One Thursday Morning: Inspirational Christian Romance (Diamond Lake Series Book 1) Read Free

wasn’t going to be able to hurt me anymore where I was going. And while I loved the idea of him never again being able to hurt me like he had before, a part of me felt scared.
    I went into the bedroom and began packing the gym bag. I began to think about how much easier it would have been if I didn’t still love him, if somehow, I could have cut that part out of my heart. Glancing over, I saw one of his empty bottles of whiskey sitting on his nightstand—it helped dull the pain of packing. Stopping a few minutes into packing, I pressed a hand against my forehead. He’s going to be a wreck. The problem was that I did love him, and I couldn’t help but worry about him being alone with nothing but the bottle. My eyes fell to a blood stain on the carpet in our bedroom. Seeing my own blood on the carpet helped push away the worry for John and motivated me to finish packing.
    After the bedroom, I headed into the living room with the gym bag on my shoulder and retrieved the metal box from the floor beneath the piano. Shoving the money from my stash into the bag, my hands couldn’t help but tremble. This is it. I’m really going to leave him. Turning off my cellphone, I tossed it, along with my purse, into the metal box. With the remainders of my old life in a ten inch by ten inch metal box, I latched it shut and placed it back into the floor. I fixed the carpet to make it look perfect, then I stood up and walked out the front door.

Chapter 3
    One year later . . .
    Balancing five plates of food between my two arms, I wove in a zig-zag pattern through Dixie’s Diner, dodging other servers and tables along the way. Arriving to the family of five that sat in the corner booth of the restaurant, I smiled. A pencil behind my ear, an apron on my waist, and just enough energy to get through the day was my new life in Newport, Washington. It wasn’t a glamorous life, but it was mine and it was away from John. Love , for the time being, only existed in the pages of the novels I read, the movies I watched, and in the couples or families that would come into the diner. I was okay with that fact. I needed the time over the last twelve months to allow my heart to heal, my life to rebuild, and my outlook to change.
    Over the course of twelve months, I realized just how delusional I had been when I was with John. My idea of love back then was warped. I learned this through many hours of therapy down at ‘A New Me in Christ’ Christian Counseling Center in the neighboring city of Spokane. My idea of love had relied heavily on however John was feeling that particular day. If John came home and made love to me and didn’t beat me, I felt loved. Counseling was a tough decision to follow through with, but it came after miscarrying my baby girl, whom I named Hope, at fifteen weeks pregnant. Her loss was devastating to me. After losing her, I became depressed and felt hopeless, without a reason to live. Depression seeped into my existence and crushed my spirit, and then one night, I decided to end my life with a bottle of sleeping pills. Before I did, though, I stumbled upon a Gideon Bible inside a nightstand in a cheap hotel in downtown Spokane. I started reading right where I opened—Psalms. And when I came to Psalms 46, my heart clung to the words like thirst to water in a dry place.
     
    God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.
    Psalm 46:1-2
     
    It was the same verse that my mother read at her own mother’s funeral. Though I had abandoned my faith in my teenage years, I returned to Jesus that night. Asking Him to rule over my life on June 1, 2014 at 1:12AM, in a dimly lit hotel room with the sound of sirens in the background, I allowed God to be God again in my life.
    Placing each plate of food in front of their respective owners at the table, I wiped my palms against my apron and asked, “Anything