from Crazy Were We in the Head

​I had been brought up not to believe in ghosts. Uncle Edgar made himself very clear on that point. You couldn’t be a Bible-believing Christian and still believe in ghosts, he said, with of course the one exception, the Holy Ghost, who was in a class by Himself.

But when it came to a choice between the theories of Uncle Edgar or Snake, I always tended to go with Snake. Sitting there on the motel bed sifting through those old books and pictures and the family history, I became more and more convinced of the existence of ghosts. In fact by ten o’clock I had come to the conclusion that a world without ghosts wouldn’t be much of a world. Without ghosts you wouldn’t have a past, and without a past, what would be the point of going forward?

Another thing I’d been informed on good authority was that God has a plan for the world; otherwise, why would He have bothered to create it? And why would He have bothered to create us if He didn’t have a plan for each and every person? So isn’t our own purpose in life to discover His individually-tailored plan for us and then get to work on implementing it? “QED!” said Uncle Edgar triumphantly when he had finished this line of thought, “QED!”