AN: I have trouble with boring beginnings, I know, but bear with me. It will get better! Please review!

Chapter 2

"Do you want to talk about it?" Dawn never failed to be compassionate.

Anna smiled. "Shouldn't I be asking you the same question?" She shook her head. "I'm okay… it's just the rainbow sometimes hits me hard. You know how it is." That was just it. Dawn did know what it was like. The same pain Anna felt when she talked or thought about her father was the same pain Dawn felt every day. "Do you want to talk about last night?"

Anna still wondered whether she should have asked. Sometimes things could be hard with Dawn. She didn't want to be the one to put hand sanitizer on her open cut, thinking she was helping by ridding her of germs but actually just putting her through immense pain.

How Dawn responded surprised her: "I don't know whether I want to talk about it or not. You used to say your father always said that talking about it helps, but I don't know…"

"I know how it is," Anna agreed. "You don't want to spout your own problems to everybody while they're thinking, 'I have my own problems too, you know!'" She smiled. "That's what I always felt like I was doing when I told my mother my feelings, as if she could tell me it's all right. But it was never all right. Dad was dead."

Grinning, Dawn said, "That's exactly how I feel when I'm talking to you. Do you really care what's going on in my life? I mean, you have your own feelings about your father to deal with, why should you have to deal with mine?"

"Because you're my best friend. We should have to deal with each other's problems," laughed Anna, wanting to take the stress from the moment and conversation. But she soon sobered. "It helps to have God to talk to."

Dawn frowned now. "But God… I mean, if it's like you say, what's the point in talking to him? I mean, he already knows every detail of your situation, even every thought you had during it all. What's the use in telling him if he already knows?"

"I feel that way sometimes… or rather, a lot," Anna said. "But you could ask him to help you with it. That's what I do. I always feel so much better afterward. Sometimes I start having fun without realizing it, and suddenly become conscious that my prayers have been answered. I don't know what I'd do without God helping me."

"How do you do it, Anna?" Dawn asked. "How do you blame everything good that happens on God? Believe it or not, there's good in this world, and I don't think that all of it has to do with God."

"Dawn, everything has to do with God."

"Surely bad things don't have to do with God," Dawn said with mock horror. She covered her mouth with a fake gasp. "God is so good! He can't have anything to do with the bad things that happen, can he?"

Anna decided not to take her sarcasm personally, and she shoved her friend's shoulder playfully, even though her words the next moment were serious. "Actually, the bad things that happen don't have anything to do with God. It all has to do with Satan… with us. We're sinners; we brought sin into the world."

"Let me guess… that whole story about Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Satan disguised as a snake, and the apple, right?" Dawn asked sarcastically with a snort.

"I really don't know why you're so angry, Dawn," Anna said reasonably. "And actually, yes, that's exactly what I was about to say. It's like someone offering you the control of the entire world. That would mean everything you wanted: new clothes, all the food you wanted, weight loss pills to help you counteract eating all the food you wanted, new shoes, a new laptop, a new cell phone… wouldn't you take it if someone wagged it in front of your face?"

"It was an apple," Dawn said dryly.

Anna smiled and pointed at her. "Obviously, you don't know the stories as well as you think you do. No, the serpent convinced Adam and Eve that the fruit on the tree in the middle of the garden would not kill them, but that God had simply told them to stay away from it because he knew the moment they ate from that tree they would see all that God saw, that they would be just like Him, just as powerful and knowing everything. Actually," Anna laughed, "my Bible says 'fruit'. I don't even know if it was an apple."

"So Satan, disguised as a serpent, said that eating the fruit would make them all-powerful, like God," Dawn nodded. "I knew that."

Anna smiled wider. "So do you get what I was saying? Satan is so persuasive, he tempts us every day. Adam and Eve had it bad, it was way worse for them than simply being tempted by chocolate cake when you're on a diet. So you see, any one of us would have taken the fruit. We take the fruit every day, actually, when we lie, when we steal, when we use God's name in vain."

Dawn shrugged. "So it's our entire fault that there's bad stuff happening in the world, eh?"

Anna looked over at her. "No, it's not. If Satan didn't exist, we wouldn't have any problems at all. It's not even Adam and Eve's fault, either, and it wouldn't help at all to point fingers, because I wouldn't have been any different than them."

"So technically, back to your sentence: we're all sinners," Dawn was grasping the point. "And we can't help it."

"My father used to call it our nature. Humans weren't meant to be perfect. If we weren't perfect, we wouldn't have any need for God. We wouldn't need to repent for our sins; we wouldn't have any problems to come to God with. Our lives would be so easy, it wouldn't even be funny. In my opinion, that's why there's evil: so we have temptation, so we can sin. All the better to trust in God," Anna sounded satisfied at her explanation.

Dawn smiled. "So you're saying that sinning is good."

"No," laughed Anna. "You have the oddest mind. I meant that coming to God is good. I'll ask you now: if everything was perfect in your life, if bad things didn't happen, if everything was fine and you had no problems or you were never sad, would you even think about God?"

Dawn was serious now, and she shook her head, "Probably not."

"And I won't go without saying the exact same thing. My relationship with God has actually grown since I was thirteen. When my father passed away, I stopped turning to him for help, and I went to God," Anna said.

"Do you think God made that accident happen on purpose?" asked Dawn, as if implying that God was still heartless.

Anna shook her head. "I think God makes everything happen on purpose."

AN: Lol, I look back on my 'hand sanitizer' comment, and though it's all very serious, I couldn't help but laugh at my own analogy! Not that I meant to be funny at the moment I was writing it… I was actually going to say the usual, 'pour salt on an open wound' thing, but I decided hand sanitizer was more original. Original indeed!

Oh, and I don't have any other version of the Bible except for The Message Remix version. My sister took my other Bible and I couldn't find it in her room, so I don't know what the other versions say about the fruit on the tree in the middle of the garden, whether it was an apple or not. It's just what I learned when I was younger, apparently my Sunday school teachers thought an apple was easier for us little kids to understand. Let me know in a review if your version says apple or just fruit!