lately I'd been thinking about the girl I used to be. The zealot. Scrawny and shy, seventy-five pounds soaking wet, operating with the only currency she had. She knew she wasn't enough on her own. She needed to make allegiances. She wanted power, the kind that heals the sick and raises the dead and lifts small girls from backwoods farm towns into the glittering, bustling, half-evil world. A world that for all its faults was still beloved to God.

When I was a girl experiencing it for the first time, that rollicking religion seemed to have come organically, from the world itself, like water or air. Pentecostals aren't much for history, and the only origin story I'd ever heard was the story of how the Holy Spirit had descended on Jesus's disciples centuries ago when they gathered to mourn his death.

Mrs. Afolabi adre me if I was a Christian. I knew what she was asking: Are you a good person? Can I trust you? I hedged and then answered yes, ignoring the unsettled feeling that rose up in me when I said those words. The typical Christian testimony was one of being lost, then found. But my own testimony ran backward. I had been found once, but somewhere along the way I had gotten lost.

Our God was a God of great power and great authority, and the world danced on his axis, not our own. If I had forgotten all of that, then it was no wonder I'd also forgotten that the Devil's agents were everywhere among us, scratching and crawling at our edges, searching for a way to get inside.

Whenever I visited, I felt like I was going back in time, funneling back to an America I didn't think much about anymore. An America of fields and farms and barns and clapboard churches, where children said yes ma'am and no ma'am, where strangers greeted each other with a nod in the grocery stores, where chances were that every stranger you met had some relation in common with someone you already knew.

Good people voted Republican, the party of family values, and went to church on Sunday. When women had children, they quit their jobs and stayed home like the mothers they were meant to be. Men belonged with women and women with men. Everyone seemed to share the belief that the country was on a downward spiral and only prayer and divine intervention would set things right again.