The Prodigal: A Ragamuffin Story Read Free

yourself, giving back to God. Let the critics complain about the size of his church buildings, about the TV shows and ad buys, about his salary, which was well deserved; there was no Grace Cathedral until Jack built it.
    He had done some good in the world.
    Every August at the end of the fiscal year, the church went online and voted on ten charities they wanted to support in addition to the foundations Jack had created and the church supported, End Sexual Slavery and Cleanwater. And every year he took camera crews around the world to show the people of Grace—and to show their critics—what their money did, how it rescued people from brothels in Thailand, how it brought clean water to villages in Africa.
    This year, Sally had asked him to consider some action on the drug violence in Mexico. It was a subject on which she had too much knowledge. Her father had been an innocent bystander killed in a gang shootout; her grandparents still lived in a border city.
    Jack had asked her to tell the church about how murder and intimidation were transforming the country she loved into a nightmare for many Mexicans.
While the root problems might be too complex to tackle
, she’d said,
the wives and children who’ve lost husbands and fathers desperately need help.
The stat that got him on board was hearing that in the last four years, over eight thousand children had been orphaned in Ciudad Juárez alone.
    Grace Cathedral was also moved by her words. The congregation voted to help fund the widows and orphans of the drugwars, and to study the problem more closely to see if they could do more.
    So, in October, Jack and a group from the church had taken a weeklong junket to Mexico with a film crew. They had visited a drug-war refugee camp and an orphanage in Juárez that Grace was now sponsoring. Jack had attended a conference with regional governors, cabinet members, and Mexican clergy to talk about what Americans could do to help. They had closed their week in Mexico by filming a sequence in a village in the Yucatán where a new well drilled by Cleanwater had replaced a contaminated water source. It was a great photo op—lots of smiling children perched on and around Jack, great footage of sparkling clear water.
    They were slated to fly out that afternoon from Cancún, but the airline canceled their flight and a lot of others—mechanical problems with the fleet.
    “They’ve pulled fifty 757s off the line for emergency repairs,” Sally told Jack after returning from the airline counter in the Cancún airport, “including ours. Apparently seats are coming loose in flight.”
    “Really?” Jack sipped the Starbucks latte he’d just bought. “I can’t see how that’s a good thing.”
    “It’s a pretty major deal,” she said. “Flooded the whole system with canceled flights. They say they can’t get us home through our Dallas connection until Sunday, not even in first class, and there’s nothing but standby on the other airlines until then.”
    “Two days? They can’t route us through someplace else? Isn’t this their fault?”
    “Totally. Well, it’s possible they’ll be able to get us hometonight or tomorrow through Miami or Newark.” Her face did not look hopeful. “What do you want to do?”
    Jack thought about the possibility of being stuck in an airport overnight, about the three connections and eighteen-hour travel time, about flying to the East Coast to get to the West Coast, and he shook his head. When you travel a lot, travel gets harder, not easier.
    “Forget that,” he said. All of a sudden, he wanted something stronger than coffee. He took a deep breath. Then he pulled out his phone, called home, and told Tracy what was happening.
    She had already heard about the failing seats. “I wondered if that was you.”
    “Danny’s preaching Sunday,” Jack said, “and I’m not scheduled for anything until Tuesday, so I’m going to wait for a direct flight. Sally will make it work.”
    “She always