Uncle Alex! Look out for that…pig?”

Jared’s voice trailed away as Alex Armstrong applied a heavy foot to the brakes of his aging gray van and came to a screeching halt. A pink pig sat on its backside in the middle of the two-lane highway, its black hooves splayed on the concrete. It turned its head and gave them a baleful stare from one small eye, but made no signs of moving. Alex craned his neck and saw that the porker had company—piglets scurried back and forth across the road, squealing.

“Looks like a truck tipped over.” Jared pointed to an old pickup jerry-rigged with a makeshift cage that lay on its side a few yards ahead. The driver of the truck—a thin, spry man who’d seen seventy in his rearview mirror—and several other passersby flapped their arms, but the pigs ignored them.

A man in oil-stained jeans, a denim shirt with a frayed collar, and a billed cap that announced Red’s Gas & Garage sauntered over to Alex’s van, bent to peer into the driver’s side window, and grinned a flashing white smile. “Sorry about the holdup. We’ll get them rounded up soon as we can. I told Ole that this piece of junk pickup wouldn’t move Twinkle Toes, but would he listen? No way. I knew that if the pig and babies all moved to one side, that tin excuse for a truck would topple, and look what happened.”

“Twinkle Toes?” Alex stammered.

The fellow gaped at him and shook his head, like Alex had been hiding in the other half of the world. “He’s taking her to tonight’s petting zoo at the park. It wouldn’t be the same without Twinkle Toes.” The man nodded as if that explained everything and meandered toward the sow. He pulled the billed cap from his head and yelled, “You pink varmints are blocking traffic!”

“Like that’s going to help,” Jared muttered, but he never took his gaze from the chaotic scene before him.

The man named Ole, apparent title-holder of the dented pickup, rummaged in his jacket pocket and produced a dark, spotted banana days past its prime. He held it out and peeled it slowly to reveal a brown pillar of mush.

Twinkle Toes gave a soft, almost loving grunt, hoisted herself to her feet, and tiptoed toward the gelatinous muck. She reached her owner, opened her mouth, and made the banana vanish, peel and all. In a quick, practiced move, the elderly man slid a homemade halter over her head to trap her.

“If you guys would quit standing around gawking and help me get my pickup righted, I’d get her back in.” A strong Norwegian accent frosted Ole’s words. “The piglets will follow.” The voice sounded familiar to Alex.

By this time the crowd had grown significantly, as traffic piled up in both directions. Alex took a step forward, ready to help. Then he remembered his impractical leather loafers. He wouldn’t be able to get enough traction to make a difference moving the truck. Jared, city boy to the core, looked as helpless as Alex felt. Several men stepped up and, with much pushing and grunting, rocked the elderly pickup back onto its tires. Ole hopped into the box like a man half his age, shoved one end of a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood onto the ground, and turned it into a ramp. Twinkle Toes scrambled up the makeshift ramp. The piglets congregated by the back tires and were lifted one by one to join their mother.

Ole used a piece of rope to secure the door on the battered cage, rounded the truck to the cab, revved the engine, and crept off at a snail’s pace.

“Ole is batty about that pig.”

Startled, Alex jumped. The fellow who’d first spoken to him had returned. “Excuse me?”

“Oh yeah. He does presentations at schools, teaching grade school kids all about pigs. He tells them how pigs sniff out truffles and that they have to wallow in mud to keep cool because they don’t have sweat glands.”

“Oh.” Jared shot Alex a befuddled look. “Weird. I guess you learn something new every day.” He turned the crank to roll his window up.

The traffic jam was dispersing now that the excitement was over. One by one, the cars pulled away until Alex’s van and the chatty fellow’s truck were the only ones left.

“He even compares himself to President Harry Truman, if you can believe it,” the man said.

Alex, who was beginning to feel as though he’d fallen through a rabbit hole and ended up in Wonderland, did a double take. “Excuse me?”

“According to Ole, Harry Truman once said that ‘no man should be allowed to be president who does not understand hogs.’”

“I didn’t know…” Alex stammered. How was he supposed to respond to that?

“I’m Dixon Daniels, by the way.” The farmer thrust his hand through Alex’s open window to shake hands. Before Alex could say more, the stranger wandered back to his own vehicle.

“What is this place?” Jared asked, shaking his head.

Alex glanced at the road sign not thirty yards from them.

WELCOME TO GRASSY VALLEY, NORTH DAKOTA.

CITY POPULATION: 1,254

A PLACE LIKE HOME.

Alex took a deep breath. “Well, Jared, I guess you could say we’re home.”

So this was it.

Alex Armstrong pulled his van to the side of the gravel road and stared at the panorama before him. He gazed across gently undulating fields, past a small, glittering azure pond painted brightly with late afternoon sun, and beyond a flock of marsh ducks coming in for a landing. The mallards’ glossy-green heads glinted in the sunlight, and a tawny deer streaked from its hiding place near a stand of plump cattails as Alex fixed his gaze on a white outline butted against the horizon.

He squinted slightly and the structure took shape. A rectangle, with concrete steps protruding from the prow and an added-on shanty jutting from the stern, rested atop a slight rise in the prairie. A spire rose upward from the roof near the front of the building and seemed to disappear into heaven but for a wink of metal, a cross, piercing the sky.

“Is that your church, Uncle Alex?” Jared unwound in the passenger seat and stretched until Alex thought the seventeen-year-old might put his foot through the windshield. Sometimes Alex wondered how this lanky beanpole of a kid with feet the size of Volkswagens could possibly be related to his petite, proper sister Carol, but he’d been thankful for the companionship Jared had provided on the drive from Chicago.

Jared scraped his fingers through his already-tousled dark hair and peered at the vista before him. “It’s like a photograph…or a movie set.” He dusted tortilla chips from his lap and leaned forward. “It doesn’t even look real.”

Alex couldn’t disagree with that. It didn’t feel real either. He was a city boy through and through. What was tangible to him was the ivy-covered Christian college campus where he’d met the woman he’d planned to marry and had taught English for more than twelve years. Taught, that was, until the hand of God—a surprisingly heavy hand in this case—had turned him around and sent him off to seminary to become a pastor. There, he’d felt like an old man in a sea of youth. Most of his classmates were little older than the college seniors he’d taught for so many years.

Now here he was, a tenured professor turned inexperienced minister. His former fiancée dating someone else. Starting over at age forty-two. Gazing helplessly at his first assignment, a tiny, twochurch North Dakota parish situated at a sparsely populated bend in the road.

Jared squirmed like an eager puppy in his seat. “Drive to the church. I want to see it up close.”

Alex didn’t move. Couldn’t make himself. He’d known it would be small. He had been warned that this part of North Dakota was rural. But still, somehow, he hadn’t expected this. The muscles in Alex’s stomach tightened. It was the clench of anxiety he’d been fighting ever since the call had come and he’d been invited, sight unseen, to pastor this congregation. He was out of his element here.

Maybe God hadn’t spoken to him at all, Alex thought, a sinking sensation in his stomach. Perhaps in his eagerness to get away from the pain of the breakup, he’d only imagined he was following God’s will by coming here. Maybe this whole thing was a gross error in judgment on his part.

“Don’t be like this. You told Mom and me that God sent you to seminary and brought you here for a purpose.” Jared waved his hand toward the pristine white church. “So here it is. Let’s take a look at it.”

“It doesn’t look much like a purpose,” Alex muttered as he drove forward and pulled into the tidy churchyard. “It’s barely as big as a shoe box.” A cemetery with headstones in orderly rows sat off to one side. It must have been recently mowed, and not a blade of grass was out of place.

He’d have to investigate it later. Alex’s senses were already tripping into overload. A riot of peonies and beds of petunias greeted them from well-kept flower beds along the foundation of the building. Old-fashioned flowers, he thought. His grandmother had grown peonies.

“Paul Bunyan’s shoe box, maybe,” Jared corrected him. “It must hold close to a hundred people.”

“Sixty could pack in, maybe. Sixty sardines, I mean.”

Jared gave his uncle an appraising look, and Alex clamped his mouth shut. His nephew probably thought he was a crotchety old geezer.

“I know, I know,” Alex retorted to Jared’s unspoken reproach. “I’m living my dream-come-true.” Alex parroted his persistently cheerful sister’s parting words as they drove away from her house in Elmhurst, outside Chicago.

“Mom says God puts people in situations that seem all wrong but turn out to be great somewhere down the road. Like how I used to hate mowing lawns, and now that I have a little summer business doing it, I really like it, you know?”

Bless Carol’s heart, Alex thought. She’s raising him right. Of course the kid was still supremely annoying on occasion.

Alex was being shaped for something. He had to be. God had asked him to walk by faith. And then God had trotted him here. The sky was so big here, the land so vast—so utterly unlike anything he’d ever known.

“This is cool.” Jared opened the car door and jumped out. Everything was either “awesome” or “cool” to Jared, including hot chocolate, summer days, the Sahara desert, and tanning beds. He ambled loose-jointedly toward the church. When Alex caught up with him, his nephew was staring up at the lofty steeple, head tipped back, squinting into the sun.

“Actually, my dream was more along the lines of an associate pastor position in a church in a mid-sized city,” Alex said mildly, trying not to reveal his anxiety even though his heart was tripping like a drum major in the Rose Parade. “Some place offering lots of programs and several services on Sunday morning. My dream would have had an attached preschool and day care. And, if there was a parsonage at all, it would be within five minutes of a grocery store and post office. That was my idea of a humble way to start.” The worst part was, he’d almost had it. And then Natalie—

“Who needs that stuff? Here you’ve got pigs, cows, and…tractors and…wild animals and stuff….”

Jared was trying. Alex had to give him that.

“There’s something I don’t get,” Jared added. “Why is this called Hilltop Community Church? There isn’t a hill for miles. Why isn’t it called Grassy Valley Community Church? That’s the name of the town we drove through.”

“This church isn’t located in the town of Grassy Valley. It’s out here in the country, in Hilltop Township, hence, the name Hilltop Community Church.”

“What’s a township?”

“I had to look it up myself,” Alex admitted, feeling a little sheepish that he had so much to learn. “It’s a subdivision of a county, with a local government that takes care of things like road maintenance—a community within a community, of sorts. The people of Hilltop are tied together by their interest in this particular area, and the church is named after the township.”

“Oh,” Jared said. He snapped his gum and took the steps to the front door two at a time. He tested the doorknob and the ten-foot-high door glided silently open. “There aren’t even any locks.” A shadow flitted across Jared’s features. “Different from our church at home, isn’t it? Mom still talks about the fuss everyone put up when the council decided that we needed to lock the doors when no one was in the church office.”

Alex remembered it vividly. He, too, had hated the idea of having someone seek solace in a church and be turned away by bolted doors; but after several acts of vandalism on the property, what else could they do? Theirs was an inner city congregation, a beacon of light in a poor, tough district, a church his family had loved for years in a neighborhood that had aged badly. But here were open doors to welcome anyone who might come.

Alex took a deep breath and followed his nephew into the building. He felt immediately at home in the high-ceilinged vestibule, as if welcomed by the generations who had worshipped here. The floor, worn from years of footsteps, was solid beneath their feet and polished to a high shine. Two ropes, one thick and meaty, the other slightly finer, hung straight down from the ceiling.

“Bells!” And before his uncle could stop him, Jared grabbed the thickest rope and tugged. Something grated, and the sound of a clapper striking the inside of a gigantic bell gonged out its song. Alex felt the sound reverberate in his chest.

“Cool.” Jared dropped the rope and pushed through a pair of tall, white swinging doors into the body of the church. Alex followed more slowly, soaking in the scents of pine oil and candle wax, feeling as if he were at a precipice, looking upon the sheer drop into which he was about to tumble.

“It’s like landing on another planet,” Jared said.

“You’ve got that right,” Alex murmured. Planet Hilltop Community Church. “I guess no one will mind if we go in and look around.” It was peculiar to feel like an interloper in what was now “his” church.

“Didn’t the call committee want to bring you here first?” So Jared actually had been listening when his uncle told him what had transpired prior to being hired. Alex hadn’t been sure, plugged in as Jared was to a pair of headphones. He’d been busy listening to music and eating bag after bag of chips all the way across Minnesota.

“Let’s take the risk.”

The interior looked more like a replica in a museum than a functioning church. Ahead of Alex, Jared followed the ruby carpet runner down the aisle toward the altar, his size-eleven athletic shoes making a squishy sound as he walked. He tipped back his head to stare at the ceiling. “What’s that stuff?”

Alex followed the direction of his nephew’s pointing index finger. “Embossed tin. The real stuff.” He glanced down and paused to run his hand along the back of a pew, a curve of wood with intricate carving. “This is a masterpiece. Every care was taken in building this place. It’s incredible.”

Thanks to sunlight flowing through the elaborate stained-glass windows depicting the highlights of Jesus’ time on earth, every bit of the church glistened. It was as if they were standing inside a jewel box. From a painting above the altar, a kindly, loving Jesus with small children scattered at His feet beckoned them forward. Come to Me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

“Are you scared, Unc?” Jared’s question hit hard at the queasy pit of Alex’s stomach.

“Scared?” He paused. “I’d like to say no, but I suppose I am, a little. This”—he tipped his head toward the church and the fields beyond—“is foreign territory.”

Here I am, Lord. You’ve taken me a long way from home in so many ways. It is like another universe. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

He put his hand on Jared’s bony shoulder. “But I’m sure God will bless it in ways I can’t even imagine.” He added a silent prayer to the end of his statement: Please?