TRUSTING
THE SUBAUDIBLE

Topics: Agnosticism; Dependence on God; Faith; Fear; Help from God; Trust

References: Psalm 23:1–4; Matthew 6:9; 28:20; 1 Peter 5:7

Trisha McFarland stopped on a family hike across the Appalachians to go to the bathroom. In trying to catch up with her family, she found herself on the wrong trail, lost and alone. She sat down, closed her eyes, and tried to pray for rescue. But praying was hard. She said, “Our Father,” and it came out of her mouth flat and uncomforting.

She couldn’t remember discussing spiritual matters with her mother, but she had asked her father not a month before if he believed in God.

“I’ll tell you what I believe in,” said Larry McFarland. “I believe in the Subaudible. Do you remember when we lived on Fore Street? Do you remember how the electric baseboard units would hum, even when they weren’t heating?”

Trisha shook her head.

“That’s because you got used to it,” the father said. “But take my word, Trisha, that sound was always there. Even in a house where there aren’t baseboard heaters, there are noises. The fridge goes on and off. The traffic goes by outside. We hear those things all the time, so most of the time we don’t hear them at all. They become …”

“Subaudible,” Trisha said.

“Pree-cisely. I don’t believe in a God who marks the fall of every bird, who records all of our sins in a big golden book and then judges us when we die. But I believe there has to be something. Some sort of insensate force for the good.”

“The Subaudible,” she said.

“You got it.”

So, here’s this girl in the woods, lost and sensing that there must be something more. Then she remembers her baseball hero, the great closer of the Boston Red Sox, Tom “Flash” Gordon. He pulls out miraculous saves for the Sox, and when he wins, he points his finger to the sky, giving credit to a personal God who has revealed himself to the world in Jesus Christ.

After nine days of being bug-bitten, scared, cut, sick from drinking bad water and eating poisonous berries, Trisha finally pleads to a personal God to bring her out of the woods.

“Please God, help me find the path,” she says to the God of Tom Gordon, not her father’s Subaudible. She needs a God who is really there, one you can point to when and if you get the save. “Please, God, please, help me.”

—Based on Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Scribner, 1999)