I remember the first time I felt doubt. It was the night my little sister was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes. Mom figured it out at the grocery store — we’d been through this once before — and was sharp with us, but she let me buy a treat and for a while on the ride home everything seemed okay.

Then she said it. “I think Em has diabetes.”

There’s that pang even now. That lurch. Em was three. At home, we already had the equipment from my other sister’s diagnosis. The glucose monitor. The ketone strips. Mom was crying. Em was crying. I couldn’t tell which was worse, my mother’s grief or my baby sister’s wails. I went upstairs to my room and shut the door and prayed so hard it felt like my stomach would roll into a ball and fall out. Please, I said. Please, Heavenly Father, give it to me instead.

Nothing. No miracle. I didn’t really expect one, even as a ten-year-old. But no comfort, either. I cried, then went into the bathroom and nearly vomited, then crawled into bed and cried some more. When I looked out from the cocoon I’d built around myself, there was the treat from the store. Sugar. Something my sister would have to avoid from now on. I threw it in the trash and fled back to my blankets and that’s where the memory stops.

The Great Commission, designed by Simon Amadeus Pillardo and Paul Snuggs, is sometimes about doubt. Not often, but sometimes, and not always in a way the game seems to understand. Set during the early years of the Christian Church — strictly speaking before there were Christians or churches as we conceptualize them today — it is preoccupied with the evangelizing mission that Jesus commanded after his resurrection. Or rather, a particular interpretation and portrayal of that mission.

Read the rest of this entry →