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You know that trust game where you fall backwards into someone’s arms because you know they are standing there waiting to catch you? It’s a trust game because you don’t really know them. That’s how it’s set up in team-building workshops. You don’t really know your “team.” Is this stranger going to catch me? I just fall. Or rather, push, myself: backward.

I did this as a kid. And there was a person behind me, waiting to catch me, waiting to lie me on the ground. Everyone was moaning around me, those that were standing up. There were others in aisles or in front of their bench seats jumping or spinning around and around. There were others speaking in tongues.

The thing about this game as a kid, though, was that it was not myself who pushed me backward. It was another person. A man with a sweaty hand. Sometimes it was a Bible. Either way. It knocked me backward. Someone caught me. Someone laid me out. I was not dead. I was just “laid out.”

If I didn’t fall down RIGHT AWAY, the preacher man would push me push me backward (still standing up) with his palm on my forehead or with the Bible in his hand and then his sweatpalm, often speaking in tongues himself, or at least praying to GodJesus that all that was wrong with me would fall out. He would keep pushing me backwards (still standing up) until he touched that part of my head that made my neck go back and I had no chance of standing up anymore and then I was laid out. Hallelujah. LordGodJesus.

I voluntarily went to the prayer push line most of the time. It was pretty much voluntary. I didn’t want to sit on the benches by myself and I didn’t want to stand in the aisles with the spinners and the jumpers. I wasn’t old enough or big enough to catch people. I didn’t play an instrument. I wasn’t a wailer nor did I speak in tongues yet. I was a kid. My dad went in the line sometimes. But sometimes he caught people when they got felled and got laid out. He comforted them when they didn’t want to be laid out anymore and rolled over on their side or sat up and he said it was okay it was okay it was okay and he prayed with them that all was good in the Lord. He never caught me. It was always a stranger like the game.

One time I was really sick and I didn’t get in the line, I didn’t get off of my bench. I stood there by myself in the back of the church in my pew and I could see what was going on, but I didn’t want to go be healed. I wanted to suck on a Halls cough drop, Honey Lemon, my father kept these as “candy.” I hated them, but I needed one this minute. Menthol vapors. No shouting from the front. There was shouting from the front, GodJesus, but it was muted in the back of the church somewhat. The bass from the Peavey sound system was pretty heavy, but I could handle that more than I could handle the people. But I prayed really hard. With my eyes open, although I wasn’t really supposed to do that at dinner, or during solemn moments during the service, but when people were speaking to the Lord during the crescendos of the evening, people prayed with their eyes open. People prayed in tongues. I was just praying. My throat hurt really bad and I wanted it to go away. I shut my eyes after a bit to drown out even more of everything and kept praying. I didn’t pray out loud, I was a kid, that was for grownups to pray out loud so that other people could hear them. But somehow God heard me and through my stuffed up nose, I finally smelled something. It wasn’t the Honey Lemon or the menthol. It was the smell of roses. There were no roses around me. I looked up and checked. I felt scared and stopped praying and still smelled roses and then they went away and I smelled the Honey Lemon in the cough drop. Then I couldn’t smell anything again, my nose got stopped right back up.

I was asked to be in the children’s choir so I joined. It was fun, but I didn’t always have a ride to practice, so a family with five boys with no father and their mother would come pick me up at my house and bring me. My father got upset that I had “these people” come pick me up because they didn’t have a whole lot of money to come pick me up, although I didn’t really understand what money had to do with people giving me a ride. But he made me call the mother and tell her that he would bring me to choir practice and that if he wasn’t available, that meant that I just couldn’t go. I couldn’t tell her that last part of course, but I had to give her the drift. Not that she was poor, just that he didn’t need me to make her take pity on me. Just because I had a father who couldn’t always take his son to choir practice and that she was a single mother with five boys who found the time to even take a stranger to church didn’t make him a bad dad, it just meant that he was working hard for me and him and she didn’t have a man. At least that’s what it felt like he meant. I think maybe I just said I would call her if I needed her to give me a ride maybe sometimes.

But I loved being in that choir. And sometimes I would be even be able to be in the adult choir after kids’ choir practice because we had practice early on a Sunday or Wednesday, especially Wednesdays, where there would be the adults singing as part of the service or before the preacher preached. When a special evangelist was there all week every night, the choir was full and I was needed to fill the choir spot, my voice was needed for that special tone against other tones and that felt good. We would go to church twice a week sometimes and sometimes it would just be me who went not just once but twice a week so that I could go to my choir practice early in the evenings on Wednesday nights and the lady brought me or maybe I’d stayed at a friend’s house who was also in the choir. Practice was important, that’s why we had it twice a week before service. We would get together a routine from a booklet of a children’s (we were in the young adults or teens category according to the books) songs and then we would perform once a month or two. At first we had the pastor’s wife as our choir director, but she was kind of lame at the job, so then we had this electrical engineer as the choir director. I’d seen him in the adult choir and sometimes in church, people would sing solos after all of the other songs had been sung by the choir or else a soloist would lead and the choir be their backup. If it was a charismatic singer, sometimes there would be a call and response and everyone in the benches of the church would get up and be the extra choir. The electrical engineer wasn’t that charismatic, so we didn’t have that going for us, but he was a darn good soloist and he knew his musical scores. I think that must’ve come from math or something. Isn’t music supposed to be all math?

The engineer taught us how to read simple music and taught us what sopranos, altos, tenors and bass singers did and showed us the lines on the musical scores from the booklets that corresponded with each. He turned out to be awesome. At one point I really believed that I wanted to be an electrical engineer one day, too, until my father told me that they had to sit in cubicles and draw lines and do math all day. That pretty much turned me off, but it made sense as to why singing was something he really wanted to sink his teeth into. And here I thought the whole job of conductor was kind of forced on him. Maybe too he just didn’t want to always stand in the laid out lines catching people all the time. Maybe he wanted another purpose at the church.

I was asked to be a robot. This was a while after having been in the choir. We’d had many sessions and sing-a-longs and even went to choir competitions in Birmingham, Alabama and Gatlinburg, Tennessee where we all got ribbons for participating and a big trophy for the church lobby. I don’t know if we were scored or what. But apparently the engineer deemed me ready for my big moment, and I would be speaking in tongues finally, 10001010100101010 01010001.

The robot was somehow a Christian, although I think we in the choir were all a little perplexed at this turn of events in our agenda. We hadn’t really done pageant-stuff before. We had done prepared booklets of similar songs I guess, but nothing with a “theme” like this. And a robot? How was a robot a Christian? Is it because the robot had a person inside of it that made him a Christian? And if the robot had a person inside of it, why not just have the person share the moral of the story instead of the robot? But if the robot wasn’t a person, did it have a soul going to heaven? If the robot was a person, did it have a soul going to heaven? Was the person inside of the robot a full person or a half-person half-robot? It was all very confusing. And to be asked to be the kid inside of the robot felt kind of like a big deal, so I said, of course.

So I was a musical robot, with or without a soul, I could never tell. I had a solo and a duet in the musical although it had been a bit difficult to rig up a microphone to the big silver painted boxes that made up my robot costume. It was much easier to hear the overdubbed CDs in the Peavey sound system that had my voice saying my Christian moral lines while I was on stage moving around like a person pretending to be a robot living inside of two silver boxes would move. The boxes were made out of wood. Wood! Not cardboard. Heavy wood. You would’ve thought the electrical engineer could’ve helped come up with something better than this.

I would pray with the kids. I would sing with the kids. I would ask the audience to sing. I would ask the audience to tell me the answers to yes or no moral questions. It was all very very good. I think I was a pretty good robot.

At the end of the program, I think people weren’t quite sure what to do. It wasn’t really a fire and brimstone service like people were used to where people would get up and go to the alter and get hands laid on. It was a moralistic weird robot play put on by kids where I, never one to be much of a go-getter enthusiasm-builder myself, had to be the robot, who was pretty much of a downer. Plus no one didn’t know what to think of this weird robot. So they didn’t know whether there would be any more preaching or whatever. But there was. The pastor got people into a frenzy about how great this robot was and God’s morals how people needed to listen to the LordGod and think about what they had heard that night. Please come up to the altar. Then there were people dancing, hands laid, spinning, tongues. 10001010 101001 100100.

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Did my robot follow Asimov’s laws? Did the “morals” harm the humans? First law. Did they harm me? Third law (if, indeed I was a robot). Did my robot trust the humans to do the right thing? Second law?

I don’t know.

I know I hit my notes and hit my solo and hit my duet like I was in a masterclass. I could read the notes on the score. That was a score. Thanks to my engineer friend. It was kind of weird that the engineer was also a conductor. I’d never thought of that. And we were his train. A train like the line of people being prayed on by the preacher. A train like a bride wears that shouldn’t be trampled on and should be carried gently (or not so gently if it acts up and is too big and unwieldy like a children’s choir that acts up too much because they are children and like to horse around).

We could trust this engineer. We did trust him. He didn’t engineer the robot. He didn’t make up the songs. He just helped us learn them the best he could. He conducted us with his hands, not with a stick like in some orchestra. He brought the sounds in and out up and down. He was not the pastor. And with us, he didn’t have to stand and catch people when they got laid out.

He trusted us and we trusted him. And we didn’t even have to fall down. But my robot fell. The wood was too heavy for me. And I fell. But my engineer choir director helped me back up. I think it’s probably on film somewhere; some kid’s parent must’ve recorded the show. Everything stopped and my blocks of wood, one smaller on top, the other huge on the bottom, with my head poking through a hole in the top wearing silver makeup and a robot hat, everything fell backward. I fell backward. I was in the middle of a moral quandary with the church. How could they make this human a robot without a soul? But I got caught. Instead of toppling into one of the other kids, the choir director saw it happening and ran over and caught me. He didn’t lay me out. He stood me back up. The show went on.

Sometimes you don’t have to play the game where you have to trust someone to catch you when you fall. You just fall and there is someone to catch you. Sometimes there is no one to catch you. Sometimes you’re a robot and the engineer/conductor catches you and you’re just a kid again with a soul.