Emerald Windows

by Terri Blackstock

  Bill struggled to his feet. Nick grabbed the man’s collar and shoved him against the wall, his face inches from Bill’s. “Don’t you ever lay a hand on that girl again!”

  “All this White Knight stuff is pretty noble coming from you,” Bill spat out, his lip dribbling blood. “You know, you and I aren’t so different. You liked them young too, if I remember.”

  Nick jolted the man’s head against the wall again and jerked his face up so that Bill couldn’t avoid seeing the fire in Nick’s eyes. He threw Bill to his knees, and the man crawled to his feet again— then turned, only to see Roxy’s father coming toward him with his own raging intentions.

  “Call the police, Alice!” George shouted.

  Bill barreled past them toward his car, his eyes luminous.

  George started after Bill, but Roxy stopped him. “It’s over, Daddy,” she said, her sobs punctuating her words. “I don’t want everyone to know about this. The Hemphills will just tell more lies, and it’ll get out of hand, and we’ll spend the next ten years fighting them. Nick stopped him before he did anything.”

  “That man should be in jail,” Nick said, his shoulders rising and falling with each heavy breath. His eyes met Brooke’s as she ran out of the house. “You have to report this,” he said.

  Brooke took a tentative step toward him. “Thank God you were here,” she whispered.

  Nick wiped the cold sweat from his face, then looked down at his feet, his heart pained with regret. “I came over to tell you how sorry I am about the sculpture, and there he was…”

  George Martin tapped Nick’s shoulder, and Nick turned to face the man who had once wanted to kill him—the man who had believed for nearly a decade that he’d stolen his daughter’s virtue as shamelessly as Bill had tried to steal Roxy’s. Holding Roxy protectively under one arm, George extended his right hand to Nick. “I think I’ve been wrong about a few things,” he said quietly. “I owe you an—”

  “You don’t owe me anything, not after the trouble you folks have had over the years because of me,” Nick cut in, his eyes misting with emotion.

  “Well, maybe I was wrong about that too.”

  Brooke’s eyes filled with tears as Nick took her father’s hand and shook it in both of his. When her family had gone back inside to call the police, Nick fell back against the side of the house and raked both hands through his hair. He looked at Brooke, the moonlight casting curved slivers of light in his weary eyes.

  “Nick, there’s something I have to tell you,” she whispered. “When I was at your house tonight, I started reading your Bible. And before you came home, I prayed, and…I gave my life to Christ.”

  Nick closed his eyes, wondering if he’d heard right. Sweet relief began to gently ease its way into his heart.

  “Tonight when you came home and said those things and broke the sculpture, I would have thought my life was over, if I hadn’t prayed that earlier. And I came home and prayed some more, and I know that God knows what’s best for me. I know that whatever He has planned, it’s better than anything I could have come up with. So it’s okay that you don’t want to be more than friends and colleagues. If we weren’t meant to be—”

  Before she could finish, he pulled her into his arms and clung to her with all his might. “He did have it planned,” he whispered as tears rose in his throat. “We are meant to be. I thought I was being obedient, listening to Him about how we were different. But we’re not different, Brooke. We’re the same.”

  She pulled back and looked at him. “Those goals and beliefs and values? Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes. It was all about God, Brooke. I want to be obedient.”

  “I do too. But I’ll need help. I don’t know much about God.”

  “I’ll teach you.” He crushed her against him again, then whispered, “Let’s not wait and play the dating game and pretend we don’t know what we want, Brooke. Will you marry me?”

  Brooke pressed her forehead against his mouth and closed her eyes, savoring the words she had longed so many times to hear. “Yes, I’ll marry you,” she whispered.

  His kiss was everything she had expected, more than she had dreamed. Bright light glowed in her grateful heart as she thanked her God for giving her such joy.

  CHAPTER

  THE WHITE LIMOUSINE DRIVEN BY the pastor pulled to the front entrance of the new Hayden Bible Church, parting the hundreds of townspeople who had gathered there for the unveiling of the windows.

  Nick’s hand tightened over Brooke’s, and she looked up at him with wonder and awe in her emerald eyes. “Nick, look at all these people,” she whispered. “They actually came.”

  “They came as much out of gratitude as curiosity,” the pastor said. “I’ve been making phone calls myself, making sure everyone in town realizes the sacrifices you two made for those windows.”

  Nick leaned over and gazed, awestruck, at the cars he recognized in the parking lot.

  “Let’s just hope they like them, or we’ll be tarred and feathered by sundown.”

  Horace chuckled. “I’ve seen the windows. I don’t think that’s likely.”

  A cheer rose from the crowd as Brooke and Nick got out of the car, hands clasped tightly. They stood still for a moment, utterly amazed at the emotional welcome they received, but finally the pastor gestured for them to cut through the crowd and enter the finished church.

  They went in, shaking hands as they went, and found that the inside held even more people than were outside. The room resounded with a loud roar that crescendoed as they made their way through to the pulpit.

  Brooke felt a heady feeling of disbelief as she climbed the wine-colored steps. She glanced anxiously up at the windows, now covered in sheets that would drop to the floor at the assigned moment. Would the church members really like them when they saw them? Would they understand them?

  Nick nudged her lightly and gestured toward a cluster of people standing near the platform. Roxy and Sonny were standing arm in arm, beaming proudly up at them, and her parents stood next to them, their pride evident on their faces. And then she saw Mrs. Marcello and the Castori clan, all waving at Nick as if to show everyone in the room that he was one of them.

  The mayor stepped to the podium and quieted the crowd, and they saw the captive, anxious faces turn to listen. He began to speak about the reasons for the renovation, the steps involved in reconstructing the church, the church growth it would accommodate. Brooke’s mind wandered, and she glanced over the proud faces, one by one, and asked herself if these had, indeed, been the same people who had condemned her and run her out of town. Had they also been the ones who gossiped after she and Nick got married in the empty, unfinished church?

  But they were also the ones who had given donations out of their personal, individual funds to make up the balance of what they needed to complete the windows.

  Abby Hemphill was conspicuously absent, but Brooke had expected that. So much had gone wrong in the woman’s life in the past year. Bill, her son, had been arrested the night of his attack on Roxy, but had been released the next day because Roxy had refused to press the issue. But Bill had still wound up in jail the day after his baby was born, when he’d driven drunk and rammed his car into the glass front of a gas station, injuring the young woman in the car with him—a young woman who wasn’t his wife. The scandal had created an uncrossable chasm in Mrs. Hemphill’s family, and she had ultimately left her husband and her immaculate house and taken a condo in downtown St. Louis.

  “But these two weren’t daunted by the lack of funds available for a project they so believed in,” the pastor was saying, and Brooke moved her gaze back to him. “They made supreme gestures of sacrifice to get the money to build the windows for a town and a church that had been less than gracious to them. I consider this a real act of love for the Lord. But in gratitude for that love, the town of Hayden has a love offering to give to them in return. A belated wedding gift, if they want to consider it that.”

  Brooke looked up at
Nick, who seemed as confused as she as the crowd roared with delight, and she wondered if everyone in Hayden except she and Nick had been let in on the secret. The pastor stepped toward them. “We’ll need you to step outside for a moment, if you don’t mind.”

  Brooke and Nick looked at each other, and as the crowd parted, they stepped through and made their way to the door.

  As they stepped out into the sunlight, they saw the gift they had never expected. Nick’s grandfather’s Duesenberg sat in the parking lot, as shiny and perfect as the day he had sold it.

  Nick’s face went slack, and Brooke burst into tears.

  “The Finance Committee agreed to match, out of the church budget, whatever the members themselves could raise,” the pastor said, laughing with delight at the shock on their faces. “And boy, did they come up with it. It meant a lot to all of us to get the Duesy back for you.”

  Tears filled Brooke’s eyes, and she turned back to the crowd as another wave of applause swept over them. Nick drew her against him, his own poignant, eloquent expression touching her heart as he pulled Brooke with him to the microphone. “Thank you,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I can’t tell you…” His voice broke, and he took a moment to control himself. “…how much this means to me.”

  The crowd erupted in applause. He waited a moment as it died down, and finally he swallowed and nodded to Brooke that the moment of truth had come. “So now, if you’re ready, I guess it’s time to see what all the fuss is about.”

  He leaned down, cupped Brooke’s chin, and dropped a kiss on her lips. “I love you,” he whispered.

  “I love you,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  Together they reached for the single rope that would release the veils all the way around the church, and the crowd grew still with anticipation.

  They pulled, and the sheets billowed to the ground, revealing a panorama of some of the most poignant stories in the Bible—all of them about the covenant-keeping God who worked in each of their lives.

  For a moment, not one of all the hundreds of people present made a sound as they gazed up, their eyes circling the room, quietly experiencing the poetry of the windows.

  Brooke’s mouth went dry, and she shot Nick a panicked look. His frown told her he was as bewildered as she by the absolute silence.

  Then suddenly, near the front, someone began to clap.

  Then everyone was clapping, and Brooke saw other faces wet with tears, and children pointing overhead and asking questions of their parents, and elderly people nodding in affirmation. And it was as if each person there embraced the windows; as if they had been put there to speak directly to them.

  Nick pulled Brooke into his arms and kissed her before God and the world, beneath the halo of beauty they had created with their own hands. And as she held him close, Brooke knew that the rest of her life with Nick would be as intense as the work they produced together, as emotional as the visions they shared, as all-encompassing as the windows that skirted the ceiling of the church for all the world to celebrate. Because God was guiding them, together…

  Down the same lighted path.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Christ is the author and finisher of my faith, and the power and provider of my books. He is the One who gifts me with ideas that often keep me awake in the night. And it is He who grants a shared vision to those who play crucial roles in the publication of my work: Greg Johnson, Dave Lambert, Lori VandenBosch, Bob Hudson, Sue Brower, and so many others who have come to mean so much in my life. God has blessed me more than I could ever have hoped or imagined, and so often, these precious people are instruments of those blessings. I thank them for allowing me to dig through the layers of worldliness, youth, and misunderstanding originally written into this book so many years ago, and get to the heart of what the Lord intended for this story. And no words can ever express the depth of gratitude I have for my Lord, who is in the merciful business of granting second chances to those of us who long ago ran out of first ones.

  Author's Afterword

  Don’t you hate it when things change? I sure do. And at this writing, I’m looking ahead to a spiritual time of change. You see, my pastor, Dr. Frank Pollard, announced this week that he will be retiring in just a few months.

  As I sat in my pew and listened to that announcement, I found myself struck with grief, as if a family member were saying good-bye. Selfishly, I mourned the fact that such a stable, humble, precious part of my spiritual life would be moving on. I mourned for myself and wanted to cling and cry and ask him not to go. I wanted to run to him and ask, “What about me?” But I couldn’t speak at all, so I swallowed back my tears and decided to speak to him another time when I could be less selfish and think, instead, of all that God has in store for us as our church turns this corner.

  I didn’t realize how important this man was to my life, since his work in this megachurch made it impossible for frequent one-on-one contact with him. He had his hands full with eight thousand sheep. But over ten years ago, when I joined his church as a broken, grieving, divorced mother of two, Frank Pollard’s flock embraced me and drew me in. His philosophy was that church should be a healing place, not an execution chamber. He said time and time again that when hurting people came to our church we would send an ambulance and not a firing squad. In the triage of that wonderful place, my wounds were bound and my broken heart was healed. I was able to rediscover Christ there because he smiled at me from the faces of the members and he touched me through their hands. And through Frank Pollard’s two weekly messages, I grew in my walk in the Lord. His prayers and those of his flock unleashed God’s power on my life as I gave my career—my last holdout—to the Lord.

  So if my books have ministered to you, then you owe Frank Pollard too.

  But this is not about one man. This is about the power of the church. I often receive letters from Christians who aren’t plugged in and don’t have that support system, that accountability, that love. Some belong to dead churches where that support and ministry don’t really exist. They praise God alone from barren places and don’t know the joy of assembling together with other believers, belonging to a family to whom they can turn in times of joy and stress and devastation. They don’t know the joy of being challenged by a preacher who calls them to a closer walk with Jesus.

  For those, I pray that God will lead them to a new church, one where the Holy Spirit is evident at the front door, where his power is at work in the ministries of that church, where they can be engaged and active, and experience the joy of riding in that ambulance that goes to the hurting world, and tells them that healing can be found in Jesus Christ, and that he’s waiting to give it to them, if only they’ll give themselves to him.

  God was so good to give Frank Pollard to our church as a minister of his love. May each of you find a shepherd like him, to lead you toward the Great Shepherd.

  —Terri Blackstock

  About the Author

  Terri Blackstock is an award-winning novelist who has written for several major publishers including HarperCollins, Dell, Harlequin, and Silhouette. Published under two pseudonyms, her books have sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide.

  With her success in secular publishing at its peak, Blackstock had what she calls “a spiritual awakening.” A Christian since the age of fourteen, she realized she had not been using her gift as God intended. It was at that point that she recommitted her life to Christ, gave up her secular career, and made the decision to write only books that would point her readers to him.

  “I wanted to be able to tell the truth in my stories,” she said, “and not just be politically correct. It doesn’t matter how many readers I have if I can’t tell them what I know about the roots of their problems and the solutions that have literally saved my own life.”

  Her books are about flawed Christians in crisis and God’s provisions for their mistakes and wrong choices. She claims to be extremely qualified to write such books, since she’s had years of personal exper
ience.

  A native of nowhere, since she was raised in the Air Force, Blackstock makes Mississippi her home. She and her husband are the parents of three children—a blended family which she considers one more of God’s provisions.

  Seaside

  Terri Blackstock

  Seaside is a novella of the heart—poignant, gentle, true, offering an eloquent reminder that life is too precious a gift to be unwrapped in haste.

  Sarah Rivers has it all: successful husband, healthy kids, beautiful home, meaningful church work.

  Corinne, Sarah’s sister, struggles to get by. From Web site development to jewelry sales, none of the pies she has her thumb stuck in contains a plum worth pulling.

  No wonder Corinne envies Sarah. What she doesn’t know is how jealous Sarah is of her. And what neither of them realizes is how their frantic drive for achievement is speeding them headlong past the things that matter most in life.

  So when their mother, Maggie, purchases plane tickets for them to join her in a vacation on the Gulf of Mexico, they almost decline the offer. But circumstances force the issue, and the sisters soon find themselves first thrown together, then ultimately drawn together, in one memorable week in a cabin called “Seaside.”

  As Maggie, a professional photographer, sets out to capture on film the faces and moods of her daughters, more than film develops. A picture emerges of possibilities that come only by slowing down and savoring the simple treasures of the moment. It takes a mother’s love and honesty to teach her two daughters a wiser, uncluttered way of life—one that can bring peace to their hearts and healing to their relationship. And though the lesson comes on wings of grief, the sadness is tempered with faith, restoration, and a joy that comes from the hand of God.