Cast a Road Before Me Read Free Page A

go on to tell me of So-and-So’s wife or child or physical ailment—until she’d catch herself and abruptly snap her lips shut. “There I am, at it again,” she’d breathe, eyes tilting skyward. “‘Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from troubles.’ Proverbs 21:23. Forgive me, Lord.”
    Looking back on my first summer in Bradleyville is like staring into a deep, dark hole. Often, alone in my bedroom, I would cry until my tears ran dry. Weekdays, Aunt Eva was busy at the post office, and Uncle Frank worked at the sawmill. To keep me busy while they were gone, my aunt and uncle had made a point to introduce me to girls my age, and they all tried to be my friends. They’d invite me over for an afternoon or to slumber parties, but I rarely said yes. My grief was sucking me dry; I had no energy for people.
    When I wasn’t crying, I spent hours slumped upon my bed, trying to sort things out. I was obsessed with the harsh finality that my mother’s life, so charismatic and unselfish, had been cut short within an instant. She’d been only thirty-five years old. The memories of her death were enough to wrench me from nightmarish sleep, sweat-drenched and shaking. How to describe that mindless, wobbly-kneed run ending at the twisted crunch of metal that had been our car? My mother inside, bent and bloodied, with no way to reach her because the doors were flattened, handles gone.
    “Sweet chil’, only Jesus can help you through your grief,” Aunt Eva would croon to me. “I know, because he surely helped me when we lost Henry. I’d sat in church every Sunday since movin’ here, but not until Henry died did I accept Jesus as my Savior. That terrible loss drove me to my knees.”
    I knew she was trying to help. But her words of faith and encouragement sounded like such platitudes, even though I didn’t doubt she bore deep sorrow—over Henry’s death and my mother’s.I didn’t mean to be selfish, but I couldn’t believe anyone really understood the depth of my pain, not even Jesus himself. Besides, I didn’t want Jesus to “help me through my grief.”
    I just wanted my mother back.
    In the fall, I began my junior year of high school. Bradleyville’s high school was a fraction of the size I was used to attending, consisting of one small building on the same campus as the elementary school. I flailed my way through eleventh grade, barely able to concentrate in class. Eventually, I had to repeat the whole year. The nightmares still pursued me, and grief over my mother had swelled into a smoldering resentment against God for taking her from me. Although Mom had taught me to pray when I was young, I no longer cared to talk to God. As far as I was concerned, my mother was the best person who’d ever walked on this earth; yet he’d let her die, while criminals and all manner of selfish, nasty people still lived.
    Every Sunday I went to church with my aunt and uncle, fixing my eyes upon our pastor, Jeffrey Frasier, during his sermons but hearing little. The Bellinghams were joyful in their worship, and I admired their faith. Sometimes I wished I had what they did, for they seemed well grounded and content. I’d look at them and then think of Mei Zheng and her children, praying to Buddha. As my mother would say, both families had certainly found their ways to God. There had been times, when I was serving at Hope Center alongside my mom, that I’d felt close to him too. But now he seemed so distant, his ways impenetrable. My anger at him left me feeling all the more alone.
    One Sunday about a month after Christmas—which was the hardest day I’d faced to date in Bradleyville—Pastor Frasier preached from the third chapter of John about a man named Nicodemus. “Verily, verily I say unto thee,” he quoted Jesus as saying to Nicodemus, “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” For some reason, those words penetrated my distant thoughts, and I frowned, trying to make