James Calvin Schaap

Anne Francis drove alone to church last Sunday night, the car silent in light traffic, Frank sitting back home in front of some scandalous segment of 60 Minutes.

“How long has it been,” he had said, “six weeks now, maybe?”

She knew what he was thinking because she was thinking it too.

“I know it’ll be a prayer service tonight,” he told her. “I can feel it in my bones, Annie. I’m just not up for sharing tonight, so I’m sitting this one out.”

With a month to go before the day to end all days; with little left to plan but some finishing touches on the gourmet lunch Crissy had finally decided on (after rejecting her mother’s advice to keep it simple); with what seemed an entire year of intensive research and development on weddings behind both of them; with Crissy’s crumpled Kleenex still sitting on the table, wet with tears shed voluminously about whether she’d picked the perfect colors—Anne Blanchard, mother of the bride-to-be, grabbed a bottle of wine from the cupboard abo

Professor Farnsworth is, well, fascinating. I think the reason she's not married is that she's already joined at the heart to Jonathan Edwards, William Bradford, Anne Hutchinson, and most of American Puritan history. She's a kick. She really is. When she starts in on one of the Puritan leaders, she gets in a zone, and it doesn't seem to matter whether there's anybody in the chairs in front of her. When that second hand sweeps past 11:00 a.m., something in her goes into gear and pushes through the class like a minesweeper.

Juan Ildefonso Rodriguez is a fine man—kind, soft-spoken, considerate—but more than a bit exotic at Windmark Community Church.

“We’ve not found anything, Mom.”

That’s what Ellen told her. Jan might have felt hopeful if the words weren’t always packaged in a deadbeat tone that carried too much finality, and Jan knew—aren’t mothers supposed to know?—that Ellen wasn’t really looking.

So Jan had tried once again, last night, Christmas Eve. “Have you found a suitable church?”

Pastor Dobbins’s questions about Betty Andress began the Sunday morning he looked at the choir and didn’t see her. It’s not that she was the glue that held the harmony. She was a fairly substantial alto, but she was far from the star. From the front of the church, he checked the praise team—no Betty. Just behind the piano sat the drama people, but she wasn’t there either. His eyes swept through the sanctuary. Let’s see, he asked himself, where do the Andresses normally sit?

In the basement of Seventh Avenue Church the furnace was going, the computer humming, the Xerox running, and, upstairs, the organist practicing for Sunday worship. We’d been working on Pentecost. I’d been reading through the passage in Ephesians 5, the very famous passage about not being drunk on wine, but being filled with the Spirit.

When Carl Westenberg drove up to the church on Friday afternoon, he deliberately backed his truck up onto the sidewalk that led to what was once the west entrance. He told his wife he’d backed it in because he wanted everybody to see the bumper sticker his grandkids had picked up for him for his birthday—“I’d rather be fishin’,” it said, but he wouldn’t have dared to say it aloud because the work was being done for such a good cause.

When I read the note, I went perfectly blank. I thought about what it said for every moment of the afternoon, even though I finished the mid-semester meetings without anyone suspecting a thing. I went about my work as if I hadn't read what I had. I kept it all in. I told myself that I'd call her immediately when I got home.

My daughter is pregnant—my daughter the lawyer, my daughter the lawyer who is not married.

Bo Meredith could have made commercials for Skippy peanut butter. He was the penultimate darling little boy—round face, apple cheeks, floppy red hair, and a glorious Lone Ranger's mask of rusty freckles ear to ear. Terry, his mother, the daughter of a Lutheran preacher from Indiana, had been coming to Fort Anderson Church off and on for six months. Bo's father wasn't a believer, she'd said, and from her sketchy descriptions, Pastor Jack had developed the sense that the marriage wasn't in great shape.