Rooming With God

This past weekend, my husband John, participated in a handball tournament outside of Paris. Team handball, as it is more accurately called, is not the game played by hitting a small rubber ball off the wall with your palm. It is a sport played on a basketball court with a ball the size of a volleyball. It is relatively unknown in the US but is very popular in Europe and thus, as soon as we moved here, John signed up to play with a recreational league. His teammates come from all over the world and one of them just happens to be an Egyptian guy named Allah. I find the idea of naming a kid God even more amusing than the Hispanic tradition of naming a kid Jesus and thus I insist on referring to Allah by the English translation of his name. Seeing that the tournament was being held an hour outside of Paris and since my husband is both the team captain and main organizer, he decided it would be best if the team spent the night in a modest hotel near the arena. To save money, all team members were expected to share a room and my lucky husband got God as his roommate.

“You get to room with God?!” I asked incredulously. “How cool will that be?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” John admonished me. “It’s inflammatory.”

“How can calling someone by their name be inflammatory?”

I could hear him sigh wearily into the phone, a signal that he was not interested in discussing it further (probably because he knew I would win the argument).

“Are you coming down with the girls tomorrow?” he asked.

“Absolutely, we’ll be there by nine.”

“Okay, then, see you tomorrow, honey,” he said, and hung up.

When we arrived at the arena the next morning, I made a beeline for my husband who was sitting down stretching out on the sidelines. I just had to find out how God was as a roommate. Turns out, God is messy. And he snores. Who knew? But the real surprise came during the second half of the match. God was benched for talking trash to the refs, but even that did not keep him from getting riled up. God continued to berate the refs from the sidelines and he even started to swear at them. Loudly. And not just any swear word. Nope. God used the F word. Three times! At this point the head ref came over and told my husband either God had to leave the arena or he was gonna stop the game and call it for the other side. Boy, was John mad. He personally escorted God outside and told him to stay there. Their team won the game, but just barely. After it was over, John informed God that if he didn’t behave from here on out, he was gonna bench him for the rest of the season.