“I can tell you what’s going to happen,” he said quietly. “We’re going to get out of the truck. I’m going to hold your hand while we walk into the building. We’re going to sit down next to Dawson and Caroline and their kids. They’re going to beso happythat we’re here. Then Willa Glover is going to get up. She’s going to talk about the Savior and His love and His mercy and His grace for all of us. Every single man there is gonna wonder how I got you to go out with me, and who you are, and whytheyhaven’t met you and snatched you up yet.”
She scoffed again, but Brandon smiled.
“Then we’re going to sing the closing hymn, and we’ll say hello to my momma and daddy, and Arizona, and Duke, andtheir kids. Then we’ll walk out of that building hand-in-hand, and I’m going to take you somewhere amazing for lunch.”
Lenore dropped her head, a singular golden curl coming forward to fall over her shoulder. She normally wore her hair straight back in a ponytail, and Brandon sure liked this look for church. She’d dusted on a little bit of makeup as well when she normally didn’t, and a warmth filled Brandon. It told him he wanted his home to be with Lenore on the homestead.
While he’d been able to get his voice to say a lot of things, he couldn’t figure out how to tell her that.
“Come on,” he said roughly. “Let’s go in.” He got out first and went around to help her down. He walked with her, her hand in his, into the chapel. He found Dawson and Caroline on the left side, where two seats on the end waited, as planned.
He let Lenore go into the pew first, and he sat down on the end beside her, putting his arm around her back. He squeezed his brother’s shoulder while Caroline leaned forward, reached across Dawson, and patted Lenore’s knee.
“How are you two?” Dawson asked, the picture of calmness—though Brandon knew he suffered with plenty of his own mental problems.
“Uncle Brannon!” Colt said from the other side of Caroline, but Dawson leaned forward and shook his head.
“You can talk to him after, son. It’s about to start.”
Colt didn’t like that, but Brandon let his parents deal with him, because Pastor Glover had just gotten up behind the podium, and Brandon always enjoyed the things she said.
“Good morning, brothers and sisters,” Pastor Glover started. “You may have noticed we did not begin in our usual way. There is no choir coming down the aisles. There is no organ this morning.”
She smiled as if this were a wonderful thing. “That’s because our organ broke this week during choir practice.” She chuckled,though she didn’t exactly sound happy. “It is exceptionally bad timing as we prepare for our Christmas program, but as Cactus and I fiddled with it after we sent the choir home, I had the strangest feeling….” Her voice grew tender. “That God’s timing is perfect.”
Brandon ducked his head, his eyes following the grain of the wood on the pew in front of him.
“He knows Christmas is only a couple of weeks away,” the pastor said. “He knows we get more people to church on Christmas than any other time of year. He knows how incredibly important the choir and musical numbers are to me for our Christmas program.”
She paused, and Brandon lifted his head in time to see her swiping at her eyes. That alone made his chest constrict, because Pastor Glover meant a lot to him.
She’d aged over the years, and Brandon hadn’t even noticed until that moment. She always preached with such power and expressive facial expressions. And she signed—especially now that her son had opened his Deaf Academy and they had more deaf and hard-of-hearing attendees.
“My husband has been calling around for an organ repairman,” Pastor Glover continued, her voice steady, though her eyes remained bright. “We’ve learned that people who know how to repair organs are very hard to find and in very short supply. We’ve been quoted January, February, even May. And obviously, none of those will do in order to salvage the Christmas program.”
She looked left and right, her hands in ASL finally catching up to her words in English “Just when I thought I’d learned enough in this life, God continues to teach me.”
Pastor Glover drew a deep breath. “I know He could fix that organ. I know He could give me an idea of what to do, or He could lead Cactus to a person who could come tomorrow to fix it.
“I also know that sometimes I try to fix everything myself, using temporal means here on earth, when I should turn to the divine.
“That is my message to you today. Are you trying to control too much on your own? What could be different if you opened the door to the Lord? If you trusted thatHistiming is perfect, and thatHewill provide for you in the very hour that you need it?”
Her questions sank deep into Brandon’s heart, and then his mind, and then his soul.
He’d burrowed deep within himself, but the sound of sniffing beside him brought him back to awareness. He looked at Lenny and found her quietly weeping. He tightened his arm around her, pulling her closer to him, as if he could shield her from anything bad in this world.
She looked at him, gave a wobbly half-smile, and laid her head against his chest.
“I don’t know what will happen with the Christmas program,” Pastor Glover said. “Perhaps we will play recorded music. Or perhaps the piano will suffice. Or perhaps God will tell Pastor Knowlton and I something else He would like us to do.
“No matter what, I trust Him. I believe in His divinity and His power to work miracles—not only in my life, but in each of yours. I encourage you to strengthen your own trust in, and belief of, God’s power and timing.”
Brandon ducked his head again. He had always been one to go with the flow, laughing along the way and moving from one thing to the next. He had lived an easy life until the past year or so, when he realized he wanted more than casual dating, and a new girlfriend every month, and a life inside a shared two-bedroom cabin.
Stepping out of that comfort zone had been hard for him, and he’d assumed God would immediately provide the things he’d suddenly found lacking in his life.
But He hadn’t.
