Authors Note: This is not like what I normally write. No offense meant to anyone or anyone's religion. The religion depicted in here is not mine; it's loosely based on many Christian religions. Thanks to Ebony10 for being my beta.
Authors Note 2: Recently went through and reread this and notice a few grammatical errors, reposting the same chapter for make those corrections. Nothing was done to change style or story.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not even close.
Guilt
Guilt. Well, guilt and oppression really. That, he decided, was the reason for religion. He hadn't been inside a church since his wife and daughter were killed and yet here he was, inside a church on the very day that the practitioners of religion toted out the biggest guilt maker of them all.
He hated sitting here, listening to the preacher telling them all how horrible they all were. Preaching about how a god—a perfect being—had come to this imperfect place, had died for the people, the sinners sitting in the audience...congregation, whatever.
And the people were eating it up. There was even a woman a few rows up from him that was crying. It was enough to make him laugh out loud, but he didn't. He didn't want her to know he was there. He used to go to church every Sunday while his family was still around, but now he didn't. He just couldn't believe in a God that would let such a horrible thing happen to such a perfect being. And this time it he wasn't thinking about the "savior" that everyone was talking about.
His pastor had come to see him after the murders. Had told him that God was saddened at the loss of two of His children. Jane didn't believe it. If he was really sorry, it wouldn't have happened to begin with. He had told the pastor as much and the man had still kept talking. Said that the Lord wouldn't want him to hate, to have vengeance in his heart. He had laughed at that.
God had lost all say in his life when that monster had brutalized his wife. God had let him down. He had given Jane this wonderful gift and he hadn't even been able to use it to save the life of the people he loved the most.
His pastor had kept going on about how God would forgive him for all of the sins that he had committed. He just needed to repent and he would be able to live with his wife and daughter in the next life. The man of the cloth had said that Jane's wife and daughter were already at the presence of the Lord and he just needed to believe and forgive the man—the murderer—that had committed the heinous acts against his family.
That had been the last straw for him. He had unceremoniously punched the pastor in the nose and forced him out of the house. He hadn't set foot in a church since then. And yet here he was. Sitting in the back pew of a church he had never been to before all because he had a hopeless addiction to eavesdropping.
He had heard her talking on the phone to someone—he assumed it was a friend—at lunch one day. She was talking about singing in a choir, adamantly refusing to sing a solo although he could tell she would give in by the end of the conversation. He had never realized that she sang; could he be getting rusty? No, she was just getting better at hiding things from him. It took her long enough, most of the team members learned how to mask the little things, but it had taken her longer, nine months, and she was just starting to figure it out.
He figured that she would be singing in church. She didn't really have time to sing in even a community choir, which would take more of a time commitment than she would be able to give with the work they did. Lisbon would kill him if she ever found out that he had snuck into her office to look through the personnel files. The CBI kept a record of preferred religious preference just in case you were injured in the line of duty. It hadn't taken him long to find out what religion she was and even less time to narrow down the church she would go to.
He had narrowed his list to three churches, only one of which was having a choir sing on Easter. So here he was sitting in the back of the church, trying not to laugh at the way that the pastor was leading the congregation around like lambs. The choir was sitting behind him, and, if he craned his neck just a bit, he could see the woman he had come to see. The pastor finished his sermon to a chorus of praise and supplication. Jane just rolled his eyes. The choir stood now and the woman he had been waiting for came up to the microphone.
The deep purple choir robes stood out against her red hair, a contrast that Jane liked. Her voice was low and sorrowful as she sang about the same guilt ridden topic that the pastor had been talking about. Her voice was much more powerful than he would have expected from such a soft spoken woman. She hit the notes high and clear. It was almost touching. Almost.
The song ended and Jane noticed that the pastor was getting back up to speak. Jane chose that moment to leave. He didn't want Grace to see him. She had really toned down on the religious holier than thou attitude that she had spread on so thick when she had first joined the team. He didn't want to give her another reason to start up. Still, he knew that as long as she kept singing, he would be coming back.