Chapter 47
God’s Little Community
The next few days were a joyous time. Uncle Nick’s and Almeda’s faces showed that a weight of concern had been lifted from them. And among all of us there was a sense of calm and peace, a good feeling, that would erupt every so often in laughter. Pa played with Tad like I hadn’t seen him do in a long time, and Emily asked if she could invite Mike McGee to the house for dinner the next Sunday afternoon. Uncle Nick could be seen bounding all over the property and up and down between the two houses with Erich on his shoulders, laughing and carrying on like they were two little kids. There was really a change in him. How much had to do with Katie, and how much had to do with what he’d done himself, I didn’t know.
It didn’t matter. A new spirit was suddenly alive among us all because Katie had opened up her heart—and it was wonderful!
Almeda remained quiet. I knew she had to take it slow on account of the pregnancy, and every time Doc Shoemaker came to the house he would say, “Now you just don’t let yourself get excited about anything, you hear me, Almeda?” But I think her joy went deeper than it did for anyone else. She probably knew in a more personal way how hard it had been for Katie, and knew more of what Katie was feeling because she had felt the exact same things herself. She had shared her own life with Katie, painful as all the recollections were, and endured the emotional pain over what Katie had said. After all that, and the loss of Katie’s child, to have Katie finally say that she wanted to know God’s love for herself meant more to Almeda than she could have expressed.
She went up to see Katie the next morning. I asked her if she wanted me to go with her.
“Walk me up to the creek, Corrie,” she answered. “But then you can come back down here. I want to talk to Katie alone.”
She was there a long time. When she got back home she was clearly tired but there was a peaceful smile on her face. Pa asked her what had happened.
“We had a long talk,” Almeda said. “A more personal time than we’ve ever had. She opened up whole new areas of her life to me. She’s really a changed woman! I think we’re at last ready to be sisters. And then we prayed together, for the first time, and when I left she hugged me.”
There were tears in Almeda’s eyes even before she was through telling about it. She turned and went inside and straight to her bed. Pa just put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze, and said nothing for a minute.
“The Lord’s really up to some unexpected things around here, ain’t he, Corrie?” he said finally.
“You can say that again!” I said.
“Nick’s just as changed inside as Katie,” he said. “And I aim to sit him down like Almeda’s done with Katie, and talk about some things and get him to praying too. It’s time all ten of us—well, at least the nine of us except for little Erich—it’s time we all started praying together and bringing God into everything we do around this little community of ours.”
“Community, Pa?”
“Yeah, Corrie. Don’t you see—we got two houses, two families, nine or ten people, however you count them—”
“Soon to be eleven,” I put in.
“Yeah, well I reckon you’re right—eleven. But you see, here we are a little community within the bigger community. And if all of us—this nine or ten or eleven of us dedicate ourselves to live in what we do by what God tells his folks to do, then it just seems to me that other folks around might sooner or later stand up and take notice, and say, ‘Hey, I want to be part of living that kind of life too.’ You see, Corrie, it’s gotta start someplace, people joining themselves to live together like God’s people. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and now with Katie and Nick doing what they’ve done, I figure God might be about to do some new things among us that we haven’t seen before.”
“That sounds exciting, Pa,” I said. My mind flashed back to my talk with Zack at the picnic, and I wondered if I wanted to leave this little “community,” as Pa called it, of the Hollister-Belle families. Pa made it sound like there couldn’t be a better place to be than right here in the middle of where God was at work. “What do you think he’s going to do now?”
“How could I know that?” he answered. “I’m not about to start trying to figure God’s ways out ahead of time. I’d have never figured a bunch of people like us would be all together like this. Almeda’s from Boston, and Katie’s from Virginia! But God’s got a way of bringing folks together from places about as far apart as we can imagine, and then, boom—there they are together and he starts working among them. So how could I try to figure what he’s gonna do next?”
“I see what you mean, Pa.”
“But I’m sure of one thing.”
“When God sets about knittin’ folks together—just like weaving threads to make a piece of cloth—when God starts doing that, then good things happen. Just like all of us here—good things are gonna happen, Corrie, I can just feel it. Other folks besides Katie and Nick are gonna find out what it really means to live like God’s people.”
“How will they find out?”
“Who can tell? They just will. I don’t doubt my being mayor’s got something to do with what the Lord’s up to. It’s no accident I got elected when nothing could have been further from my mind. And your writing, Corrie. People read the things you write.”
“But I don’t write anything about God or what’s happened here in our family.”
“You might someday. And when you do, people are gonna pay attention to what you say. They’re gonna listen, and they’re gonna say, ‘Hey, I want to live the kind of life Corrie Belle Hollister talks about . . . I want to be a Christian like that . . . I want to pray and know God’s love.’ You see, Corrie, there’s all kinds of stuff God’s gonna do with all of us, and with lots of other people too. We’ve only just seen the beginning!”