First define your audience...

For a young child growing up with a strict religious upbringing, there is no more delightful place to play than inside a church building. Churches are wonderful places to play for anyone, but they are especially fun for a child who attends the same church on Sundays and Wednesdays, because she can take a wicked pleasure in invading all the secret rooms and holy places usually revered on meeting days. I don't think I ever told you that growing up, I had the rare privilege of having a church for a playground. My mother worked for years as the church secretary, and in the summers I would go to work with her and have my run of the entire building. The church pews were a site for endless games of tag and hide-and-seek with my brother; the workroom upstairs had more craft supplies than you would need to make a thousand Noah's arks out of felt and construction paper; the hidden closets and attics held more treasures and discoveries than an inquisitive little girl could get through in a year. When that church was empty of the faithful during the working hours, every toy in every classroom, every puppet behind the youth room stage, every frosted animal cookie in the baby's nursery, was mine. We even used to slip into the room where they kept the communion supplies, nipping some of the grape juice and snacking on the unleavened bread when Mom wasn't looking. Luckily, in the Church of Christ there is nothing especially sacred about the bread and the fruit of the vine themselves, so if we were caught, no one threatened us with having wasted the body of Christ.

The one place we didn't venture was the baptismal pool, which was located behind the pulpit in the main room. There was something sacred about that place; it was where people descended with black souls and rushed back out of the water with lily-white ones. They only opened it to the view of the church when some poor sinner decided to give his or her life to Christ. Every now and then I would try to look back there and dip in a curious toe, but I always felt the breath of God on my neck and I had to run back to safer areas of the church. I was relieved many years later to have my soul cleansed in a regular swimming pool at church camp, rather than that terrifying little resevoir of atonement hiding behind the sanctuary wall.

You see, the church was mine, but the salvation performed there didn't belong to me. Though I knew all of the church's secrets and places to hide, God still seemed to have secrets I wasn't worthy of knowing. Much later in life, when I finally knew that water was just water and secrets were only illusions, I wished I could go back to the church and stick a defiant toe into that pool without flinching. I am disappointed in the little girl who couldn't conquer every shadowy place that all the other churchgoers were too afraid to penetrate. Sometimes I don't know whether she even emerged from the swimming pool that summer night or if she drowned there. These days, I find myself no longer wanting to believe in sacred things. There is something strangely comforting, Elliot, about finding out that there's really nowhere left to hide.