by Alana Terry
Jade made a point of turning to look at the bear-shaped clock hanging in the church foyer. “Good, because a minute’s all I got.”
“Is there some place where we could sit down?”
Jade shrugged. “It’s a free country, right?” She decided Pastor Reggie wouldn’t be needing his office tonight, seeing as how he was on vacation with his family in the Lower 48. She started to head that way then stopped when Aisha touched her arm.
“Sorry,” she whispered again. “We started talking outside, and I mentioned that letter. I should have asked you first.”
“Yeah, you should have.” Jade brushed passed her friend, holding the door open for the trooper. Once they were situated in her pastor’s office, she crossed her arms and stared at him. “Like I said earlier, I don’t have a lot of time. What’s this all about?”
Chapter 2
BEN SEEMED TO TAKE a lifetime to decide where and how to sit.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked once they were finally situated.
Jade didn’t answer. As far as she saw it, she’d never be comfortable. Not held up by some white cop ten minutes before she was supposed to stand up and share her testimony in front of her whole church.
And for what? That letter was just some stupid ploy. It didn’t mean anything. Jade had lived her life in fear. She was an expert on the subject and had eventually learned that fear can’t kill you.
And that you don’t go to the police when you’ve got a problem. It was bad enough the daycare where she worked invited the troopers in once a month to read stories to the kids. It was just as well the men who came couldn’t read her mind, or they’d never come back.
Jade still had her arms crossed, but Ben didn’t seem to know what to do with his. “I saw the announcement in the newspaper,” he finally explained. “Thought I’d come hear you.”
Is that all he had to say to her? She stared at Pastor Reggie’s stack of Alaska Fishing magazines and waited.
He cleared his throat. “I’m new to the area and heard a lot of good things about the church.”
“Mm-hmm. I’m sure you did.”
Ben glanced at her questioningly. She held his gaze until he looked away.
Finally, she decided it was time to put this conversation out of its misery. “Listen, if Aisha told you about that letter, I want you to know it’s all under control. It’s totally fine.”
“Your friend seemed pretty worried about it.”
Jade shrugged. “She gets like that, but trust me. It’s nothing. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Ben leaned forward earnestly, his eyes nearly as large as Pastor Reggie’s mounted moose head behind him. “I want you to know this is the kind of thing we take seriously down at the trooper station.”
“I bet you do.” Jade stood up. “Well, if there’s nothing else, officer, I need to get ready.”
Ben nodded. “Will you let me know if there’s anything I can do to help?”
Help? There was a new one. As far as Jade could tell, policemen like him had helped her family far too much already.
She opened the door of the office, mumbling, “I’m sure I’ll be all right,” as she let herself out.
Chapter 3
BEFORE JADE COULD HEAD downstairs to check on her daughter, Aisha hurried toward her. “Listen, I’m sorry about that trooper. I didn’t know he’d want to talk to you right away. I just kind of mentioned it in passing ...”
Jade rolled her eyes, figuring it must be their differences that kept her and Aisha close. Jade had given up any desire for romance or even casual dating, but Aisha would flirt with anybody under the age of fifty. Men in uniform were one of her special weak points. Jade was certain that Ben’s trooper’s badge was all Aisha had to see to start fawning all over him, and what better way to snag his attention than to blab about some threatening note Jade received in the mail?
“Don’t worry about it,” Jade mumbled. She couldn’t afford to stand here all night and convince Aisha that everything was fine. She’d lost enough time already. Men and women were filing to their seats, smiling at Jade as they passed the family of carved bears welcoming congregants to the service.
On with the show.
She straightened her shirt, smoothed out her pants, and walked into the sanctuary with her head held high, resolving to forget about Aisha and that silly trooper. Jade would bet her paycheck from the daycare that Ben would ask Aisha out before Christmas rolled around. She could have him. Jade had a testimony to focus on.
She made her way to the front row and bowed her head, partly because she wanted to pray and partly so people wouldn’t come up and try to strike up any conversations. She clasped her hands in her lap. Were they still shaking? What was it about tonight’s testimony that had her so worked up? This was Glennallen. There was hardly anyone she hadn’t met in this town, and most of them were already familiar with her story. If anything, tonight was her chance to tell her testimony in her own words so her neighbors wouldn’t have to rely on second- and third-hand information.
Nothing like a small town in rural Alaska to get the gossip fires roaring like mad.
Jade shut her eyes. She had to focus her attention on what she was going to say. Had to make sure that her spirit was in the right place.
Help me, God, she prayed when a shrill, whiny voice interrupted.
“Mama!”
Jade snapped her eyes open. “What did I tell you about bugging me when I’m up here?” she hissed, hoping that since she was in the front row, the people behind couldn’t detect the annoyance in her expression. If they knew how exasperated she got with her daughter, they might all think twice about inviting her to share tonight.
“I’m so bored down there,” Dez groaned and plopped into a chair with a melodramatic sigh.
Jade pinched her arm. “You get yourself back downstairs, or I’m taking away those new light-up shoes, got it?”
Dez turned to her mom once more with wide, pleading eyes. “But I’m old enough to be up here, and I promise to be real quiet.”
“Well, you and I both know it’s impossible for you to be real quiet. Now get downstairs.” The last thing Jade needed was for Dez to hear her testimony tonight and start asking a thousand questions about their past. Jade forced a stern expression as her daughter tilted her head to the side and stuck out her lower lip.
“None of that now.” Jade cracked a smile and gave her daughter a playful swat on the arm. “Go get yourself downstairs or I’ll tan your behind.”
“No you won’t.” Dez was smiling now. “You’re always saying that, but I don’t even know what it means.”
“If you don’t know what it means, then you should be a lot more worried than you are.”
Dez rolled her eyes again, but it was clear to see she was trying hard not to grin.
“Go downstairs, baby,” Jade repeated.
“But Mrs. Spencer’s gonna make me practice my angel lines.”
“Then practice your angel lines, baby. I swear, I’ve never seen a child more stubborn than you.” She let out her breath, softening her voice. As a new Mom, Jade had resolved to never resort to bribery, but that was before she had any idea what it was like to negotiate with a precocious preschooler. “Tell you what. If you’re real good, I’ll take you out for ice cream after the service.”
“But it’s too cold,” Dez complained. “You can’t eat ice cream in the middle of winter.”
Jade found herself wondering for a moment if Dez really was her flesh-and-blood child. “Of course you can. Who’s been raising you, my little Eskimo baby?” She tickled her daughter’s ribs. Dez squealed and ran down the aisle. Jade just hoped she wouldn’t trip anyone on her way out of the sanctuary.
With Pastor Reggie out of state, Jade wasn’t sure who was going to start the service. These Tuesday night meetings had started out as just a prayer service, but then they added a worship band. Next, Pastor Reggie started to ask people to share their testimonies until finally it was like h
aving a second church meeting in the middle of the week. Jade didn’t mind. With the sun setting by 3:30 at the latest during this phase of the Alaskan winter, it wasn’t as if there were a whole lot else that she and Dez could be doing. Still, with its being so close to Christmas, she would have thought more people would be out of town traveling, but the sanctuary was as full as it was on a typical Sunday.
Great. On top of the crowd, the couple who usually led worship was out with the flu, and Reggie and his family were out of town, so Jade’s talk was going to be the focal point of the evening. It was hard to think that all these people had come just to hear her. Up until recently, Jade hadn’t thought of her testimony as anything special, especially when you compared it to the stories of Christians who were saved out of lives of alcoholism or addiction or truly destructive behaviors. She didn’t feel ready to talk in front of a group this large, and she certainly didn’t feel like she’d had enough time to pray and prepare herself spiritually, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it at this point.
One of the elders welcomed everyone to the meeting, offered a quick word of prayer, and then Jade was standing before a church full of people waiting to hear her story.
Chapter 4
FOR ALL OF ITS ROCKY start, Jade’s testimony picked up until she almost forgot that she was the one speaking. Explaining her history, it felt more like she was one of the dozens of church members sitting in the rows of chairs, listening to her talk about the way God had worked in her life.
She sensed the general interest in the room, and when she talked about the church she grew up in while she was still living in Palmer, Alaska, she saw her audience leaning in as if refusing to miss a single word. She painted them a picture with her words, a picture of the extreme control the leadership at Morning Glory International held over her family, over their congregation. At one point, her eyes landed on Ben, the trooper sitting in the back row, and she saw the same interest and curiosity in his expression as she felt from the rest of the church.
Her hands clammed up for an instant, making it hard to hold onto the microphone. She pried her eyes away from his and avoided looking at that section of the sanctuary for the rest of her speech.
“The funny thing about it,” she explained, “is that we would have never used a word like cult to describe ourselves. Even though it sounds pretty obvious to other people that what we were involved with was definitely not a healthy Christian church, we didn’t know that. We were all taught, not just the kids but our parents too, that it was a grave sin to disrespect our leaders or question their authority in any way. Since we all upheld and respected the Bible, we believed that it would be wrong to go against anything our pastor said. At least once a month the preacher would talk about how Miriam bad-mouthed Moses and was struck with leprosy. The moral was always that we should never question God’s leaders. I asked my five-year-old about it a few weeks ago, and that particular part of Scripture hasn’t even come up in her Sunday school lessons. She’s never even heard of it, but it was more common at our church than Noah’s ark or Easter Sunday or any of the other Bible stories.
“It wasn’t just Sundays either. We had meetings just about every night of the week, and if you missed something, you needed to have a really good reason or the elders would start to question if you were backslidden. You couldn’t miss a service if you were sick, either. You were supposed to come even if you were throwing up a lung and have the elders pray for you and anoint you with oil, right there in front of everybody. And if you didn’t recover by the end of the service, that was another time where people would question if you were backslidden. My mom pushed vitamins on all of us like we’d die without them because she knew people would question her spiritual health if her family ever caught a cold.”
Jade’s hands were still sweaty, but that wasn’t because she was staring at the trooper anymore. It was because she knew what part of the story was coming up. She swallowed once, trying to recapture the sense of calm she’d had just a moment earlier.
Unfortunately, she knew that this part of her testimony wouldn’t be nearly so easy to get through.
“The biggest problem was that there was no accountability for the elders or the head pastor. If they did something wrong, nobody would dare call them out on it. There was abuse of all kinds. If it’s a kind of abuse you can imagine, it was probably happening at Morning Glory, and most of the leaders knew about it. Some of them were honest and God-fearing, but some were the actual perpetrators. Due to this whole idea that you can’t question what your leaders do, lots of people got hurt, including children.”
She winced, hating to even say the words, hating to remember what she went through.
She was staring at her hands now, wondering if anyone else could see them tremble. She glanced up once and caught Aisha’s eye, gleaning an extra dose of strength. If she told her story — even the humiliating and painful parts — maybe she’d help someone else in the future, someone going through the same thing.
“The pastor of Morning Glory took an interest in me, and I got pregnant when I was seventeen. I’ve since then learned that I wasn’t the only underaged girl who found herself in that situation, but the others were encouraged to go have abortions. I refused. I knew what had happened to me was wrong, but the idea of an abortion terrified me. So I told my parents.”
She swallowed down the lump in her throat. A few members of the congregation were looking at her with so much sympathy it was like they were trying to squeeze the tears straight out of her body. One woman toward the front was silently weeping.
Jade felt bad for making everyone else depressed. Weren’t testimonies supposed to be uplifting? She forced a smile. “Thankfully, my parents believed me and took action. We left the church, which is a whole long and complicated story in and of itself.” Jade took in a deep, choppy breath. She wanted to tell them everything. She’d never skipped over this part of her testimony before, but tonight she couldn’t get the words out. Couldn’t tell them what it really cost her family when they filed charges against the Morning Glory leadership.
She raised her head and glanced at the clock. Mercifully, her time was almost over.
“I won’t get into all the details, but the short version is I ended up delivering my healthy daughter, Dezzirae, right before I started my senior year of high school. I later grew to realize that all believers have access to the same God. We don’t need a pastor or an elder telling us when we have to go to church or how we should raise our kids or what we should do with our futures. We can all talk to God on our own. And that’s not to discount how important it is to have a church family and to have mentors who can give you wisdom and support, even though I’ll be the first to admit I still really struggle when it comes to issues of authority after everything we went through.”
She glanced once at Ben, who was studying her attentively.
“I’m just really thankful that my parents had the courage to stand up to the leadership like they did because I have other friends whose parents were too afraid to do or say anything.” Jade’s mouth turned dry, and her words caught somewhere in the back of her throat. A picture of her dad, smiling and serene, flitted uninvited into her mind.
She blinked, forcing herself to stay composed. “I guess that’s what I want to end with tonight. A reminder that we’re all children of God, whether or not we’re a pastor or an elder or have any kind of fancy title, and we all are given the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us.”
She gave the audience a brief nod and turned off the microphone. She wasn’t sure if one of the elders was going to close the meeting right away or if they would take a little time for prayer requests before everyone left, but she didn’t care.
Walking down the side aisle to keep from distracting anyone, Jade hurried out of the sanctuary. She turned on her car’s autostart as she made her way downstairs. If she was lucky, she could grab Dez and have the car warmed up before the congregation was dismissed. The last thing she felt like doing wa
s making chitchat with three dozen people who wanted to talk to her about her life’s deepest pain.
Breathless and impatient, she swung open the door of the church nursery, hoping that Dez might have forgotten the promise of ice cream and instead would settle on some hot chocolate back home.
“How’d it go upstairs?” Mrs. Spencer asked, glancing up from the book she was reading to her twin grandchildren in the rocking chair.
“Fine. Thanks so much for being down here.”
“My pleasure.”
Jade glanced around the room. “Is Dez ready to go?”
Mrs. Spencer blinked at her. “I’m sorry?”
“I’ve got the car running,” Jade explained as she picked up her daughter’s jacket from the nursery coat rack. “Is Dez ready?”
“I thought she went upstairs with you. She told me she was going to ask if that was okay.” Mrs. Spencer stood up, setting her girls down on the ground.
“No,” Jade answered. “She came up to ask if she could stay, but I sent her back down here.” She mentally rehearsed everybody she’d seen in that sanctuary. It was a larger crowd than she’d expected but certainly not big enough that she would have missed seeing her own child.
The dry lump returned to her throat, and her heart started pounding high in her chest.
Where was her daughter?
Chapter 5
JADE’S VOICE WAS HOARSE, not from giving her testimony but from shouting into every bathroom stall, storage closet, and hiding place in Glennallen Bible Church. Initially she ignored the terrified feeling in the base of her gut. Dez was just throwing a silent fit somewhere to protest being sent downstairs with old Mrs. Spencer and the “babies.” Either that or she was playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek.
It was what Jade had to believe, and instead of focusing on her fears, she rehearsed all the ways she’d lecture her daughter.