Bargaining with God and Finding Your ‘Inner Awesomeness’

August 5, 2021 Michael Olesker

(Photo by Enis Yavuz on Unsplash)

In the summer of 1955, at a place called Camp Airy, I had my first crisis of faith.

I thought God and I had a deal that He would help me pass a so-called deep water swim test. He apparently had more important earthly business on his mind that particular day.

I’m thinking about Camp Airy since I recently stumbled onto the website for Airy and its sister Camp Louise. They each seem to be offering benefits far beyond the traditional sleepover camp joys of sports, hiking and counselors telling horror stories to terrified campers after the bunk lights are out.

Now, the website is boasting, “Camp Airy has been helping children find their Inner Awesome for nearly 100 summers.” The website uses that phrase, “Inner Awesome,” a couple of times for both camps.

At Airy, finding their “Inner Awesome” involves a bunch of stuff my generation of campers never even thought about, such as “communication skills, conflict resolution and teamwork.”

At Louise, “Inner Awesome” includes a search for girls’ “inner artist, athlete, actress or rock star.”

I guess mine was a simpler time. I never heard the phrase “Inner Awesome.” I only had the simple, boyish desire to commune directly with God Himself.

I wanted Him to help me pass that deep water swim test, allowing me to cavort in the seven-foot end of the pool with the cool kids, instead of piddling down at the shallow end with the losers.

As I was not a very good swimmer, I was hoping God would part the waters of the swimming pool the way He parted the waters of the Red Sea for the Children of Israel. Or at least the way Cecil B. DeMille eventually did for Charlton Heston in “The Ten Commandments.”

Camp Airy was swell. As a reminder, I dug up some old snapshots of that distant summer from the first day of camp, with my neighborhood pals Harvey” Hyatt, Ron Sallow and Stan Nusenko.

As memory serves, they were all pretty good swimmers who didn’t need to cut any plea bargains with God in order to pass a swim test. But I did.

In my desperation, I told God that if He helped me out at Camp Airy, I’d give up misdemeanors quite fashionable with some of my delinquent peers, such as uttering certain compound-complex curse words.

Though this was my first, primitive exploration of heaven’s role down here on earth, I’ve been wrestling with notions of faith ever since that summer.

I find it creepy when politicians of any religion boast of their close relationship with God. Matters of belief are supposed to be each individual’s to share privately with the God of his or her choosing, even if it takes an entire lifetime to work things out.

Faith is private. Prayer is a secret we whisper to our vision of God, if in fact we believe in God.

But at age 10, I was a believer all right. I believed that if you made a deal with God and held up your end, God would hold up His end. And so I cut my heavenly bargain: You help me out here at Camp Airy, and I’ll watch my language.

I wish Camp Airy had offered some of that “Inner Awesome” back then. I could have used it.

When I finally got up the courage to take the test, I nearly drowned. I had to be fished out of the pool by a life guard. I remember looking up at a sunny sky, toward heaven and thinking, “I thought we had an agreement.”

But we didn’t. And I’ve spent the remaining decades since that first primitive crisis of faith pondering variations on a theme: What happens to each of us when we ask for one tiny miracle and never get it?

Is there no God in heaven to hear our plea?

Or does He hear us, and He just says no?

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.