Leah stuck the candy in her mouth and froze before letting her teeth sink into the thin layer of chocolate. “And who would the third person be, Franklin?” she finally asked after swallowing the mint.
Franklin smiled smugly but said nothing. He just sat there smiling and chuckling to himself.
Chapter Fourteen
Instead of driving home from Franklin’s house, Leah drove straight to Kyle and Jessica’s. Too much had been happening too fast for Leah. She needed perspective, and Jessica often had provided her with just that.
Travis answered the doorbell and said his mommy was upstairs with Sara. Leah asked, “Could you tell her I’m here and see if she needs any help?”
Travis took off up the stairs, and Leah called after him, “And ask her if she has a Bible nearby.”
Leah thought she remembered seeing a Bible on the living room bookshelf so she meandered in and pulled the leather Bible off the shelf. Turning to Song of Songs 6:11, Leah eagerly read the special message Seth had left for her. “I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley, and to see whether the vine flourished, and the pomegranates budded.”
She stared blankly at the wall. “Garden of nuts”? “Fruits of the valley”? This verse reminded Seth of me?
Jessica appeared holding Sara, who was bathed and in her pajamas. “Congratulations!” Jessica said.
“For what?”
“Alissa told me you won a cruise to Alaska. That’s fantastic! When are you going?”
“May 15. Would you like to go with me?”
Jessica hesitated.
“I’m only kidding. You have your hands full.” Leah put down the Bible and stood, reaching out for Sara. “Come here, my little Sara Bunny.”
Sara went right to Leah and cuddled up.
“She’s really tired,” Jessica said. “We had an early dinner. All my kids need to get to bed early tonight. I think the weekend of parties and sugar took a toll on them.”
“It has been a wild week,” Leah said.
“Do you want to put Sara to bed, and I’ll get the other two settled? Then we can talk. I want to hear all about this cruise. Kyle won’t be home for a couple of hours so you and I can have a good, long visit.”
Leah felt relieved. That was exactly what she needed to hear. Jessica had time to listen and hopefully to help Leah figure out what was going on in her life.
Just then Travis padded into the room with a heavy Bible in his hands. “Here you go, Auntie Leah. You can use my dad’s Bible.”
“Thank you,” Leah said, taking the Bible from him. “You are such a great helper, Travis. How about if you and I help your mom tuck your sisters into bed?”
Travis slipped his hand in Leah’s, and they followed Jessica up the stairs. It took almost an hour to settle all three of the kids into bed. Leah helped herself to some cheese and crackers and poured a large glass of orange juice. She and Jessica sat in the living room facing each other in comfy chairs by the window that looked out over the driveway.
“You know this pocket of grace you said I fell into?” Leah began their conversation. “Well, I don’t think I want to be there any longer. It’s way too crazy.”
Jessica smiled. “Why do you say that? Don’t you want to go on the cruise? I think it’s another one of God’s gifts to you. Do you remember what I said before? You can’t outgive God.”
“It’s not the cruise,” Leah said. “It’s everything. A week ago Seth Edwards walked into my corner of the world—my little Snack Shack—and nothing has been the same since.”
“You two seemed so comfortable around each other last week when you came to pick out a puppy. Have your feelings changed?”
“Changed?” Leah said. “Ever since I fell into this ‘pocket of grace,’ my feelings have changed every hour on the hour. Who knows how I feel about anything? I don’t think I trust myself to answer any questions until I get my emotional equilibrium back.”
Jessica laughed softly. “I have a funny feeling that might not happen for a while, my friend.”
“Look at the note he left on my car today.” Leah handed Jessica the note and then retrieved the Bible so she could read the crazy verse to Jessica. “Are you ready for this? This is what it says, ‘I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley—’ ”
Jessica interrupted Leah’s reading with a giggle. Then Jessica covered her lips with her fingers and said, “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
“The rest of it is, ‘and to see whether the vine flourished, and the pomegranates budded.’ ”
Jessica raised her eyebrows and kept her fingers over her smiling lips. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“That’s exactly what I’d like to know.” Leah couldn’t help it; she had to laugh. Jessica’s initial reaction was correct. This was laughable.
“ ‘I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley,’ ” Leah repeated, laughing. “Do you think he’s trying to tell me I’m one of the nuts or one of the fruits in this valley?”
Jessica released a ripple of laughter. “Oh, Leah, that is so funny!”
“To you, maybe, but I’m feeling desperate here. You know how on Saturday I told you I burst out crying when he called me ‘George’? And you told me I was getting back all the emotions the locusts had eaten?”
“That was sort of what I said, yes.”
“Well, right after that, I took Sara up to her room, and I decided I didn’t want to see the world like I thought I did. I wanted to stay right here in Glenbrooke. I wanted to pursue a relationship with Seth. Then we went hiking Sunday, up that hill behind Camp Heather Brook. Seth barely noticed I was there. So I told myself my whacked-out feelings had gotten out of control. I could never hope for a relationship with someone like Seth, and I completely shut down.”
Jessica’s expression changed from mirth to concern.
“I know. It’s not good when I swallow my feelings and hold them in. Don’t worry, I’ve been crying like crazy. Last night I had this huge revelation at the Little League game that some of the things my father said about me years ago weren’t true. It never occurred to me before. I started to wonder if all those other messages I’ve believed about myself are false, too.”
The phone rang, but Jessica sat quietly, waiting for Leah to continue.
“Do you need to get that?”
“No, this is more important. If it’s Kyle, he’ll call back immediately. Otherwise I can let our machine pick it up. Go on, you were saying you realized you had believed some things that weren’t true.”
The phone stopped on the fourth ring. Leah picked up her train of thought. “I gave up my old wish of wanting to travel and then, bing! I won this cruise. I gave up on Seth, and then I stopped by Franklin’s today and bing! Franklin wants me to take him to Hamilton Lodge for the weekend, and he’s invited another guest to go with us.”
“Seth?” Jessica ventured.
Leah nodded. “It’s all happened in a week, Jess! I don’t know what I’m supposed to think or feel anymore. I hope this ‘pocket of grace’ is well padded because I feel as if I’m about to start bouncing off the walls!”
Jessica smiled.
Leah pointed at Seth’s note Jessica still held in her hand. “See? Even Seth agrees. Fruits and nuts! Further proof I’m going wacky, and everyone else recognizes it.”
Jessica chuckled and looked more closely at the paper. “Are you sure this is chapter 6 verse 11? This number looks like a two to me.”
“Let me see,” Leah took the paper and examined it more closely. The rain had smeared the letters so that all she saw was the loop of the number. She had assumed it was a six. Possibly Seth made loopy twos. Leah turned to Song of Songs 2:11. Jessica turned there as well in Kyle’s Bible that Travis had brought downstairs for them.
“Oh, yes, I think this verse is the one he had in mind,” Jessica said before Leah could read the whole verse herself. Jessica read aloud, “ ‘See! The winter is past; the rains are o
ver and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come.’ ”
Leah looked up at her, feeling humbled. “That’s a little different than the fruits and nuts verse.”
“Yes, it is.” Jessica smiled. “Much more fitting. I think Seth was trying to encourage you, Leah, by saying you’re entering into a new season in your life. That’s what I was saying on Saturday when I told you the verse about God restoring the years the locusts had eaten. You need to feel free to move on in your life.”
“Move on to what?” Leah asked.
Jessica smiled and then hopped up from her chair. “It just so happens that now I’m the one who has a verse for you.”
Leah knew where Jessica was going. She kept a stack of three-by-five-inch cards at the desk in her kitchen with various verses written on them. Those cards often ended up taped to bathroom mirrors or framed and placed above the kitchen sink. Jessica carried verses in her purse, she had them in the car, and Leah had even found them in Sara’s diaper bag. Kyle referred to the verses as his wife’s “spiritual snacks.”
Jessica hadn’t grown up going to church, and she didn’t know a lot about the Bible when she and Kyle married. In an effort to get to know God’s Word in the midst of her busy days, Jessica had written out dozens of these verse cards. More than once she had passed a card on to Leah. Leah usually stuck them in her Bible and didn’t bother to really look at them.
Jessica returned with a card for Leah and handed it to her as it if were the key to a treasure chest. “This is it,” she said, reciting the three verses from Psalm 37 from memory. “ ‘Trust in the LORD and do good; dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness. Delight yourself in the LORD; and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD, trust also in Him, and He will do it.’ ”
Leah looked at the card, hoping the words would instantly work some special blessing on her as they obviously had on Jessica, judging by the expression on Jessica’s face.
“It’s that middle verse you need to concentrate on right now,” Jessica said. “ ‘Delight yourself in the LORD; and He will give you the desires of your heart.’ Don’t concentrate on figuring out what your heart’s desires are. Concentrate on delighting yourself in the Lord. Then the rest will fall into place.”
“You promise?” Leah asked.
“I don’t have to promise. God is the one who made that promise.”
When Leah looked skeptical, Jessica added, “He hasn’t broken a single one of his promises yet, you know. I doubt he would start now.”
Chapter Fifteen
At five the next morning Leah lay awake, unable to fall back asleep. She felt as if she had gone riding through the night on the tattered edges of midnight’s dark, velvet cape. She knew emotionally she was going somewhere—and fast. But where?
When Leah realized she wasn’t going to fall back to sleep, she reluctantly rose and shuffled into the kitchen for a drink of water. The stillness comforted her. The rain had stopped, and it was quiet outside. She stood at the window, sipping her glass of water and trying to see the sky, but it was still too dark.
On a whim, Leah reached for a blanket in the living room and went through the mudroom out to the back steps. Hula rose and padded after her, not fully awake but ever faithful. For a long while Leah sat on the cold, cement steps, wrapped in the blanket and with her arm around Hula. Leah stared into the deep, quiet darkness, waiting for the morning light to come.
Her thoughts were of God and trying to understand who he was and what he expected of her in light of the conversation she had had with Jessica the night before. For so long Leah had pictured God as a cosmic motorcycle cop, hiding behind a billboard and pointing a radar gun at her. That’s why she always followed the rules. As long as God couldn’t catch her doing anything wrong, he wouldn’t be mad at her. And if he wasn’t mad at her, maybe he wouldn’t mess up her life.
Until this point, that image of God had made sense to her. She never had mentioned it to anyone, but she was sure if she had it would have seemed right and not at all twisted. Now, just as she was recognizing other lies she had believed for years, Leah realized how inaccurate that image of God was.
God, you’re not standing there, pointing a radar gun at my heart, are you? The inaccurate image immediately dissolved. What do you want, God? What do you expect from me? How am I supposed to respond to you?
For the first time since high school, Leah felt a hunger in her spirit. She wanted to know God. To hear how others viewed him and responded to him. Leah thought of Jessica as someone who had a deeper relationship with God than she did. Seth had seemed so much more connected with God when he read aloud the Easter account on their morning hike. It was all so real to him. Leah felt she was missing something. She had felt it for some time.
In the quiet of her intense contemplation, the morning came softly, a blessed contrast to the frenzy of the past few days. A chorus of birds greeted her from the treetops. Hula barked at a squirrel as it scampered across the lawn. Leah held Hula back from running after the intruder. The scent of the rain-soaked earth rose and circled Leah, inviting her to come into the garden.
Leah reached for a hoe in the mudroom and slipped her bare feet into an old pair of wooden clogs she kept by the door. In the pristine morning light, she trotted into the yard in her flannel pajama bottoms and T-shirt with the blanket tied around her shoulders like a cape. She grinned at her impulsiveness. What did it matter? No one was up to see her, digging the hoe into the damp earth.
The previous owner had sectioned off a plot for a small vegetable garden, but Leah hadn’t had a chance to do anything with it. Now, as she turned over each clod of dirt, she made plans for peas, carrots, tomatoes, and some sort of melon. Cantaloupe sounded good.
The rain-kissed earth turned for her like soft butter. She could have dug this garden with a spoon. Bending to grasp a handful of the mink-brown dirt, Leah rubbed it between her fingers and breathed in deeply its dark, spicy fragrance.
Gently, the words from Seth’s verse came back to her. Not the verse about the fruits and nuts, but the verse about the rains being over and the flowers appearing. The season for singing had come.
Leah didn’t sing. She barely breathed. Standing still in her blanket cape and flannel pj’s, with her hand full of moist earth, she prayed. It had been a long time since she had really prayed.
“Lord God,” she whispered, “You’re here, aren’t you? I mean, you’re really, truly right here. And you’re here in my heart, even though it’s been so long since I’ve talked openly and intimately with you. You never left. I was the one who ignored you.”
Leah let the dirt fall through her fingers. “The winter is over. The storms have ceased in my heart. You’re trying to plow things up, aren’t you? You want to plant something new.” A gentle breeze lifted the feathery strands of her hair from her neck.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so resistant to you. Please forgive me. I want to learn how to delight myself in you because I honestly don’t know how to do that.”
The longer Leah stood in the morning chill, the more she shivered. She didn’t want to move. One doesn’t step away from holy ground too quickly. This place, this simple earth, this garden, had become holy to Leah. God had met her here. And she had responded.
“You want me to trust you, don’t you?” Leah curled and uncurled her toes inside her wooden clogs. “You know how hard that is for me.”
Feeling compelled to kneel in the moist earth, Leah went down slowly. First on her right knee and then on her left. “Okay,” she whispered. “I promise. I’ll trust you.”
A full five minutes later, Leah returned to the house with Hula beside her. Kicking off the muddy clogs, Leah scampered barefooted into the bathroom where she jumped into a warm shower. The soothing water washed over her, refreshing her. Her spirit had never felt so clean.
Leah wrote on a yellow sticky note to buy some three-by-five cards. She wanted to start writing down verses the way Jessica did.
It was time to plant some new seeds in her life.
It was also time to plant seeds in her vegetable garden, now that the earth was ready. She began a list of the vegetables she had decided on while she was hoeing. She could go buy the seeds on her lunch break and then plant them as soon as she got home from work. The thought made Leah smile. This was her home. Her garden. It was a small blessing, one she hadn’t fully appreciated until now.
Leah entered the hospital with a light step and greeted everyone she saw on her way in. On her desk sat another tour book of Alaska.
“Did you see the memo on vacation time yet?” Mary asked as Leah settled in her chair. “I’m taking off the third week of May because my sister’s coming to visit.”
“That should be fun,” Leah said.
Mary shook her head. “I don’t know about that. We’re not going anywhere. It’s her fiftieth birthday, and she’s pretty depressed about it. I’m not sure what I can do to cheer her up.”
Leah turned and looked at Mary. “Why don’t you take her on a cruise?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Take her on the cruise to Alaska,” Leah said. “The two of you can use the free tickets. It’s the week she’s coming, and I don’t know who I would go with.”
Mary stopped and stared. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m completely serious. This would be good for you and for your sister. You haven’t been on a vacation in years, Mary.”
“Neither have you, Leah. You’re the one who always wants to go somewhere exciting. This is your trip.”
Leah laughed. “It was my fluke. My goofed-up dialing. I didn’t do anything to win the trip.”
“But it’s your trip,” Mary protested.
“Okay, it’s my trip, and I can do what I want with it. And what I choose to do is give it to you and your sister.” Leah began to dial the phone number for A Wing and a Prayer.
Mary sat down on the edge of the desk. “Are you sure?”
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