A Colorado Match. Deb Kastner

It was all gone. Completely and utterly destroyed, turned into bags upon bags of worthless debris in the blink of an eye.

      And yet it could have been so much worse, he re minded himself. He had much to thank God for.

      None of the kids had been hurt. Or his brother. Or Gracie. Or Jessica.

      People couldn’t be replaced. Buildings could.

      Except in this case, Vince didn’t know when it would happen. Or more to the point, how. The ministry was barely making it financially as it was. There’d been no way to predict such a disaster, and even if he had, his budget constraints wouldn’t have been able to have changed much.

      He sighed again and made absent circles in the ash with the end of one of his crutches. He heard Melanie exit the truck and slam the door shut, but he didn’t turn to look at her as she approached.

      Instead, he closed his eyes once again, this time centering his heart on heaven and the throne of grace. Silently, he pleaded with God for the strength and wisdom to deal with this new trial.

      Most of all, he prayed for the faith to believe God would get him through this, for he had never felt as utterly alone and abandoned as he did at this moment.

      In his head, he knew he couldn’t let his feelings dictate his faith, but his heart was not so quick to catch up.

      “What are you doing?” Melanie asked, abruptly putting an end to Vince’s agonizing prayer.

      Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and turned to face her. “Praying.”

      Her copper-penny eyes widened noticeably. “Seriously? I thought maybe you were looking for something there in the ashes.”

      “In a way, I guess I was,” he answered with a twisted smile. “Guidance.”

      Melanie shook her head. “Excuse me?”

      “From the Lord.”

      She didn’t look convinced. Her right eyebrow twitched upward in that compelling way she had, and then her eyes narrowed and she locked her gaze on him. He fought with a powerful urge to look away from her and, with effort, managed to maintain eye contact with her.

      “I hope I don’t sound insensitive, but it seems to me this place needs a lot more than a prayer.”

      “I’ll do what I can,” Vince replied softly, thinking of how little he could do. There wasn’t enough money to renovate, much less rebuild.

      Her gaze widened, but she didn’t speak.

      “As I can,” he continued. “When all is said and done, asking God for guidance is the first and most important thing I can—and should—do.”

      And the only thing he could do right now, he added silently. He was out of options, humanly speaking, anyway.

      “I’m curious,” she said, “what you think God is going to do for you. He didn’t stop the fire from happening. Why do you think He’s going to help you now?”

      He winced internally, but hoped it didn’t show on his expression.

      “You don’t sound like you believe in God,” he commented in a low tone. “Do you?”

      Vince knew the exact moment Melanie shut down. He thought he glimpsed a moment of anger before the steel barrier dropped over her eyes and her expression became blank and neutral.

      “If you mean the big guy in the sky who tosses out thunderbolts to fry all of us poor sinners every time we do something wrong, then no. I don’t believe in God.”

      She tried to make it sound like a joke, but Vince didn’t buy that for an instant. She’d unconsciously crossed her arms in front of her and was standing defensively, whether she realized it or not. She clearly had unresolved issues in her life, but what that had to do with her belief in—or in this case, animosity toward—God, he couldn’t guess.

      His heart hurt for her. Even with the awkwardness of his crutches and his cast, he very much wanted to reach out to her, maybe give her a reassuring hug, but something held him back. Maybe it was that he couldn’t quite let himself forget that she didn’t like him very much to begin with, and nothing they’d talked about recently would have done much to have changed her opinion about him.

      He gripped the handles of his crutches until he’d tempered the need to comfort her, knowing it would probably only distress her further.

      “This may sound a bit cliché, Melanie, but God is love,” he commented softly.

      She snorted and shook her head adamantly. “Yeah. I’ve heard that before. I’m not buying.”

      Vince wondered just what she had heard and from whom. Certainly she hadn’t been exposed to Jesus, the loving and forgiving Savior whose Spirit Vince carried within his own heart.

      “Anyway,” she continued, “I haven’t been struck down by lightning yet. I guess that counts for something.”

      There was no way to counter that statement—either yes or no would put him in equally hot water—so he changed the subject, vowing silently that by the end of the six weeks of their acquaintance, he would find out the truth about Melanie Frazer; and hopefully, he prayed, she would find out the truth about God.

      “This is pretty much a disaster,” he said, gesturing across the piles of blackened ash with his crutch. “The truth is, I don’t have the money to rebuild.”

      Brilliant. Not exactly the smoothest change of subject in the history of the world.

      He only now realized how foolish it was to lay out his financial troubles out to the very person who’d been hired to change everything. He’d been thinking of Melanie as a woman and not as a business consultant, and hadn’t even considered that he might later come to regret what he was telling her.

      Way to get in hot water.