Leaves of Hope

by Catherine Palmer

  Instead, she had blurted out everything about Thomas, ordered her mother to shut up and basically acted like a naughty, spoiled child. She was never like this in her real life. In New York, Beth maneuvered through traffic and business meetings and relationships. She successfully directed the overseas unit of her department. She confidently assisted families who were settling into some of the most difficult places in the world. She negotiated red tape with immigration bureaus, housing authorities, school districts and embassies. In London, she recently had convinced a whole group of European agents who owned franchises of the moving company to sign on for her department’s services. The coming months would involve hiring additional office staff, traveling to four continents and working with everyone from high-powered executives to cooks and maids. She would succeed.

  But not with her own mother. Nothing Beth did with Jan Lowell worked out well. In this house beside Lake Palestine, Beth had to go and act like a bratty four-year-old. Shouting accusations. Dropping information like bombs on her unsuspecting mom. Behaving like the most self-centered, unchristian human being imaginable.

  Lord, please help me, Beth silently prayed as she walked toward the kitchen. Give me the words to say to make it right. I don’t know how to begin, but I can’t let this rift between us widen. I need You, Lord, I need You so much.

  Her mother was setting the last plate in the dishwasher. Carefully rinsed of every crumb, the dishes sat in gleaming white rows. Jan opened a box of detergent, filled the compartment and shut the tiny door. As she closed the dishwasher and turned it on, she spotted her daughter.

  “Oh, Beth, honey, forgive me for being so bossy and talking to you in such a hateful way.” She held her arms wide. Her cheeks were wet and the tip of her nose red. “Please forgive me, sweetheart.”

  “Mom.” Beth threw herself into her mother’s embrace. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. I’ve been so rude to you. I don’t see how you can ever forgive me for what I said this morning. And I never should have mentioned Thomas Wood.”

  “Shh, sweetie. It’s okay.” Her small hand stroked her daughter’s back. “This has been a stressful time for you with all that travel, and meeting your new man, and then the information you hadn’t expected about your past. I understand. I’m glad you came home to me. I’ve missed you so much, my precious Bethy.”

  “I’ve missed you, too.” Beth straightened and gazed into her mother’s dear, familiar face. “Mom, I’m so confused about Miles.”

  “Why don’t you come outside while I weed, and you can tell me more about him? Is he nice-looking?”

  “This feels really stupid to admit, but…he’s so handsome that I can’t stop thinking about him.”

  “Well, how about that? What color is his hair?”

  “Blond. Dark blond. And he has gorgeous blue eyes.” Barefoot, Beth followed her mother out the front door and down the deck steps to the rose garden. “You should hear his British accent.”

  “Does he sound like Burt in Mary Poppins?”

  “Oh, Miles is nothing like a Cockney chimney sweep. He speaks more like King Arthur in Camelot or Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.”

  “Now, that’s romantic!”

  “He told me he’s an aristocrat. He could be a lord or a knight or something. I don’t know any of that peerage stuff. And guess what? You just won’t believe this!”

  “Try me.”

  Beth sank cross-legged into the deep, cool grass as her mother knelt to dig out the dandelions that had begun to spring up around the rosebushes. The afternoon sun heated Beth’s cheeks, and suddenly she felt like a little girl again. A good little girl. She was sitting nicely in the yard while her mommy worked in the garden. They were happy together, and it wasn’t fake. And it didn’t matter about Thomas Wood, either.

  Beth stretched out her legs and wiggled her toes. God had an amazing way of answering prayers. Sometimes right away. Sometimes years later. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Today it was yes. Right now.

  “Miles sits on the board of the British ALS foundation,” Beth announced proudly, as though telling her mom she had just climbed to the top of the apple tree and back down again. “He knows all about Lou Gerhig’s disease. In England, they call it Motor Neurone Disease or MND. Miles understood right away when I told him about Dad and what we had been through. He was so kind. So sweet.”

  “My goodness.” Jan had stopped weeding and was sitting back on her heels. “He understands about your father and Thomas Wood, too? Maybe there’s more to this Miles than I thought.”

  “Maybe so.” Beth’s focus met her mother’s. “Mom, do you suppose God could have brought us together?”

  Jan turned away and thrust her weeding fork deep into the soil beneath a dandelion’s roots. “I don’t know, Beth. I don’t have a clue what God is up to these days.”

  Beth took a seat in the waiting area near her gate at O’Hare Airport. Why a plane from Texas had to stop in Chicago on its way to New York she would never know. She shrugged her purse strap off her shoulder and settled her bag on the floor.

  Instantly she pictured Miles Wilson’s boots propped on the black leather carry-on she always kept so carefully cleaned and polished. Dried mud all over those boots. Khaki slacks filthy around the hems. The man himself had been unshaven, red-eyed and rumpled. Later, he admitted to being boorish and cocky. He had forced her to go with him to that pub.

  And then…

  That’s when it had happened, she realized. Right there in the smoky darkness over a couple of baked potatoes. Miles had looked into her eyes, and she had known immediately that he was honest. Genuine. Sincere. She had known…just known. Was this what Saint Paul meant when he wrote about a spirit of discernment? Had the Holy Spirit spoken to Beth in the confusion of that place? She needed to read the passage again to make sure.

  Massaging the ache in her right temple, Beth reached into her purse for the small Bible she had previously left on the table in London. Opening it, she started to turn to the index in the back. Instead, she discovered the note Miles had written and found herself reading it again. A hundred times she had scanned the small sheet of white paper with his name and the company address printed at the top. A hundred times she had prayed about the matter of Miles Wilson. And God hadn’t lessened her urge to contact the man at all.

  In fact, the trip home to Texas had only made things worse. Beth reflected on her mother’s perky red head bobbing as she dug in the rose garden. Jan had chosen safety. Her whole life she had managed to avoid risk and danger. Except for the brief, disastrous relationship with Thomas Wood, she had opted for security, normalcy, protection. When she recommended the same course for her daughter, Beth pictured herself living in Tyler in a three-bedroom house with three children and a professor husband. She imagined growing older and moving to a lake and tending roses. Such a routine, tranquil existence seemed like a fate worse than death.

  But that wasn’t the most troubling thing. During the visit, Beth had come to realize several disturbing truths about her mother.

  First, there were the pictures. After the lunchtime explosion, the two had spent a peaceful afternoon puttering in the garden and then strolling by the lake. That evening, Jan had consented to show her daughter the pastel chalk artwork she had been keeping under wraps. Beth was stunned. The pictures were nothing like she had expected. True, they were children, but they weren’t saccharine, trite or clichéd in any way.

  Jan Lowell’s children lived. Beth could almost hear them laughing and feel their warm breath and see the wind blowing in their hair. She felt as if she knew them, as though she had played with them during her own childhood, as though they were friends whose memory she had somehow misplaced over the years.

  Where had the children been hiding all these years? And what had prompted them to come tumbling out onto Jan’s canvases? Jim Blevins had told Beth it was the lack of pressure that had freed her mother. Jan insisted she was just missing her family.

  But Beth had a sneaking suspi
cion it was something else altogether. Her mother was changing.

  The little redhead so determined to live out her whole life in Tyler, Texas, had moved to Lake Palestine. The determined painter of a thousand bouquets of pink, red and yellow roses was suddenly bringing beautiful children to life. And maybe just as significant, the famous chicken salad, three-meals-a-day, meat-and-potatoes cook was on a fruit-and-cereal diet.

  Fruit and cereal? But where’s the protein? Beth had asked. Where are you going to get your vitamins? You always ordered us kids to eat our vegetables! Her mother had lifted her eyebrows and given a little smile. “Oh, well,” she said simply.

  Definitely, Jan was changing. But Beth felt deep concern that it wasn’t all in a positive direction. At one point during their visit, Jan had casually mentioned that she rarely went to church these days. Nor could she find her Bible when they were discussing a particular passage of Scripture. She didn’t pray before meals, Beth had noticed. And when Beth asked for advice, her mother never once suggested prayer or talking with a pastor or anything the least bit Christian.

  When had that happened?

  Had Jan wandered away from the Lord, or had she never actually been walking with Him? Beth tried to remember the details of her childhood. The whole family had gone to church every Sunday, and they’d asked a blessing at the start of each meal. Somehow, through the years of church participation, Beth had come to know Christ in a real, personal way. Much more than simply believing in Him, she had turned her whole life over to running the race she had mentioned in her phone call from Nairobi. She was striving toward the goal of obedience and surrender. Everything else took a back seat to her faith.

  Beth had always believed her family was right there beside her in the long race to the finish line. Her dad had already made it to heaven ahead of the rest. Bob and Bill were living Christ-like lives. Beth felt very sure of that. All the Lowells were on the same path. Weren’t they?

  In that area, Beth’s comfort level was ebbing. She and her mother were turning out to be polar opposites. Beth could barely speak without mentioning God. She never made a decision without prayer and consulting her Bible and her pastor or her Christian friends. She longed to be a fruitful believer, the sort of shining example of a Christian woman others looked at as a role model.

  But Jan rarely mentioned God or faith or prayer. Decisions grew out of her goal of security and stability rather than the hope of perfect submission to the Lord’s will. How could this have happened? And why?

  Beth was far from perfect. Every day, she did selfish, sinful, stupid things. But she was consciously working to root out every wrong in her life. She wanted to be right with God. Did her mom?

  The very thought that Jan might have abandoned her faith—or never had it in the first place—frightened Beth to the core. As she slipped her Bible back into her purse, her fingers grazed her phone. She lifted it out and cradled it in her palm. Then she opened it and dialed.

  “There you are!”

  Jan knelt beside a cardboard box and lifted out her leather-bound Bible with the gold lettering on a black cover. The visit from Beth had distressed her in so many ways, not the least of which was her daughter’s constant focus on religion. Not that Jan objected, of course. She had hoped all her children would embrace the faith they were brought up in.

  John had found church and become a Christian fairly late in life. As a father, he insisted the whole family be present at every service their church offered—Sunday mornings and nights, Wednesday evenings and all the special events in between. They had attended countless revivals, choir cantatas, church plays and pageants. The children always participated in Vacation Bible School in the summer, and they went to Scripture-based Sunday school classes for their age group from preschool on up. A person couldn’t visit that redbrick church without spotting the Lowell family, all lined up in a row in their favorite pew—five rows from the front, on the left facing the baptistery.

  Jan hadn’t loved every minute of those long hours of sermons and religious teachings, but she thought it was important to bring the children up right. How else would they learn good values? Ethics? Moral principles? Her own parents had felt the same way.

  She set the old Bible on her lap and opened the faded cover. Funny to look at it now, after all these years. Her folks had presented the book as a high school graduation gift—so thrilled that they had discovered a modern translation of the Scripture for their bright young daughter. No longer would Jan be mired in the musty language of the old King James version, her father had told her proudly. They had no idea that the day she unwrapped their gift, Jan was poised to embark on a relationship that would almost destroy the life they had carefully structured for her.

  The moment Jan met Thomas Wood—whose family members had hardly been to church a day in their lives—she let her new Bible start to collect dust. She found reasons not to go to worship services or Sunday school, and she no longer hung out with the church youth group. She began doing things she knew she shouldn’t do. And those awful mistakes were the very ones she had wanted her own children to avoid.

  But why had Beth become so pious? And when? She was almost like a nun or a preacher. They couldn’t have a conversation without Beth saying, “I really felt God directing me toward…” Or “I’m trying so hard to behave the way Christ taught…”

  Jan could hardly imagine her daughter surviving in a place like New York. The city was the epicenter of hedonism and sin, wasn’t it? What did Beth’s colleagues think when she went around talking about Jesus and God all the time? No wonder she didn’t date much—she probably scared off all the men! Who would want to go out with a Mother Teresa clone and have to worry about saying the wrong thing or not being religious enough? It was downright intimidating to be around Beth.

  Jan certainly had felt like pond scum. It was a good thing she’d found her Bible in the cardboard box at the back of her closet. She probably ought to start attending church more regularly, too. She could ride into town with Jim Blevins. That would save on gas, anyhow.

  On the other hand, how could someone as holy as Beth acted most of the time suddenly start screaming at her own mother? Telling her to shut up? Now, that wasn’t right at all. Beth might think of herself as a good Christian, but she certainly hadn’t behaved like one. A person could say “God this” and “God that” all she wanted, but it was how she conducted herself that really mattered.

  Jan flipped through the gold-rimmed pages. They were so thin they crackled, as if the Bible had fallen into a puddle once, though it hadn’t. She lifted the book and breathed in the smell of old oak church pews, a bedraggled carpet, pine-scented floor wash, even flowers on an altar. The mingled fragrances transported her back to her childhood, before the family had moved into Tyler. In their little country church, Jan had listened to her Sunday school teacher explain about salvation and righteousness and sacrifice. About Jesus dying on the cross and coming to life again to take away our sins. Crucifixion. Resurrection. Redemption. Such big words. Jan had loved the sound of them on her tongue, and she practiced saying them in her bedroom when no one was listening.

  Most of what the pastor said Jan hadn’t understood. But she did know she didn’t want to go to hell. The whole idea scared her silly. One Sunday after their fried chicken lunch, she had burst into tears, imagining herself burning up like the biscuits her mother had left in the oven too long that morning.

  “Do you believe in Jesus?” Mama had asked as she cradled her six-year-old on her lap. “Do you believe He was the Son of God? Do you trust that He was born on this earth of the Virgin Mary and died on the cross and rose again to save you from your sins?”

  Well, of course Jan believed all that. She’d been taught it from the day she took her first breath. Not that she could think of too many sins she had committed yet. Or knew what a virgin was. Or even how saving worked. All she knew was that nodding “yes” would get her into heaven with God and keep her from the fiery, smoky, sulphury-smelling furnac
e of the Evil One.

  Not long after that, Jan and her parents had driven over to the church one day and talked to the pastor. He asked Jan the same questions her mother had, and she nodded again. A couple of Sundays later, she slipped into a white robe and waded down into the baptistery. The pastor put one arm behind her shoulders and the other over her nose and dunked her under the water. She came up gasping for air but assured that she was bound for the pearly gates.

  Recalling how she had felt that day—dripping wet and so relieved she wouldn’t be roasted over the coals at the end of the devil’s pitchfork—Jan had to smile. She understood Christianity a lot better now, and she had tried to do a good job raising her own children in the Christian faith.

  But what was all this deeply reverent yet wildly overblown rhetoric Beth kept spouting? It seemed like the young woman was on a crusade—racing at top speed down some rigidly defined path, trying so hard to root out evil and discern God’s will that she turned people off, including her own mother.

  Jan turned the pages of the slender volume one by one, skimming the familiar names of the different books inside it until she came to the end. Beth must be finding something terribly important in her own Bible. To Jan, the book had been little more than a collection of sayings from which preachers drew sermons and Vacation Bible School youngsters memorized verses.

  Seated on the guest room floor, she lifted the Bible into focus and began to scan the words printed in red. This passage was from the third chapter of the book of Revelation, she noted. Her eyes drifted down to the fifteenth verse, which she had underlined during some long-forgotten sermon.

  The ring of authority resonated through Jan as she began to silently read the words of Jesus to those in the church at Laodicea.