Hard to Find: A Tillgiven Romantic Mystery

by Traci Tyne Hilton

  “I’m not in the mood.” His eyes were narrow slits, and a vein in his temple throbbed. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, which made the conversation difficult at best, but I wasn’t going to stop now. Every soul was worth saving, even the pretty ones.

  “Professor…”

  “I wish you would stop calling me that.”

  I bit my tongue. I had sort of hoped he’d say that someday, but now wasn’t the time. “Isaac…” My heart fluttered. I admit it, a real, butterfly in the stomach kind of flutter, when I said his name, but I bit back the completely out-of-place giggle. “Isaac”—I said it again, just because it felt good—“have you ever given your life to Christ?”

  The absolute silence that followed my question nearly killed me.

  Professor stood up without looking at me and walked a few paces into the woods.

  I couldn’t stand, not on my legs that had turned to water when I said his name. So I closed my eyes and prayed. I wanted Isaac to love God, whether he had before or not, and I also wanted him to help me find my sister. God could make both things happen.

  “Listen, kid.” Professor’s voice broke my concentration.

  “Yes?” My face heated up about thirty-two degrees, and I knew from past embarrassing moments that I was beet red. The fact that this shouldn’t have been an embarrassing moment probably told Isaac everything he needed to know about my completely inappropriate crush on him.

  “I was reading the Bible before you were out of diapers.” Professor—Isaac—looked at me through narrowed eyes.

  “And?”

  “And I know it inside and out, have a PhD in religion, and have spent the last three years teaching Bible all over the world.”

  “Goody gumdrops to you.”

  We both flinched. I wished I could stop talking like a twelve-year-old. It would absolutely help my case.

  Isaac inhaled sharply. “I hardly think the International Evangelical Bible School Association would hire a non-Christian to teach Bible at the Tillgiven campus.”

  “I once had a friend who defined Christian as an English-speaking person from the Western world who was familiar with the Bible.” I chewed on my lip. I had gone out on a limb. What if Professor Daniels was born again? Where was I then? I forced myself to gauge his body language. His jaw twitched like he wanted to bark at me. If his shoulders were any higher, they’d be holding his hat up. Though he looked at me, it was sort of a sidelong look, as though he couldn’t fully face up to what I was saying.

  “Then your friend is a humanist and a descriptivist linguist.”

  “So he is. But, the question is: Are you born again?”

  Professor’s shoulders relaxed. He turned to me, a gentle smile on his face.

  How had my words made such an immediate change in him? I didn’t dare hope it was because he was born again. I mean, I hoped that was why, but I hardly believed it could be true. I ran through what I could remember of his last lecture, the one I tuned out so well.

  “The body of Christ is much older than that popular phrase, Dani.”

  “Of course.” I tilted my head to the side. He was going to beat that drum again. “But Jesus himself said that unless a person is born again, he can’t enter the kingdom of heaven.”

  “And our postmodern church has latched onto that sentiment in a way not seen in the previous two thousand years of church history.”

  “How were the saints of the Old Testament saved?” I used his term for God’s chosen people. Always good to speak to people with their own vocabulary.

  “Through an elaborate system of laws.” His smile was smug, but I didn’t mind. He was defending his lack of faith in God. A pretty normal thing for people to do when openly confronted with their need for him. Especially when they are supposed to be the expert.

  “Wrong.” I scratched at the muddy ground with my stick. “They were saved by looking forward in faith to the coming of the savior.”

  “Ah.” Isaac looked into the distance. Even he couldn’t argue with the truth—after all, it had been point three in his first lecture at our little school.

  “And while Christ was here, how were people saved?” I was tempted to sort of bat my eyelashes and pretend I didn’t know the answer, but I couldn’t. When eternity is on the line, eyelashes need to be forgotten. He remained silent, so I answered for him, “By trusting that Jesus was the promised Messiah.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, you know the Bible very well. And I expect you believe it is true.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “And…” I swallowed. If possible, I turned a deeper red. This was the stinger, and I couldn’t not say it, no matter how rude it sounded. “And so do the demons, and they shudder in fear.”

  “You really need to work on your memory verses. The demons tremble, not shudder.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “What I hear you saying…”

  Apparently the professor was giving me the active listening treatment now. I assumed this was another of his natural defense mechanisms.

  “What I’m saying is that you know the Bible every bit as well as the devil did, and he tempted Christ to sin. What are you doing with your knowledge? If you want to dismiss being ‘born again’ as a construct of postmodern thought, that’s your choice. But whatever you want it to be called, a person has to give up control of his own life and let God take the reins if he wants to be saved.” I exhaled. Sharing the gospel with the Bible teacher. My parents would be proud.

  Isaac grunted.

  Grunted.

  That was worse than his shrug.

  “I suspect you know all of that and could have taught it to our class.” I chewed my lip. The professor didn’t give in easily, but then, neither did I.

  “Of course I could have.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  His eyebrows flew up so high I thought they’d get stuck in the tree branches.

  “Let me leave you with this riddle.” I stood up and made as though I was going to walk back to my dorm, even though I actually wanted to sit back down on the log and kiss the professor until he was happy again. There was no telling if that would make him happy or not, but I did want to test the theory. “If you have been nursed on the scriptures from your birth, and know the Bible inside and out before you’re ten, is Romans 3:23 still true about you?”

  He didn’t look at me.

  “And if it isn’t, is any of the Bible still true?”

  He stood up.

  “And if it is still true, why would Romans 10:9 not apply to you?” I walked away, one slow, painful step at a time. The man did know his Bible front and back. But I suspected that he did not consider himself when he thought of the first verse, the one that said everyone was a sinner. Which was why I also suspected that he had never felt a strong need to either believe in his heart that Jesus was his Lord or declare it with his mouth, as Romans 10:9 said we should do.

  As I walked away, I prayed for him. Prayed that he wouldn’t let his deep knowledge of scripture stand in the way of his actual salvation any longer.

  I would probably not tell him that I had seen his issues before, in other born-and-bred Christians, but there was no denying that for some people, familiarity with God’s Word had led to, if not contempt, then a dismissive attitude that indicated a lack of true faith.

  Case in point: my sister Drew, who we really did need to get after as fast as we could.

  Isaac Daniels 3

  I let her walk away because kids like her were always looking for an argument. And a box to fit people into. They didn’t have room in their worldview for academic Christians. People who believed the Bible but understood…certain historic facts concerning the document, which led to, let’s say, a moderated approach to faith.

  After all, it was just a book.

  A good book, and a true book, but it’s not like the Bible was God himself, or anything.

  And it wasn’t like evangelical zeal had do
ne me any personal good.

  I kicked the stick she had been holding. It made a halfhearted attempt at rolling away from me.

  You can’t grow up like I did and not be saved. After all, I asked Christ into my heart no less than five times when I was a kid. And I had been baptized as an infant, so that part was also covered.

  I mean, whole households were baptized during the early church. You didn’t have to be an Anabaptist zealot to be saved. You just needed to…

  I thought about Romans 10:9.

  Well, there you go. I told her I was a Christian, so that was easily confessing with my mouth, and I was in Sweden, after all, teaching the Bible, so it wasn’t like I didn’t believe.

  I was just bored with it.

  I stopped.

  I hadn’t said that out loud, had I?

  What was blasphemy, technically? Was saying God bored you the unforgivable sin? I walked as far into the woods as I could and came to a stone fence, about three feet high, that encircled a cow pasture.

  The cows were stocky and shaggy and had some pretty impressive horns. And I had a feeling they could get over that fence if they were inclined.

  I didn’t know if there were any bulls in the pen, but if there were, and if they knew they could get over the fence, my faith in the short stone wall to protect me wasn’t worth much.

  I walked along the stone wall and watched the cows munching the grass, ruminating thoughtfully on the state of their little field.

  God wasn’t a little halfhearted stone wall, though.

  He was the beginning and the end, the strong tower, the hope of nations, the Almighty. He created all and knew all, and it didn’t matter if I said it out loud or not. If I was bored with the whole thing, he knew it already.

  So why didn’t he do something about it?

  A tree branch swung at me, and Dani ran full tilt into the clearing by the fence.

  “And another thing,” she said, breathing hard. “A Christian lets God be in control of his life. He lays aside his plans for himself and follows God no matter how hard, how disappointing, how embarrassing, or even how much against the rules it is. A Christian is fully submitted to God’s will.” She stood in front of me, her hand gripping her side as she caught her breath. Then she spun on her heel and ran back through the woods.

  Dani was not boring.

  If Drew didn’t show up tonight, I was going to have to do something for that kid.

  I stayed in the woods until dark started to fall. I was expected to eat with the students as often as possible, but I did have a halfhearted Ikea kitchen in my apartment that I could heat food in, if I absolutely needed to.

  I didn’t have any food in the mini-fridge to heat, so when I made it back to my apartment, I just sat at my desk and stared at my stack of Bibles.

  English, French, Swedish—not that I spoke Swedish yet—RSV, NIV, KJV. I had more translations and paraphrases, but they were on my iPad. I ought to get rid of this stack too, to make travel easier, but it was hard. Except for the Swedish one, they had been through a lot with me.

  I flicked the spine of the RSV. It was beginning to peel off, worn from overuse, though I wasn’t sure you could overuse a Bible.

  I was a Christian.

  Dani didn’t know what she was talking about. I had been dedicated to God and the Bible my whole life. Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite— Kaká to anyone who appreciates a game of soccer played well—explained it best in his testimony. Like him, I had been raised to know and love God, and as I grew up, my interest in knowing God grew with me. My parents trained me up in the way I should go, so to speak, and I didn’t depart from it. Sorry to disappoint the teenager (well, nineteen-year-old) by being saved even though I didn’t have one big, flashy salvation moment, but neither my malaise, her perception, nor the fundamentalist dictionary, could separate me from the love of God, or my salvation.

  I mean, I had even, for a brief while, considered going overseas as a missionary. But that wasn’t my call.

  I glanced out my window. The bright moon lit the leaf-strewn gravel walking path that wove its way through the lawn outside of my building. Winter in Montreal, summer in Kansas, fall in Sweden.

  But I wasn’t called to be a missionary.

  I had sure screwed things up with Jane Adler.

  I rubbed my eyes with the ball of my hand. I was pretty sure I was over her. And seeing as how she hadn’t left Portland for her dream life overseas, she wasn’t any more in tune with what God wanted for her life than I was.

  I told Dani that Noemie in Montreal hadn’t broken my heart. It was true, because I had only dated her to prove to myself that I could find someone as awesome as Jane. But we had only dated a couple of months before she dumped me for being boring.

  Tanya, the camp counselor in Kansas, had been pretty cute, and she didn’t think I was boring. But when the camp director, who unfortunately was her father, put the kibosh on our budding romance, she hadn’t been interested enough to rebel against the paterfamilias by sticking by me.

  Of course, I wasn’t that interested either.

  In two months I would come up on the one-year anniversary of having my first and only marriage proposal rejected. Jane had had a year of romance and fun with her new boyfriend. And I was taking work wherever I could find it, and apparently not looking like a real Christian.

  I took a deep breath. Teaching Bible was the most satisfying thing I could think of doing at this stage in my life. So I cracked open a couple of the Bibles sitting in front of me. Planning tomorrow morning’s lesson was as good a way to spend the night as sleeping, and much better than moping about women.

  I went to the cafeteria for breakfast the next morning because I was starving.

  Dani came in a few minutes after I did, looking ragged. She was barefoot, and dark circles shadowed her eyes. She had a worn-out hoodie pulled low over her forehead and didn’t acknowledge any of the friendly hellos lobbed her way.

  So, just like any normal morning.

  It was a relief to see she wasn’t letting her sister’s situation get her down.

  I thought about popping over to her table to say hey and see how she was doing, but I saw no need to martyr myself. I’d check in with her after the first lecture. She was usually her cheerful self by then.

  The trouble was, an hour later I stood in front of our class staring at her empty chair.

  It wasn’t the first lecture she had been late to, or even missed, so I did my best to ignore her absence and get on with class.

  When I closed out what was meant to be a deep and foundational lesson on the Bible as seen by postmodern humanists, the class broke with unusual glee.

  Either I had been particularly boring or I had let them out early. I checked my watch. It looked like both.

  I was shouldering my way past a group of students who were making a point to ignore me, when one of the more studious students grabbed my elbow.

  “Yeah?”

  Gretchen pushed her glasses up with her thumb and looked away. I stepped back to give her room. She seemed to relax. “Have you seen Sioeli?”

  I scanned the two dozen students that had stayed in the class and didn’t see him. Had I seen him during the lecture? To be honest: no. I had only seen Dani’s empty chair. “Was he at breakfast?”

  She shook her head. “I thought maybe he wasn’t feeling well, so I asked Garret if Si had stayed in today.” She blushed. I was a little sorry to see it. In a few years, Gretchen could do much better than Si. She just had to grow into herself.

  “What did Garret say?”

  “He said Si left.”

  My head began to throb, just behind the eyes. I pressed my thumb to the bridge of my nose, but it didn’t help. “Did he head to town for the day or just take off into the woods?”

  “He took his passport.”

  I swallowed. A thin bead of sweat was forming on my forehead, like when you have a fever or are in over your head.

  “I hate to seem like a tattletale.” />
  From her stammer and the way that all the color fled her cheeks, I knew she meant it. This conversation was killing her. “But Si is my cousin, and he’s only seventeen. He’s a bit wild. Doesn’t like to be tied down by rules and stuff. I think he may have gone with Dani to find Drew.”

  “Dani went to find Drew?” I sat down on the table behind me with a thump. “What do you mean?”

  “After breakfast she got dressed and packed her backpack and hitched a ride into town. She’s going to find her sister.”

  “How do you know?”

  Gretchen fidgeted with a button on her jean jacket. “I swear I hate even saying, and I wouldn’t have at all, but I feel responsible for Si. Dani was going to take the train down to France and didn’t want to go alone. She and Si had dinner together last night, but wouldn’t let anyone else sit with them, and now both of them are gone. Garret says Si’s backpack and wallet and passport are all missing.”

  I bit my tongue, hard. Not that I was likely to swear anyway, but nothing I was thinking could be said out loud.

  The Hoffens wouldn’t be back for another day, and now I was down three students, one of whom was a minor. “It’s okay, Gretchen,” I lied. “Telling me was the right thing to do.” I tried to rub away my headache again, but it was useless. “Did Dani tell you where in France she wanted to go?” I was stalling. She was headed for Calais because two teenagers could easily find a missing American kid in a busy French port town. I patted her shoulder awkwardly and stood up. “Never mind. I’ll take care of it.”

  She nodded, clearly relieved to have passed off the trouble.

  I walked out of the classroom quickly, but shoved my growing panic as far down into my gut as I could. I swung by the boys’ dorm and confirmed that Si and his backpack were gone. I couldn’t go in the girls’ dorm, and I didn’t see the need to bother Cadence. It was obvious Dani had flown the coop. I stopped by the office and stared at the exquisite pillar of icy perfection that was Stina.

  Tell or not?

  I didn’t.

  I grabbed the keys to the school Saab—not as impressive as it sounds when you remember we’re actually in Sweden—and initialed the paper that I was checking them out.