And the Shofar Blew (6 page)

He nodded.

“A couple of guys working on the foundation came in the other afternoon. Hector Mendoza and a giant who calls himself Tree House. You know ’em?”

“Yes, ma’am. They’re the reason I’m here. They told me Charlie’s Diner was the place to come for good food and friendly service. They just didn’t warn me how friendly.”

She laughed with the others. “Well, Hector and Tree House said the place is going to be over six thousand square feet, and only Atherton and his new wife living in it,” Sally announced to everyone listening. “Can you imagine? What do people do with that much space?”

Keep their distance,
Stephen thought cynically, and pulled his wallet from his back pocket. He extracted a twenty and handed it to Sally, who punched the amount into the register and handed him his change. He put a 20 percent tip on the counter as he stood. “Thanks.” He’d needed the few minutes of human interaction before he went back to self-inflicted solitude.

She grinned. “Good-looking
and
generous.” She folded the bills and tucked them into her apron pocket. “You come back real soon, Stephen, you hear?”

“I plan on making this a regular stop.” He gave her a casual salute.

The bell jingled as he went out the door. Maybe Centerville was just the place he needed to be to lick his wounds.

Eunice closed the front door of the parsonage and set off toward Main Street holding Timmy by the hand. She tossed the end of the white woolen scarf over her shoulder to keep off the fall chill and fought tears. Paul usually walked with them, but he was preparing for a meeting today. Time with him was becoming scarce and precious.

It would be Christmas soon—their second Christmas in Centerville. Why was it that troubles often occurred during the holiday season? Which meant that even more time would be taken away from the family. But it couldn’t be helped. She remembered how it was growing up in a pastor’s home.

Oh, how she missed her parents. The ache of loss was always greater during Christmastime. Memories flooded her, taking her back to childhood in a small Pennsylvania town and the church family her father had served as a lay pastor for twenty-five years. In some ways, Centerville reminded her of Coal Ridge. The congregation had been less than fifty and as closely knit as blood kin. Young people had grown up and moved away. Most had married “outsiders.”

During spring break of Eunice’s senior year at Midwest Christian, Paul had driven her home to Pennsylvania to meet her parents. Her father’s and mother’s reserve had made him doubly conscious of everything he said and did, but he had been single-minded in gaining their acceptance. Not that he needed to worry. They showered him with love and attention. “I was lucky to have five minutes a day with my father,” Paul had told her later. “He was always busy with church business.”

Paul was becoming busier with each month that passed. She was concerned, but not distressed. She walked along the tree-lined street, thinking about her parents. How had they managed to balance home and church obligations? There had never been any doubt that they were devoted to one another as well as to the body of Christ.

Her mother and father had died within two years of one another. One of the elders had performed her mother’s funeral service. Eunice had felt like an orphan when everyone walked away and left her standing at her parents’ graves. She had been six months pregnant at the time. Paul had come home to Coal Ridge with her, but had been eager to return to the classes he was teaching. It was the only time she ever argued with him. Her emotions had been such a jumble, her grief so intense. Paul thought it best to go home. He’d wanted to be the one to distribute covenant papers. She’d been so hurt and angry she said she didn’t remember the Lord ever demanding that His disciples sign a piece of paper in order to have a covenant relationship with Him. Paul finally said they could stay another few days, but she knew grief didn’t always fit a church schedule and said they could go back to Illinois.

A pastor’s wife couldn’t expect to have her husband all to herself.

During the few days they had stayed in Coal Ridge, she had tried to imagine what Paul thought of the place where she’d grown up. Shabby houses, more bars than any other kind of business, stores closed. The mine where her father and the rest of the townspeople had worked had closed down for good, and the town was dying. The few townspeople who remained eked out a living on Social Security. No pastor had come to replace her father. What bright young college graduate would want to come to a dead-end town with no prospects for the future?

Still, the church had continued, though it changed. People no longer came on Sundays to hear Cyrus McClintock preach. They came to sit in the creaking pews and pray for everyone and everything the Lord laid upon their hearts. The doors remained unlocked throughout the week so that whoever felt the nudge of the Lord could come and pray. Eunice had no doubt those precious people her father had shepherded for so many years would continue to offer up praise and pleas until the last member went home to heaven.

Centerville Christian Church was changing, too, but Eunice wasn’t completely comfortable with what she saw happening. Paul’s ambitions for the church were growing just as the church was growing. The pews were filling up with new people. Visitors came out of curiosity, and became regular attendees because they loved Paul’s style of preaching.

Lord, what is it that’s beneath my concern? Am I being selfish? Why this sense
of discontent in the midst of such blessing? Help me through this. Help me see
clearly.

She had tried to talk to Paul about it, but found it difficult to put her concerns into words. He still made time for her and Timmy, just not as much as before they had come here. But that was understandable. The responsibilities of a pastor were greater than those of an associate pastor.

“When we got here, there were fewer than sixty people in the pews on any given Sunday, Euny. The idea is to
build
the church, not allow it to stagnate.”

Her first thought flew to Samuel and Abby Mason, both of whom lived a vibrant faith, practicing all they had been taught by the previous pastor, Henry Porter. Eunice wished she and Paul had arrived a few days earlier in order to meet this gentleman and his wife who had served so long and so faithfully and were still so well loved. “Just because there were only a few members doesn’t mean their faith was stagnant.”

“What would you call it when nothing is going on? Sure, they’ve had their little prayer meetings, and a Bible study that’s been going on in Samuel’s house for the past twenty years, but are they out there harvesting souls for Jesus? What do you call that kind of faith if not stagnant?”

“It was Samuel’s prayers God heard, Paul. It was his prayers that brought you here.”

“I know. And Samuel has been praying for revival. He told me, too. That’s what I’m trying to bring, Euny. Revival!”

Eunice knew she had chosen the wrong time to talk with him and seek his counsel. Paul was always impatient on Saturday, putting the last polishes on his sermon and practicing it for Sunday morning. “I think I’ll go out for a walk with Timmy.”

He caught her hand. “Euny, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so harsh. You just don’t understand. You came from a little church that had no possibility of growth. There’s potential here. God put us in the right place at the right time, but it’s up to us to do His work.”

It wasn’t the right time to tell him he might be trying too hard to follow in his father’s footsteps.

“By the way,” he said as she opened the door, “we’re going to start changing the music to meet the needs of the congregation.”

“The congregation loves hymns.”

“The older members, maybe, but the new people coming in have other tastes. The suggestion box indicates a change is needed if we’re going to turn newcomers into members. We won’t change everything at once, Euny, but I’d like you to introduce a new song each week, from the book we used back in Illinois.”

Eunice walked along Main Street, wishing she could talk again with her father and mother. They might have been plain folks with little education, but they had possessed more wisdom than she had seen in some pastors who shepherded flocks in the thousands. Sometimes Eunice wondered if Paul wasn’t being driven by his past, prodded by his own feelings of inadequacy. He’d always worked hard to prove himself worthy. His father had shown him little, if any, grace. Despite Paul’s seeming self-assurance, he was a young man still desperate to gain his father’s approval.

Her father had seen that in Paul and told her to encourage and love him through the years ahead, and choose her battles with wisdom. And her mother had said to be patient and willing to step aside for those in greater need. She held their advice close to her heart.

Oh, Lord, You’ve given me this wonderful husband. I don’t deserve him
.

It was a miracle Paul had even looked twice at her, a girl from a small hick town, the first in her family to go to college. From the moment she met Paul, the latest in a long family line of educated pastors, she’d thought him far too good for her. What did she have to offer a man like him, other than adoration? Everyone on campus knew who Paul Hudson was, with his impeccable Christian pedigree.

She had resisted going out with him at first because she felt unworthy. She had been flattered when he asked her out, and in love with him by the end of their first date. She had turned him down two times after that, convinced she was headed for heartbreak. But Paul was persistent.

It had been months into their courtship before she began to see the hurt and struggle within him, the burden of pain he carried from childhood. She remembered how uncomfortable she had been the first time she attended the church Paul’s father had built. She’d felt out of place among the thousands of affluent parishioners in their expensive suits and adorned with real gold jewelry. And they had all sat mesmerized by David Hudson’s preaching. He stood above them on a stage, holding the Bible in one hand and gesturing with the other as he paced back and forth, looking over the massive audience. He was eloquent and elegant, polished and perfect in his presentation.

She had been embarrassed when she realized Paul’s mother was watching her closely. Had her feelings of disquiet shown? It was the first time in her relationship with Paul that she had felt that “check in her spirit,” as her father called it. As though God was trying to show her something, and she didn’t have the eyes to see. She looked closer and listened harder, but still she couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong or why she was troubled. The words were right. . . .

She was feeling the same check in her spirit now.

She had few illusions, having grown up as a preacher’s daughter. She would always have to share Paul with others. The demands on her husband would always be great. The needs of others would often outweigh her own. She could accept that. Still, she missed discussing the Bible with him. She was as passionate about it as he. But lately, Paul grew annoyed when she had another viewpoint. He became defensive.

Perhaps it was the strain after the elders’ meeting.

She had always prayed she would marry a pastor like her father. She had worked hard so that she would qualify for a scholarship to a Christian college, knowing she was more likely to meet godly men in a godly environment. Her father had told her before sending her off on a Greyhound bus that not every young man on a Christian campus was a Christian. She told him a year later that not all professors on a Christian campus were Christians either.

She had never once questioned Paul’s faith, nor did she question it now. He loved the Lord. He had been called into ministry.

Oh, Lord, let Paul experience Your grace. Let him feel Your amazing love. He
had so little of it from his natural father.

He was pouring his heart into Centerville Christian. Hadn’t her mother warned her that the life of a pastor was never easy and harder sometimes for his wife? “He’ll get calls in the middle of the night and have to go out in the snow be-cause someone is sick or dying or in distress. And you’ll have to fix his breakfast and his lunch and thank God if you have an uninterrupted meal with him.”

At least Paul received an adequate salary from the church and didn’t have to work a day job in order to support his family. Even at that, she couldn’t remember a time when her father hadn’t been there when her mother needed him. Or when his daughter had needed him. He had
made
time. Not once had her father ever made her feel she was his last priority.

She had to stop thinking like this. Wallowing in self-pity wouldn’t help. She could hunger for Paul’s attention, but not be so selfish as to demand it. The other day she had been taken aback when he said, “I never knew you were so needy.” She blushed in shame thinking about it.
Needy.
Was she? A clinging woman held a man back from doing what God intended. She must learn to stand beside him instead of standing in his way.

Everything was so jumbled. One doubt led to another until her mind was in confusion. She had come out for this walk to give Paul space to do what he needed. Timmy had been begging Daddy to play soccer with him, but Paul had to prepare for another meeting.

“Cast off those things that keep you from serving Christ wholeheartedly,” Paul had said last Sunday.

Was it her
neediness
that made her feel cast off? Or was Paul’s focus so fixed upon the task ahead that he couldn’t see she needed him as much today as she had on their wedding day?
Lord, You are my constant companion.
You always have time for me.

“Eunice!”

Surprised, Eunice uttered a soft laugh, realizing she had walked over a mile to the Masons’ house. “Your garden looks wonderful.”

Abby’s face shone with welcome as she set her weed bucket aside, brushed off her hands on her apron, and opened the gate. “I was just about to take a break. Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?”

“I’d love it, Abby.”

“Sam!” Timmy broke away and ran toward the house. “Sam!” He sounded like he was calling for help.

Eunice felt the heat pour into her cheeks.
“Mr. Mason,
Timmy. You should call him Mr. Mason.”

Abby laughed. “Sam is home, Timmy. And he’ll be delighted to see his little buddy.”

“Sam!” Timmy stopped on the porch.

Abby opened the front door. “Samuel, you have company.”

“Sam-u-el.”

“It’s all right, Eunice.” Abby chuckled.

Timmy made a beeline through the family room to the open door that led into Samuel Mason’s small study. “Sam-uuuuuu-el.”

Eunice thought of how much her father would have loved Timmy. She pressed her fingers against trembling lips.
Oh, Daddy, I wish you’d lived long
enough so that my son could have run to you the way he’s running to Samuel
Mason.

Abby’s laughter died. Her expression softened as she reached out and slipped her arm around Eunice’s waist. “Come in, dear. Let’s go in the kitchen. I’ll fix us some coffee, and you can tell me what’s troubling you.”

Eunice felt as though she’d come home.