“We have another guest coming for the cookout,” Neil said. “I hope you and Sherry don’t mind.”
“Of course not,” I told him. “We’re your guests. As long as he doesn’t eat all the barbecue and drink up all the beer, I don’t mind.”
“No worries there,” Neil said. “He’s a young priest who has taken a parish on the mainland. Susi met him on the ferry and invited him for dinner.”
Neil and Susi are our good friends who moved to Ambergris Caye from Louisiana in the U.S.
Susi said, “Father Dominic is really, really young—maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. He doesn’t seem to know much about real life.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She said, “I had Baby Amy on the boat with me and he asked how old my daughter is. When I told him she’s eight months old he asked if she was my youngest child.”
When Father Dominic arrived and took a seat at the table, he was very apologetic.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said, after being introduced. “I was visiting the priest at God’s house here in San Pedro.”
Eight-year-old Neil Junior said, “God has a house here?”
“He certainly does. The church is His house.”
“I thought he lived here with us,” Junior said.
“God lives everywhere,” Father Dominic said. “He lives in our hearts, our souls and our minds.”
“I thought he lived in our bathroom,” Junior said.
“Why is that?”
“Because every morning my dad bangs on the bathroom door and yells, Dear God! Are you still in there?”
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