The Homecoming (24 page)

“So you won’t do anything crazy while I’m gone?” He was choking back his emotions. “I need you to be here, Dad. I want you waiting for me when I get back.”

“I don’t think I’ve got any crazy left in me. You just do what you gotta do, and don’t worry about me.” They exchanged hugs. “Now you go next door, get some dinner, say hey to everybody, then bring them all back here with whatever dessert Mrs. Fortini’s fixed up. Then you can tell ’em all the news.”

When Katherine awoke the next morning, thoughts of what Shawn had shared last night pushed aside the fading images from her last dream. She welcomed them; they were better than a dream to her.

Mrs. Fortini had been right. She should have trusted God. Why was that so hard to do? She had feared the worst—that she would soon lose both Patrick and Shawn for good—and instead she’d been given a reprieve. Now she would spend the next three months with both of them in London.

She felt bad leaving Mr. Collins and Mrs. Fortini behind, but both had gone out of their way to assure her they’d be fine. She got up and began getting ready for church. When she came downstairs, Mrs. Fortini informed her that Shawn had just called. Patrick had a stomachache and Shawn was keeping him home from church. He said he’d take care of him and to feel free to go on without them.

She was saddened to hear Patrick was sick, but she really did want to go to church. She was running a little late. She skipped breakfast, hugged Mrs. Fortini good-bye, and headed out the door. The church building was just a few blocks away. She got there in a few minutes, found her favorite parking spot, and joined the rest of the congregation making their way through the front doors. Just before going in, she read the sermon title on the sign out front: “The Book God Has Written About Us.”

She sat in her usual seat in the back row. After four months, she felt pretty familiar with the routines. During the hymns, she happily sang along with the rest, even recognized some of the songs. They took up the offering, read a few announcements, then Pastor Harman got up and greeted the congregation. She picked up her Bible and read along as he read his text. He said it was from Psalm 139:

“O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is too high; I cannot attain it.”

Then he said, “Please skip down to verses 15 and 16.” Katherine looked further down the page:

“My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

“Let’s pray,” he said.

She closed her eyes and listened. She didn’t understand everything he said, but she knew one thing. She liked listening to him very much. She liked being in this place, being with these people. She liked the Bible passage she had just read. It had never dawned on her that God was intimately acquainted with all her ways, even knew what she was thinking. She’d always thought God was too busy for little people, that he only had time for presidents and generals.

After he prayed, Pastor Harman said, “We’ve just read from God’s book. But did you see what David says here in this psalm? He said God has
another
book. A book he has written about
our
lives.” As he normally did, the pastor spent the next thirty minutes going over each verse and explaining what each one meant, then how they applied to everyday life. Katherine was riveted by every word.

Then he said, “One of the most meaningful things the Lord has shown me these last few years is the value and importance of living for him one day at a time. To awaken each day aware of my complete dependence on him, then very quickly, before my mind begins to fret and try to take over, I begin to yield my heart and turn my thoughts toward him. If we don’t, we wind up living like orphans fending for ourselves. Our lives become full of anxiety and fear, because deep inside, we know we’re not really in control. Think about it . . . how much of your life—even this week—went just the way you planned?”

Katherine answered the question in her head . . . none of it. She realized that all she ever did was worry about tomorrow, what might go wrong. If not tomorrow then she worried about the rest of the week or the next month.

“Instead,” he said, “we need to awaken each day as a disciple— as it says in Isaiah 50—to listen as one being taught. Our most important task is to begin each day drawing near to God. To surrender our will, our plans, our agenda for each day to the one who loved us and gave himself for us on the cross.”

The cross; now she knew he was talking about Jesus.

“We know,” said Pastor Harman, “that God’s faithfulness toward us awakens with the sunrise. The Bible says his mercies are new every morning. And the psalm we’ve just read tells us that our future—all the days of our lives—though turning one page at a time for us, are already written in God’s book. Have you ever thought of that? God has written a book for each one of us—the book of our lives. And each day is like a page. How many pages do you have, do I have left in my book? What things might happen in those pages? I don’t know. But this I do know . . . the one who made us, the one who died and gave his life for our sins . . . he knows how many pages we have left and what’s written on each one. And we know Jesus has promised to be with us as each page unfolds, leading us and guiding us by his Spirit, as we take hold of his hand and follow.”

Katherine knew at that moment that she desperately wanted to know God this way, the way the pastor and all these people did. The way Mrs. Fortini did. Pastor Harman asked a woman to come up and play the piano softly. As she did, he said he wanted to close his message explaining the gospel clearly, just in case there was anyone there who didn’t understand it.

Normally, this was the time Katherine slipped out of the pew to head over to Patrick’s classroom, so she could be there when he came out. She felt the impulse to go but realized this morning, she didn’t have to.

She stayed put.

Pastor Harman said, “The God who made us demonstrated his love for us, not by connecting it to our fickle feelings, which shift rapidly like the wind. He demonstrated his love by sending his Son Jesus Christ to die in our place on the cross. Why did Jesus have to die? Why did his blood need to be shed?”

Katherine realized . . . she had never really understood the answer to that question. She sat forward.

“He shed his blood to pay the price for our sins. This shows how serious our sins are to God, but also his amazing grace and love. Left to ourselves, we would all just wander away. These sins, which we’ve been committing all our lives, separate us from God. They’re the reason God can seem so far away. And they must be punished, because God is just and holy. But if we turn from them, if we ask God to forgive us, he will. Because Jesus paid the price in full. God is willing to completely wash our sins away and give us a gift of righteousness, the very righteousness of his beloved Son. And that’s not all . . . God will become our heavenly Father and adopt us into his family.”

Jesus died for my sins . . . God wants to adopt me?

As Katherine heard these words, tears rolled down her face. She had never been in a family before. At the orphanage where she grew up, she’d longed to be adopted by any of the dozens of couples who came by. But it never happened. By the time she was thirteen, she’d finally given up. She didn’t even come downstairs anymore to see the parents who came.

But the pastor just said God wanted to adopt her, to be her Father. It was almost too wonderful to be true. But she decided right then . . . she did believe it; she believed everything she had heard. Pastor Harman asked if anyone wanted to pray with him to receive Christ as their Savior.

Katherine raised her hand. She didn’t even notice she was the only one.

She closed her eyes and prayed along with him. She felt someone’s warm hand on her shoulder. She looked up to see Sadie Robbins, the woman who first greeted her months ago. Tears flowed like rain; she couldn’t stop them, didn’t want to stop them.

She felt so light and peaceful inside. She had never known such intense joy.

She couldn’t wait to go home and tell Mrs. Fortini.

Thirty-four

June 12, 1944
London

Katherine was sure she’d probably experienced more “firsts” in the past month than in the rest of her life combined. She had personally experienced God’s love for the first time. She had traveled outside of Pennsylvania for the first time, to New York City, where they’d caught a plane to London, of all places.

Flying in a plane, that was a first.

It had been a fascinating experience, except for the times that terrified her, and there were too many of them. It was
so
noisy and bumpy. Several times she’d thought the plane would just pull apart and fall out of the sky. She kept looking at Shawn. He could not have been more at ease, like they were out for a Sunday drive to Valley Forge.

Patrick kept turning to her for comfort, burying his face in her coat. His father would gently pull him away. “Piece of cake, Patrick,” he’d say. “Just some rough air, we’ll be okay.” Then he’d go back to reading his paper. He had flown much worse in England, he told her, almost every day . . . plus he was being shot at.

They had finally landed in London. Another first—she was in a different country.

Not just any country, but the fairytale land of her childhood stories and books. She might actually get to see the places she’d read about in Dickens and her Jane Austen novels. Perhaps they might take a drive out to Yorkshire, see the moors and mansions she’d read about in
Wuthering Heights
.

At the moment, Katherine felt far removed from the majesty and splendor of the English countryside. She stood in a long line at a bakery—a “queue,” as the Brits called it— waiting for a single loaf of bread. In front and behind her, as best she could interpret, middle-aged women argued about how much rain was supposed to fall that day, the lousy service of the bloke at the counter, and something Churchill had said last night on the radio.

She paid for the bread using sixpence or shillings or some other coin of the realm, then stepped out into the crowded street.

The city streets and buildings had the charming old-timey look she’d expected, but her London fantasies had been marred by the stark reminders of war. On every block stood some of the loveliest row homes and businesses, many hundreds of years old. But like a smile with missing teeth, each street had horrible gaping holes. Homes and businesses no longer there, bombed-out shells, reduced to neat little piles of bricks and rubble. A neighbor had told her that every family she knew had lost someone in the Blitz. Entire families were routinely wiped out in a single night. And this had gone on for years.

She couldn’t imagine living every day in such danger. At least they were safe now. There hadn’t been a single bomb dropped on England since they’d arrived. Shawn said the skies had been clear for more than two months before that. She had stepped out into the street when a blaring horn surprised her. She fell back on the sidewalk. An army truck sped by; she barely escaped the muddy spray from its tires.

“Didn’t you see the lorry, miss?”

She looked up at the kind face of an elderly man reaching out his hand. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “Been here a month, and I still keep forgetting to look the opposite way.”

“Figured as much,” he said. “Seems we’re killing more of you Yanks on the road than on the battlefield.” He helped her up. “’Ere’s your bag, miss. A bit banged up, it is.”

“Thank you,” she said and smiled as he walked away. The crowd on the sidewalk moved on, used to such things by now. She pulled the bread out, saw a wide crease right through the middle. It would have to do, she thought; she had no time to go through that line again. Shawn was coming home for dinner tonight from his base at High Wycombe, the first time she or Patrick had seen him since D-Day last week. She had four other stores to get to, then just enough time to get back to the apartment to cook.

That’s right, she reminded herself . . . it’s not an apartment; they call it a
flat
in London. But what sense did that make? Her flat was at the end of a long hill, then once through the doorway she had to climb a steep flight of steps. She came to the next intersection, stopped, and looked both ways several times.

It would be terrible for Patrick if she got run over.

After making her way through the stores, she headed home. She walked past the church she’d been attending since they arrived. It was smaller than her church in Allingdale, much more formal, and the pastor was not near the preacher Pastor Harman was. But she cherished her time there every Sunday. Even here, the presence of war was evident. In the back corner of the sanctuary, light poured in, and sometimes rain from a large hole in the roof. She’d been told a German bomb made the hole and then, thankfully, failed to explode upon impact.

Katherine picked up the mail by the front door of their apartment. She noticed among the envelopes the now familiar handwriting of Albert Baker. He’d still written to her as often as when she was in the States. She had to admit, she did enjoy the idea of being pursued so eagerly but still wasn’t ready to give in. He kept his letters safe and mostly non-romantic, other than always ending them the same way . . .
Love, Al
. She had mentioned in passing, in one of her rare letters back to him, the possibility of them coming to England.

She didn’t know how he’d found out where they lived, but obviously he had. She put the letter in her purse for later. How she wished Major Collins would show even a fraction of the interest Captain Albert Baker lavished upon her.

“That’s it up on the left, Private,” said Shawn.