. Dying and going to heaven would be most welcome right now, Darcy thought.

When she was younger, Darcy always thought of God as the big old man in the sky, throwing down lightning bolts in a thunderstorm, blowing out from his lungs to cause the wind, and sweating up in the clouds to produce the rain because everyone knows hot air rises. He must be sweltering up there.

Now that she was nineteen, Darcy found that her perceptions hadn't really changed that much. She found religion to be a bit of a one-sided joke at times and the "Christians" she encountered always seemed so high and mighty but were mostly hypocritical and sour underneath. She'd never fully grasped the idea of God being a loving Father. It just didn't seem to fit, not when the world was the way it was.

Besides, it was not a cool thing to believe in God anyway. It just made someone appear too scared to go through life as they were, without believing in anything.

It was different for Darcy though; she knew she wasn't cool and was never going to be cool so she didn't see the harm in having faith in something.

But God; He seemed so unreal.

She pulled the covers tighter around her and curled her body into them, keeping her eyes tightly shut. The noise in the hallway was begin to subside. Soon she would be left in peace.

She thought too soon though as the next thing she knew she was being disturbed again by a knocking on her door.

She tried to squeeze out a 'come in' but it came out as more of a croaky 'c'iiiin'.

'Oh Sum...'

Darcy couldn't be bothered turning over but she knew the voice belonged to her friend Renae.

She heard footsteps come over to her bed and suddenly a face was peering over to look at her. 'Wow, either you really did go to that party last night or you've caught some sort of bird flu.'

'Gee, thanks,' Darcy snuffed into her pillow.

'Need anything?'

Darcy knew she could count on Renae for absolutely anything. If she wanted a humidifier, she knew Renae would be down to the shops in a flash. As much as her thoughts drew her to wanting one though, she shook her head.

'I'm okay. Thanks.'

Renae was studying medicine so Darcy knew she had more important things to do than run around after her.

'Rest up. If you need anything though, give me a call. Remember I'm only two doors away.'

Darcy thanked her but knew she wouldn't be calling. Renae was one of the few people she knew who was a self-proclaimed Christian but also carried it out in her life. Not that there was a process or anything, but she thought the way Renae lived her life was pretty close to God-pleasing.

She snorted up her running nose and then lunged for a tissue. Obviously the big man wasn't going to be helping her out today. She wiped her tender nose and upon placing the tissue box back on the table, she saw her Bible sitting there. That thing was hard to read. Most of it didn't even make sense and as far as a loving Father went, the parts Darcy had read made him out to be angry and spiteful. The whole thing was a contradiction but the more she thought about how difficult it was to follow, the more she wanted to read it.

She pushed herself up onto one elbow and flipped through the pages. There seemed to be so many standards for how you should live and it made Darcy feel sick to her stomach. She was never going to be able to live up to it all. God would see right through her. Did that mean she'd be condemned?

Darcy put the Bible in her top drawer and sunk back down into her covers. Maybe she just wasn't cut out to be a Christian. She'd never be like Renae. She'd never been good at following rules or procedures so how was she supposed to obey everything in the Bible? She'd rather be nothing than be one of those hypocritical Christians. It was all or nothing. And Darcy knew pretty well where her life fell along the bar, where she fit on the spectrum; she'd never measure up, her life would stagnate on the nothing end. God would see through her if she tried to do better. As much as she wanted to accept her spot on the cast off end of the spectrum, there was a drive inside her. Something filled her inner self telling her to let that thought go. Maybe she should at least try and give it more. Surely that couldn't hurt. Could it?