“It is?” he asked, and then he looked like he immediately regretted it. “Yeah. Okay. Great.” He nodded as he drove to the intersection with the highway and turned left.
She felt the next question coming, and she braced for it.
“So, what do you think about the money? Greg’s putting it in his safe deposit box at the bank in Greely until we can figure out what we want to do with it. I thought that would be better than us hauling it all around the country.” Once again, he sounded like he knew there would be gunshots in his very near future. “I mean, what do you think? Is it ours? Should we go looking for whoever might be an heir to the place or something?”
Closing her eyes, Dani shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know about any of this.”
That seemed to drag concern out of him. “What? You didn’t think today went okay?”
“Okay?” She opened her eyes, and her arms came up to shield her instinctively. “Is it just me or is it hard to breathe in that house?”
“Hard to…” He laughed. “Oh, that’s just the dust.”
But she shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She shrank into the embrace of her shoulders. “It’s like we’re building a house on a graveyard or something, and the residents aren’t very happy about it.”
His gaze checked her. “I never knew you believed in ghosts.”
“I don’t,” she said quickly. “I… don’t. It’s just… I don’t know. It’s like I can feel all the stuff that went on in there or something, like the past doesn’t really want to let it go.”
A second and his hand came across and landed on her knee. He checked both ways and turned onto another dirt road. “It’s gonna be fine. Really. I have a good feeling about this.”
Well, that was good. At least one of them did.
When they arrived at Luke and Sage’s, Eric knew they needed to be acting like a happy, intact family, so he did his best to hover close to Dani and hold Jaden’s hand when they entered. The others were already there, adding Emily and Greg to the mix as well as the pastor and his family. That meant the Baker farmhouse was practically busting at the seams.
Happy sounds all-but bounced off the walls, and in seconds, Jaden had shed her coat and ran off to join the festivities.
“Hey, hey,” Luke said, bringing a dish to the table, “look who made it!”
Hi’s, hello’s, welcomes, and hugs came at them from every direction. Eric made sure to introduce Emily to Dani, and with smiles, they said they had met at the wedding. With everyone clued in to who everyone else was, he let out a breath of relief. At least it looked like there would be no fireworks at this particular party.
“This is ready,” Luke called over the not-quite-small crowd. “Pastor, could you say a few words and bless the meal for us?”
“I’d be happy to.”
The din quieted, and when the pastor bowed his head, so did everyone else. “Dear Lord, we thank You so much for the great gift of Your Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We thank You for this food, and most of all, we thank You for this time of fellowship together. Please bless our time together so it nourishes our spirits as much as this wonderful food nourishes our bodies. We ask this in Jesus’s Holy Name. Amen.”
“Amen.”
“That fire’s really great,” Derek said when supper was finished, the dishes done, and they had all congregated in the rather small living room to relax and just be together. The kids were off in other parts of the house playing something that erupted in fits of laughter or yells only once in a while. He sat down on the couch next to Jaycee who snuggled in closer to him when he put his arm around her. “We’re going to have to get ours going, but I’m afraid to ask what that’s going to take.”
“If it doesn’t have to be done right away, I could take a look at it for you,” Luke said as he stoked the fire before sitting on the hearth and putting his hands up to it. “Wouldn’t be the first chimney I’ve ever cleaned out.”
“I’d be afraid to know what was in that thing,” Rachel said from her position on the floor next to Caleb’s leg, her little girl in her lap. “I think dead animals are well within the realm of possibility.”
“There’s a visual,” Sage said, wrinkling her nose.
“Hey.” Rachel shrugged. “That’s fair warning.”
“So Rach are you really going to refinish those things from Attabury?” Luke asked.
“Well, I have to earn my keep somehow, don’t I?” She nudged into Caleb’s leg. “I’d hate to get fired on my first day on the job.”
“I can’t wait to see the place,” Jane, the pastor’s wife, said. “I bet it’s just going to be stunning.”
“If we can keep it from falling down,” Caleb said. “Now that the furniture’s mostly out, I think we’ll get in there and get the place swept down for the structural crew to come in on Monday and work on that ceiling.”
Across the room, Greg nodded. “I called them yesterday. They’re ready to hit the ground running Monday morning.”
“You know,” Eric said, and all of the gazes in the room turned to him, “I’d really like to be there for that part.” He glanced over at Dani who didn’t return the look, so it was impossible to tell what she might think of the idea. “Would you mind if I stuck around and maybe helped you guys out?”
Half of the gazes in the room slipped over to Dani while the other half stayed on him.
“Well, if you’re offering, we’d love to have you,” Caleb finally said. “I’m certainly not going to tell you no.”
By the time they made it back to Derek and Jaycee’s, Dani didn’t know which end of life was up. Like a sleepwalker who was just going through the motions, she went down to Jaden’s room and made sure she’d gotten in bed with the light off. Going back down to her own room, she went through all of the things he might want to discuss and not a single one of them settled well on her exhausted soul. That they were going to church in the morning didn’t help a thing.
As quietly as possible, she opened the door, went in and shut it. The entire house was stone cold quiet, and she didn’t want to be the one to disturb anyone. Eric was already in the bed reading. And not his cell phone or laptop either. She tried not to notice but she did anyway. It wasn’t big enough to be a Bible. It looked like an actual book. But what did she care what he did or didn’t read? What difference did that make to her? Reaching up, she shut off the lamp on her side. “Goodnight.”
The pause only lasted a breath. “’Night.”
Not terribly happy about that, she resettled into the covers and let herself fall off into an exhausted dreamless sleep.
It was Eric’s second pass through the book, and already he could see things he had missed the first time. Like this passage on intention. He laughed to himself remembering Derek’s words about thinking life was just lived, and he wondered if Derek was reading the book as well. Next to the words, he wrote, What Derek was talking about last night!
Intention. Do you live with intention, or do you just live? Do you have life goals? Have you decided what kind of person you will be? Do you have a life mission statement? Do you know where you are going? Or do you just exist?
I think that once you make the leap across the impossible chasm and begin to have “now faith,” one of the things that happens is you stop living unconsciously. You don’t go into situations and just hope to survive them. You don’t be whoever happens to show up. You don’t just participate in the drama anymore. You might now decide to remove yourself from the drama or you might choose to try to fix the drama. Whatever it is, you stop just being collateral damage of whatever is going on in your life. You stop wallowing in self-pity and choose to live a different way.
Now, granted this shift into intentional living doesn’t always come easy or without pain. It is often very difficult to look at issues and problems in your life. It is far easier to push them under the rug, hope they go away, tell yourself, “time heals all wounds.” The truth is, time helps, but it doesn’t heal anything
if you’re not intentional about the healing process.
Living with intention takes a great deal of courage because no longer are you able to just blithely go through your day “asleep” to what’s going on. Instead you are now awake. You actively look and see what’s going on in every area of your life, and you are actively both making decisions about these things, and hopefully, actively choosing to confront them with good, God-based choices.
No longer will the alarm go off and you roll over and decide you don’t feel like “doing” life. Now, you have to grow up and choose to live.
It’s a whole new way of being!
Eric let the book fall to his lap, and he breathed the lesson in. Living with intention. What did that even mean? It is far easier to push them under the rug… Well, he knew all about doing that. He thought about the money. They hadn’t counted it, thinking it better to leave it intact until they could get an expert opinion on it. He glanced over at his wife and found only her shoulder looking back at him.
Living intentionally. Was it too late for them to start doing that, for him to? He wished he could ask Caleb or Greg, talk to them, sort this all out, but he wasn’t sure they would have the answers he needed either.
Still swirling in all of the questions, he folded the book up, laid it on the little night stand and clicked off the light. With a sigh, he closed his eyes. “God, I’m really not sure any of this is even real. Would you please show me how to do this because I feel like I’m missing it totally.” There weren’t really more words to the prayer, so he shook his head and willed sleep to come. Maybe he would figure it all out tomorrow.
Chapter 10
When the alarm went off the next morning, Dani was quite sure she was not feeling well enough for church. She had been thinking about it off and on all night, and really she was a grown woman. She didn’t have to go to church if she didn’t want to, and she didn’t want to. However, when Eric got out of bed without making sure she was up, that didn’t set well with her either. Surely he wouldn’t just get ready and go without her.
Then again, that was exactly what she had wanted to happen five seconds before. Oh, why couldn’t her life make any sense at all? Sighing her frustration away, she lay very still, trying to hear where he was in the room. When she didn’t hear him, she rolled halfway to the side and found herself in an empty room. He had already left. Why was it that it didn’t really matter what he did, she found a way to be upset about it? That angered her about herself almost as much as she was angry with him and with life. She was turning into her mother, and there was no way that was a good thing.
Eric quietly padded out to the kitchen, thinking he could start the coffee for everyone else. However, he found the coffee already brewing and Derek sitting at the table.
“You make enough for everybody?” Eric asked.
“Help yourself.”
When he had gotten the coffee, he took the cup and went to sit at the table as well. He would probably need to make breakfast, but it appeared it was only the two of them awake so he figured he had time. “So what time is church anyway? I never got around to asking.”
“Nine.”
“That’s good then we have some time.”
Derek nodded, and in the pause Eric took a drink.
“So, how do you think Attabury is?” Eric asked. He’d never really gotten the chance to talk with the producer of the show, and he wasn’t going to waste this chance.
“Oh, Caleb will get it. No challenge is going to take him down.”
Eric nodded at that information. “I’m glad you and Jaycee could come. Not that I don’t think Caleb can do it. It’s just nice.” He thought for a second and decided to be honest. “You guys all work so great together. It’s like… It’s like you have each other’s backs.”
“We’re a team,” Derek said and set his cup on the table before leaning back. “Can’t say I ever saw that one coming, but I sure do appreciate it now that it’s here.”
“Oh?”
There was a hint of a smile under the moustache. “They’re a great group of people, I’ll tell you that for sure.”
“I think you all are.”
A second and Derek shook his head. “I guess they bring out the best in people. That’s the only way I can account for it.”
“For?”
“Ah, you know.”
At first Eric thought he would just leave it at that, but one moment before he asked, Derek let out a breath.
“Let’s just say, I wasn’t what anybody would call stable when I first got here. I’m not proud of it now, but life for me before this place was pretty much ‘where’s the party?’ Oh, I had the show, and that kept me a little grounded.” He took a sip, set the cup down and shook his head. “It’s just when you’re living for yourself, I guess it doesn’t really matter what you do or don’t do. You’re the only one it really affects. But now… I’ve had to really start thinking about what’s most important, you know? What do I want from life? What does Jaycee want from life, and are we going in a direction that will conceivably get us there? It’s like being on a baseball team. You can be the best player ever to play the game, but you’re not going to win any games on your own. So you have to learn to play with the others, to trust them, to count on them, to win and lose together.”
He squinted into the thoughts. “Out there, it’s not always like that. It’s not like that a lot actually. Everybody plays for themselves. Everybody is in it for what’s in it for them. They don’t think about everybody else. They don’t even care most of the time. People are expendable. They’re replaceable. You’re only as good as your last show or the ratings for last week, so you’re constantly trying to prove yourself or not slip up to give them an excuse to find somebody else. But it’s not like that here. When I come here…” The words trailed off, and he shook his head again. “I can’t explain that any more than I could the first time I really saw it in Jaycee—how she worked her tail off to make my life easier.
“She said it was her job, but it was more than that. She cares about other people, like deep down, way deep inside. She truly wants what’s best for them. They all do, and seeing that in them…” Derek tilted his head. “I don’t know, it makes me want to be like that, a better person if you want to call it that.”
Eric nodded, absorbing what Derek was saying. Strangely it was incredibly similar to what Greg had said and what Caleb had said. He couldn’t account for that, nor could he even articulate it, but he could see it just the same. “So you don’t mind if I stay and help out on Monday?”
The laugh was soft, more a breath. “Hey, it’s your house.”
They were in a pew right next to Caleb and Rachel, their kids and her mom when the pastor stepped into the sanctuary at nine o’clock. Eric sat up straighter, feeling like he would be judged and condemned any second now. He knew how few times they had been in church over the past few years. He knew it was probably his fault they had quit going. He also knew it was at least a good bet that he was the reason they were here now. Maybe he shouldn’t have prayed all those prayers, but what was done was done now. They were here, and he’d better figure out a way to make the best of it.
Not really knowing or remembering how to do this, they stood and sat and sang with the others. Without looking at her, he knew Dani was less-than-thrilled to be here, but she was a good actress when need be, so he wasn’t worried that she wouldn’t pull this one off. When they sat for the sermon, he pulled his shoulders back and lifted his chin before sniffing the thoughts back and down. He might not have any real intention of listening, but he needed to look like he was.
“This morning, I would like to take up the difficult topic of sin,” the pastor said, and Eric’s eyes bugged out of his head. Great. This was just what Dani needed for ammunition to blast him for even suggesting this. “Now when we think of sin, we think of doing something against the will of God, something that we will be punished for. Often we think that punishment will occur someday, somewhere, after this l
ife.
“But for today, I want you to consider that sin, missing the mark of where God intended you to live does not just affect us someday, the effects start right now. You cannot sin, and it not affect you. In fact, sin is very much like taking small doses of cyanide. It poisons you from the inside out. It starts in your heart when you say, ‘This thing, x, is more important to me than God.’ So money, for example, is more important than God. Or my time on Sunday morning is more important to me than God. Or this possession is more important than God. In fact, if you go down the Ten Commandments, you will find that if you break any one of the other nine, you are automatically breaking number one. You are putting something else ahead of God and His best for your life.
“But we rationalize and justify our sin. We say things like, ‘Well, we have to eat.’ Or ‘a man’s got to make a living.’ When what we’re really saying is, ‘I am justified in my sin.’ Justified in your sin. Now is that an oxymoron or what? In fact, every time you sin, you deliberately turn just a little farther away from God.” Without warning, the pastor stepped to the side of the podium. “Caleb, do you mind coming up here and helping me out for a minute?”
Clearly Caleb hadn’t been prepared for the request as it took a good minute to get him untangled from the children and Rachel. He stood, readjusted his suit jacket, and stepped forward. At the front, the pastor stood on the step and looked at him.
“Now I’m going to ask you a question that’s going to sound like a trick, but don’t over think it, okay?”
Caleb’s laugh said he would try. “K.”
“Good.” The pastor nodded and looked right at him. “Can you see me?”
Tipping his head slightly to the left, Caleb thought for a second. “Yes?”
The pastor laughed. “You don’t sound too sure of that, but it was the right answer. Of course, he can see me, right? He’s two feet away from me, but what if, he turns an eighth of a turn? Like this.” Taking hold of Caleb, he turned him slightly. “Now can you see me?”
Raising Attabury: A Contemporary Christian Epic-Novel (The Grace Series Book 5) Page 13
