Seasons Under Heaven (24 page)

Sunday morning, Barry and Tory decided to take Brenda’s children to their own church again. Brenda and David wanted to stay at the hospital with Joseph, who was doing well but wasn’t out of the woods. Because of the animal fair and the amount of time Tory had spent at the hospital with Brenda, she felt as if she knew a lot of the members of Brenda’s church already. They welcomed her and Barry as if they were family, and the children couldn’t wait to get to their Sunday school classes to tell of the miracle Joseph had received.

Instead of Sunday school that morning, the adults of the church met in the sanctuary for what they called a “power session.” Barry and Tory weren’t sure what they were getting into, but when they learned that it was an intense hour of prayer for Joseph’s recovery, they were all for it.

They all met around the steps at the front of the small podium and prayed from the bottoms of their hearts, one at a time as they felt led. By the end of the hour, both Barry and Tory
felt as if they had been touched personally by the Holy Spirit. Their hearts felt cleansed; their minds were clear and alert. When it was time for the service, and they had Spencer and Brittany and the Dodd children back with them, they sat close to the front. Barry stayed awake the whole time—in fact, Tory saw him smiling and nodding during the sermon. And at the end, when they were singing the final praise songs before closing the service, Barry surprised her with the exuberance in his voice and the tears she saw in his eyes.

When they had dropped the Dodd kids off at the hospital and were on their way home, Tory glanced at her husband. “So what do you think about that worship experience?”

He smiled. “I think I need to quit worrying about being a deacon. It’s time to change churches.”

The kids erupted with excitement in the backseat. Tory only smiled. “Are you sure, Barry? They depend on you a lot at our church.”

“They can depend on others,” he said.

“Maybe we’re supposed to stay and light a fire under everybody.”

Barry considered that for a moment. “I think we’re the ones who needed a fire lit under us. We’re not in any position to activate anyone right now. Let’s go to Brenda’s church for a while longer, and then decide whether we should go back to our church and get something going. But personally, I need some discipling.” He paused a moment. “You know what the pastor quoted today from Second Peter, about growing in respect to your salvation? I don’t think I’ve done that. As far as I know, I’ve never borne any fruit.”

“Me, either,” Tory agreed. “And then I see Brenda, and 1 think, Lord, if I can’t be like You, let me be like her.”

When the children were down for their naps, Barry came into the kitchen where Tory was reading the paper. He picked up his car keys.

“Where you going?” she asked.

He shrugged and looked down at the floor. “I thought I’d go up to the hospital and see David.”

“Really?” They had never been close friends. The relationship between families had primarily been between Brenda and her. “Okay. I’m sure he’d appreciate that.”

He nodded. “I’ll be back in time to take us all back to church.”

“Okay, you can bring the Dodd kids back with you.”

“Good idea,” he said.

As he headed to the door, Tory sat back in her chair, thinking. She wasn’t sure whether Barry had ever shared his faith with anyone before, other than cursory conversations with the children—but she had no doubt that’s what Barry was intending to discuss with David. That sermon must have given him a sense of urgency. She was thankful. She only hoped that David would listen—so that Barry would be encouraged to share his faith even more.

Then, maybe, she’d start doing it herself.

At the hospital, Brenda was surprised when Barry arrived alone. He bantered with the kids for a while, welcome entertainment when they were all confined to the SICU waiting room—they were only allowed to visit Joseph for a few minutes every couple of hours. When Barry asked David if he’d like to go down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, and David agreed, Brenda was more confused than ever. She watched, perplexed, as they left the room. Then she turned back to the children, who were playing a game of Monopoly.

“Mama, I think the Sullivans really liked our church this morning,” Daniel said.

“Really?”

“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Barry even had tears in his eyes.”

“How about that?” Brenda said, amazed. She looked at the doorway again, wondering if that had anything to do with Barry’s visit. Just in case, she breathed a silent prayer for him.

Downstairs in the cafeteria, Barry and David sat at the table across from each other, eating a piece of pie. “So how are you holding up?” Barry asked.

“Fine,” David said. “I’m not going to lie to you. It hasn’t been easy.”

“I went to Brenda’s church this morning,” Barry told him, as nonchalantly as he could manage. “They had a power session for Joseph during the Sunday school hour.”

“Power session? What’s that?”

“It’s when they all get together and pray intensely for someone. I’d never heard of it before, but it was a really good idea. And then I come here and I see how well Joseph’s doing, and I’m just amazed. I really think prayer has had a lot to do with it.”

David smiled and nodded his head politely, as if he didn’t want to argue with Barry. “Doctors had a little something to do with it.”

“Of course,” Barry said. “But I believe that Joseph is doing so well because so much prayer went into it. Not that those of us who are praying should take any credit—I just mean that God answered.”

“Yeah, that’s what Brenda tells me. But you know me. I have trouble with that.” He crossed his arms on the table and looked up at Barry. “We were about to take Joseph home that night. We didn’t want him to die in the hospital. And then—there was a heart.”

“And you don’t think God was working all that out?”

David smiled and shook his head. “I can’t believe that. I think things just have a way of working out sometimes. And other times they don’t.”

“So you put more faith in accidents and coincidence than you do in God?”

“Not really,” David said. “I don’t have faith in accidents or coincidence either. They just happen. I guess I don’t have faith in much of anything, except for my wife and my kids.”

Barry didn’t know how to respond. He knew that Brenda had shared the gospel with David many times, and that nothing he said today was going to change David’s heart. Only the Holy Spirit could do that. Silently, he prayed for words that weren’t confrontational, but that would shoot through the faithlessness straight into David’s heart.

“You know, Brenda said something just before we got the heart,” David said. “We thought we were going to lose Joseph. I told her I couldn’t believe in a God who would take our child from us. And she pointed out that, even when our children were all healthy, I didn’t believe.” He glanced up at Barry. “She was right. You know, if there was any way I could force myself to believe, for Brenda’s sake, I’d do it. I’ve thought of faking it, going to church with her, sitting beside her, singing those songs loud and clear like I was one of them. But church and I have a long history together, and it’s not a very pretty one. I’ve done enough faking in my life. For now, I’d rather be honest about my disbelief. I’m not willing to fool my wife just for the sake of peace in the family.”

“I don’t know about your history,” Barry said. “But maybe if you went to Brenda’s church once, you’d find out it’s not like you remember.”

David looked down at his plate, frowning deeply, as if something Barry said had triggered a flood of memories. “I don’t think that would happen. I have trouble with the way they do things there. Even those power sessions or whatever you call them. I mean, they seem like name-it-and-claim-it mumbo jumbo to me.”

“It wasn’t anything like that,” Barry said. “We prayed that God’s will, whatever it might be, would be done.”

“Yeah, well, I really resented the elders praying over Joseph. But then the way they’ve supported us through this, bringing meals to the house, donating money, coming to the hospital…” He cleared his throat. “It wasn’t that way for us—my mother and me—when I was a kid.” David leaned back and stretched, and Barry knew that he’d said all he was going to say about his past.
“But that whole business about God’s will—that’s another area where I have trouble. There’s something a little superstitious about trusting completely in God’s will, no matter what happens. Whether you lose your father, your husband, your home, your friends…”

Barry suspected that David hadn’t meant to say those last few words, but he decided it might be the opening he’d prayed for. “Are you talking about your mother?”

David looked down at his hands, folded in front of him. “It was like a mental illness with her. No matter what my father did, no matter how cruel the church was to us, even when we were out on the street, she kept saying it was God’s will. But it was just her excuse not to do anything for herself, not to try to make it better…”

“Sounds like a real burden to have to carry around,” Barry said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“You have a lot to forgive. An awful lot, I’d say. That kind of stuff can weigh you down, control your life, until you cut it loose.”

“I’m over it,” David said, shrugging it off. “I’m just telling you, church and I don’t go together. But I live a good life, even without believing what you believe. Brenda keeps talking about abundant life. I feel like our lives are pretty abundant. Sure, I could want more financially, that kind of thing, but other than Joseph’s illness, things have gone pretty well.”

“But when you have trouble, like this business with Joseph, there’s an awful lot that’s out of your control.”

David took a skeptical breath and looked off across the room. “So you think I should believe that God’s in control?”

“Sure. Because He is, whether you believe it or not.”

David shook his head and finished his pie, then abruptly changed the subject to football and fishing. Finally, they made their way back up to the SICU waiting room. Brenda looked up.

“I’ll take the kids with me now if you want me to,” Barry said. “We’ll get them back to church. Tory and I are planning to go back tonight. We’re thinking about moving our membership.”

Brenda caught her breath. “That’s wonderful! We’ll be going to church together.”

“Yeah,” he said. He glanced at David. “You tell Joseph to keep getting better, okay? Tell him they’re really missing him back at that church.”

“I will,” Brenda said.

Then with a wave, he headed out of the room, praying silently that the Holy Spirit would finish what he’d started.

The night of the school board meeting, Cathy dressed in her most conservative dress and prayed that people would come. For the past couple of weeks, she had used those skills she’d learned raising money for Joseph’s bills. She’d gone from parking lot to parking lot, putting out flyers about the Monday night school board meeting. She’d made countless phone calls. She’d gone to baseball and soccer parks, left flyers on windshields, and chatted with parents she met there. She didn’t think she could have worked any harder if she’d been running for congress. All of this was hard for her. She wasn’t a confrontational person; she wasn’t used to rocking the boat or making people angry. But that, she suspected, was exactly what was going to happen tonight when she got up to speak to the people making decisions about her children.

She had seen Steve only once or twice since their date and had decided that he was no more reliable or interested in commitment than any other single man she’d met. Yes, he was
apparently attracted to her—but he seemed torn between that attraction and his allegiance to the wife he’d lost. And he was lukewarm, at best, about Cathy’s kids.

Still, when he did call, she found her heart racing and hoped he would suggest another date. She refused to show it, and even prided herself in pretending she was so busy she hardly had a moment to talk.

She expected him to be at the school board meeting, and he didn’t disappoint her. In fact, he was still sitting in his car in the parking lot when she arrived, as if he was waiting for her. She got out of the car and looked around at the other cars already filling the parking lot.

“Looks like a big turnout,” he said.

“You think it’s for us?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s go in and find out.”

Inside, she studied the crowd that had filled the room. There was standing room only. The school board members were scurrying around, trying to find places for everyone to sit. It was an open meeting, but it was clear that the board wasn’t used to a crowd this size.

She made the rounds, shaking hands with some of the people who were still standing, and learned that they had, indeed, come to find out about sex education in the schools. Her heart leaped as she realized that her work had not been in vain. The school board would have to listen to her now!

When they had found enough chairs to seat everyone, the meeting came to order. She waited as the board covered various housekeeping items. Finally, the school board president called on her to speak. She went to the microphone at the center of the table in front, facing the school board with the audience behind her.

“As most of you know, I’m here about something that happened in the junior high and high school at the end of last year, something I’ve been told happens every year,” she said. “I found a condom in my son’s pocket. You can imagine how upset I was. I naturally assumed that he had bought it. But when I confronted
him, he explained that he’d gotten it at school, and that they’d had a video about safe sex and how to use condoms. I was told that this was not the first time. I was very disturbed.” There was applause behind her, as if other parents in the room were equally disturbed, and she paused and looked over her shoulder, gaining strength as she went.

“As you can see, I’m not the only concerned parent here,” she said when the applause had died. “And I wanted to appeal to you as the people with the power to stop this madness. Our children don’t need the school system to teach them about sex—
especially
about condom use. They have parents to do that.”

Again, there was applause.

“I think with teen pregnancy at an all-time high,” she said, “what we need to teach our students is abstinence, not supposedly safe sex.”

“Dr. Flaherty,” one of the board members said, taking the floor, “I understand your concern, but the kids are going to do this anyway. We have to teach them how to keep from getting deadly diseases. I, personally, don’t want to have to bury my son because of AIDS.”

“I wholeheartedly agree—not your son, or mine, or any of the other students in our district,” Cathy said. “But the best way to prevent that is to teach them to control themselves.”

Again, there was jubilant applause behind her, but she held up her hand to quiet them. Her eyes blazed with passion as she went on.

“A few months ago, someone told me that the best we can hope for is to raise our children to adulthood without pregnancy or disease.” The memory of her ex-husband’s statement reddened her face. “But for the last few weeks, I’ve been watching another parent fighting for the life of her child—a child that did have a disease. But that child had such character, even when we thought he might die. Character that his mother instilled in him, not from teaching him a list of do’s and don’ts, and not from giving him tools that enable him to make bad choices. She taught him character by giving him a value system that never changes.”
Her voice broke, and she blinked back the tears in her eyes. “If—no, when—that little boy grows up, he probably won’t ask her what’s wrong with sex before marriage as long as nobody gets hurt. He’ll already know that everybody involved is hurt by premarital sex, because he’ll know where his values come from.” She cleared her throat, and tried to steady her voice.

“I haven’t always known that myself, so my children
have
asked those questions. I’m ashamed to say that sometimes I haven’t had answers. But watching my friend has shown me that we
can
teach our children better. We
can
expect more of them. We
can
demand more from ourselves. If we want to do the best for our children, we can give them a firm base of values that come from someplace specific, someplace like the Bible, instead of passing out condoms or showing titillating videos. We can show them how a moral life works, instead of giving them the means to
ruin
their lives.”

Again, applause erupted, until Superintendent Jacobs began to speak. “You think they’ll stop having sex just because we tell them to?” he asked. “We have to arm them, Dr. Flaherty.”

Cathy leaned in to the microphone again. “It’s interesting that you would use a metaphor involving weapons, what with all these recent school shootings.” The room got so quiet she could have heard a pin drop. The school board members sat straighter in their chairs. “You don’t give a violent kid a gun and think it’ll deter him from shooting it, and you don’t give a hormonal teenager a condom and think that’s going to somehow keep him from having sex.”

Again, there was raucous applause behind her, and she felt her face reddening and perspiration tingling on the edge of her lip. “As you can see, I’m not the only one here who feels this way.” She looked from school board member to school board member and realized that some of them were smiling and nodding their heads, as if to encourage her. This confused her. Were some of them on
her
side? Deciding not to dwell on it, she pulled out a magazine article she had brought. “If you’ll turn over the sheet I just passed out,” she said, “you’ll see an article
that came out in a major parenting magazine recently, describing an abstinence program that has worked in many cities, bringing down the teen pregnancy and AIDS contraction rate drastically.”

“I’ve read all about this program,” Jacobs said. “But I don’t think it would work well in this community.”

“Why wouldn’t you try it?” she demanded. “Don’t you think our children are worth that?”

“I wouldn’t try it because it’s a waste of time.”

“A waste of time? You’d rather encourage them to go to bed with each other than to teach them how
not
to act like animals?”

The crowd roared behind her, and the superintendent slammed the gavel and took control of the microphone. “Thank you, Dr. Flaherty. I think you’ve made your point. Does anyone else have anything to say?”

At least fifty parents stood up and raised their hands, and the members began to look at their watches as if they might be there all night. Finally, the superintendent leaned back hard in his chair. “All right, please line up at the microphone. You have three minutes each. We won’t have time to hear all of you out, but we’ll hear some of you before we take a vote.”

Cathy left the microphone and sank down in the seat Steve had reserved for her. She felt as if a hundred pounds had floated off of her shoulders. He was grinning from ear to ear. One by one, other parents added to what she had said, conveying comments their children had made after viewing the video, and tearfully sharing incidents of teen pregnancy and abortions—in some cases, as a result of the sexual activity that began the day they’d been given condoms.

After forty-five minutes of testimony, the superintendent suggested that they take a vote. When all was done, the school board had voted six to two to allow parents to view any sexual material before it was shown to their children, and to do away with the current sex education program. To Dr. Jacobs’ chagrin, the school board president assigned someone to look into the abstinence program Cathy had suggested, and set a date to vote
on its use locally. When the gavel struck to adjourn the meeting, the parents all cheered.

After the meeting, Cathy was treated as a celebrity. They patted her on the back and thanked her for what she had done. Steve stood back, letting her bask in the adulation. When the room had mostly emptied except for the school board members, one of them came and set her arm around Cathy’s shoulders. “Way to go,” the woman whispered.

Cathy gaped at her. “You were on my side all along?”

“You got
that
right,” the woman said. “I’m a parent, too. I have kids at the middle school and high school.”

“Then why haven’t you objected to what’s going on?”

“Didn’t know about it,” she said. “Here I am sitting on the school board, and none of my kids ever told me what’s going on. Until it came up on this agenda, I didn’t have a clue. I’ve only been on the board a year; they implemented this program before that.”

“I’m glad I came, then,” Cathy said.

“Good thing you did,” she said. “You know, the people on this school board are good people. They’re trying to do what’s best for the kids. But sometimes we need the help of parents like you to call our attention to problems and help us get things across to those of our members who don’t agree. It’s not easy, this education thing.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is.”

She squeezed Cathy’s shoulders, then let her go and started out the door. She stopped at the door and turned back. “Woman, you pack a wallop when you want to. Next time you’ve got a beef with the school board, how about giving me a call first so I can brace myself?”

Cathy laughed and followed her out.

Steve was talking to a few stragglers in the parking lot, and when she got into her car, he came to the window and leaned in. “I’m pretty proud of you, lady,” he said.

She laughed. “I’m kind of proud of myself. So…you want to go have a milkshake and celebrate?”

He smiled apologetically. “Wish I could, but Tracy’s home with a baby-sitter and I promised I’d be the one to tuck her in.”

“Can’t argue with that,” she said. “I like a man who’s a good dad.”

His smile faded. “I like a woman who’s a good mom.”

She hadn’t heard those words in a long time. There was no one to praise her mothering skills and tell her she was doing a good job. More often, she had a million reasons for selfcondemnation. It almost brought tears to her eyes. “Do you really think so?” she asked, feeling a little foolish.

“I know so,” he said. “How many moms would have fought this hard for their kids?”

“Well, my children wouldn’t agree. They’re embarrassed to death. They said their friends are calling me ‘the condom lady.’”

He laughed softly. “They’ll appreciate it one day.”

“Yeah, maybe.” She cranked her car. “Well, looks like we’re the last ones here.” Their eyes met, locked for a long moment. Finally, he leaned in and pressed a kiss on her cheek. Her heart jolted.

“I’ll call you tonight, after I get Tracy to bed,” he whispered. “And then we can relive your moment in the spotlight.”

“I’ll look forward to that.”

As she drove home, she thanked God for helping her to pull the whole thing off, for getting the school board to vote for her instead of against her—and, most of all, for letting her still have a chance with Steve.