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J
OHN
B
AXTER’S CHEST ACHED,
and he blamed it on being more tired than usual.

Never mind that they’d finished moving the blankets and picnic baskets and Frisbees and place settings from the car and set them up on the beach. Forget the fact that Elizabeth was sitting beside him, and that playing on the shore a few dozen yards away were the people he loved most in the world. They’d brought thirteen people with them to the Baxters’ annual Labor Day picnic this year.

But it was the fourteenth that John missed.

And with Sam and Erin leaving in the morning, John was pretty sure he’d never again spend a Labor Day on the shores of Lake Monroe with all his children present.

Once Erin and Sam spent their first year in Austin, they planned to vacation early next summer. With Erin teaching, by the time Labor Day rolled around again, the two of them would have to be back home getting ready for the following school year.

John stretched out in his beach chair and glanced at Elizabeth. “Sorry.”

She raised an eyebrow. “For what?”

“For not talking much.”

“You said you were tired.” She reached over and covered his hand with hers.

A long breath eased from between his lips, one that seemed to come from the bottom of his feet. “That’s not all.”

The whisper of a gentle wind off the lake played in the tree branches behind them. Elizabeth made a slight turn in her chair and met his eyes. “I know.”

He hesitated for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re sitting here thinking about Luke, wondering where he is and how come he isn’t here. Knowing that wherever he is, he knows it’s Labor Day…knows he’s missing our picnic, but that he’s chosen to stay away all the same.” Her voice was calm, steady. Soothing, the way it always was. “And you’re thinking about Erin and Sam leaving tomorrow.”

He stared at her for a long while. How many times had he sensed this bond between them, known for certain that she truly was part of him and he a part of her? Elizabeth could read his thoughts, his heart, as easily as he could read hers. And no matter how far apart their daily dealings took them, they always returned to this…this not knowing where she stopped and he began. This quiet place where oneness wasn’t something they tried to find but rather simply was.

A slow chuckle sounded in his throat.

“I’m right.” It wasn’t a question. She turned and looked at Cole, Maddie, and Hayley chasing each other in the gentle surf.

“Perfectly.” The laughter faded and he studied his wife’s profile. “Where do you think he is?”

“I’m not sure.” Unshed tears made her eyes glisten in the waning afternoon sunlight. “With Lori, I guess.”

They were quiet for a moment. Elizabeth was right, of course. Luke had to be with Lori, maybe at some club event convincing himself that his family was no longer worthy of his attention.

After a long while John let his eyes lift toward the sky. “God—” he hesitated, sensing the very real presence of the king of the universe—“wherever our boy is, please bring him back to us.” His voice cracked when the weariness within him was more than he could bear. “We miss him so much.”

Luke’s biggest revelation of the week took place in a rental car twenty minutes out of Bloomington.

Until then, he could hardly believe the changes that had happened in his heart this past week. He and Reagan had talked for hours that first night, while he held Tommy and tried to convince himself he was really in New York City holding his son and talking with the only girl he’d ever loved.

They’d agreed on almost everything. That they’d been foolish to let so much time pass, that she was sorry for keeping her pregnancy from him, and that no matter what happened next, they never wanted to be apart again. They’d even talked about getting married.

The thing that remained a struggle for Luke was the idea that God had allowed the tragedy of September 11. He and Reagan went round and round on that, and always she said it was simply her father’s time to go. Same with the other people who died. All people have a last day on earth, and that was it for the people in the Twin Towers.

But Luke was still troubled.

Why bother to pray if God was going to do his own thing anyway?

They’d agreed on something else. That Luke needed to make things right with his father, needed to come clean with him about what had happened between Reagan and him in the hours prior to the attacks on America. And he needed to tell his parents about the baby.

“Are you afraid?” Reagan asked him two nights ago. “To see them…after so much time?”

“A little.” They had been sitting side by side, with Tommy lying across both their laps. “I’ve been such a jerk.” He’d gazed at her eyes and wondered how he’d lived without her for so long. “What if things are never the same again?”

“They will be, Luke.” She leaned close and kissed him on the cheek. “I know your dad, remember? Things will be fine. But you need to go to him.”

That conversation moved Reagan and him to get on her family’s computer and book another flight—this one round-trip to Indianapolis.

He’d landed an hour ago, rented a car, and was now headed for Lake Monroe. Suddenly traffic slowed and narrowed to one lane. Ahead he could see two fire trucks and at least two ambulances. The flash of lights told him that something bad had happened. Maybe even something deadly.

One car at a time made its way past the area. As Luke pulled up close enough to see the accident, he caught sight of the car. It was an SUV of some kind, lying on its side, crushed almost beyond recognition. Two other vehicles were pulled off to the side, both with serious dents, but less damage. To the side of the SUV, three people huddled together, all of them weeping. At that moment one of the ambulances pulled away, sirens blaring.

That’s when something else caught Luke’s attention, and he glanced toward the other waiting ambulance. Two paramedics carried a stretcher toward it, but they weren’t in a hurry. Luke saw it more clearly then. His eyes grew wide; his heartbeat quickened. On top of the stretcher was a body.

A covered body.

Luke swallowed hard and filed past in the stream of traffic, but when he was a mile up the road he pulled off at a gas station, parked his car, turned off his engine, and dropped his head against the steering wheel. When he closed his eyes he could see it: the totaled car, the paramedics with the body suspended between them.

Just minutes ago the person on the stretcher was driving down the same road Luke had been on. Heading to an afternoon barbecue or telling stories to the family as he drove down the highway. Maybe he’d been to the lake with friends or on a business trip. Or maybe he’d merely been out to the store for a bag of groceries or a can of paint. Whatever his reason, he couldn’t possibly have known that in the blink of an eye he’d be lying on a stretcher, dead.

The image played again and again in Luke’s mind, and it occurred to him that he’d seen it somewhere before. Fire engines…ambulances…paramedics. Covered bodies on stretchers.

Then he remembered where.

On TV footage after September 11. Body after body after body.

Slowly, with other cars coming and going past him, the realization grew in Luke’s mind. Not a news flash exactly, but something that hadn’t hit him quite this way before. Ever since the collapse of the Twin Towers, he’d been blaming God for not coming through.

But for the person in the crushed SUV, today was even more tragic than September 11. That person’s day of reckoning, of tragedy and terror, happened on a sun-soaked highway late in the afternoon of a beautiful Labor Day. The person’s last day on earth.

Tragedies happened every day: murders…rapes…car accidents. As Reagan said, everyone had a last day, a time when their hours would be over and they’d be called to judgment. Luke gripped the steering wheel and lifted his head enough to look out over the dashboard.

Suddenly Luke’s realization hit full force: God hadn’t hijacked the planes that day. He hadn’t flown them into the World Trade Center or encouraged the terrorists to do so. What God
had
done, Luke realized, was give each person free will. Not so much freethinking, but the freedom to make choices—either good or bad, right or wrong.

He closed his eyes again and remembered something his mother had told him in the weeks after he left home. The Hound of Heaven wasn’t about to let him go easily. Luke blinked, and in a flash the events of the past few days screamed at him. Had his mother been right? Was God the one who’d been chasing him all those times when he couldn’t find peace?

God, are you there? Are you…are you mad at me?

A car squealed out of the gas-station parking lot, but when the sound faded, Luke felt something stir in his soul. A voice even quieter than a whisper.

Son, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Return to me. Return to your first love.

Once, a lifetime ago, thoughts like those would have echoed loudly in Luke’s heart, making him certain God was there beside him, talking to him. But now…was it his imagination? Wishful thinking, maybe, or a beacon of contrived light to help him find his way through the dark?

A dampness gathered at the corners of Luke’s eyes. How could he return to God when he’d made such a public mockery of the faith he’d been raised with? His family, his father had honored his choice to set out on his own, to explore the options a fallen world offered. They’d honored him and loved him even while he made plans to cut them out of his life completely.

He hung his head.
God, I’m pathetic. The worst son ever. I’m not even sure I remember how to love.

Return to me, my son.

Luke blinked his eyes open and looked around. The voice had stirred in the private places of his heart, the places that hadn’t forgotten—no matter how much his mind had willed him to forget—what it was to love God.

Not only did God exist, but he hadn’t given up on Luke Baxter. Even after every horrible thing Luke had done to leave God behind.

A Bible story came to mind—something from a sermon he’d heard on the radio long before his world turned upside down. Jesus was talking to his friends after many of his followers had turned away. Tension must’ve filled the air as Jesus looked at those who remained and asked simply, “Will you go, too?”

Peter’s answer rang through Luke now—even after such a long time away from the Bible: “Where would we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.”

Hadn’t that same dialogue played out across America this past year? Wasn’t Christ’s question to his followers the same one indirectly posed to all of America on September 11? With so many across the United States already turning away from God, Jesus might as well have peered at his followers through the veil of smoke over New York City and said, “Will you go, too?”

Some—Kari and Ryan, Peter and Brooke, even Ashley—answered the way Peter had thousands of years earlier. “If ever I needed God it was after September 11,” Brooke told him once. “Faith helps everything make sense.”

But others…

Luke’s chest ached and he sat up. He relaxed his hold on the wheel and stared at his hands. How could he have run from God? What was he thinking? That somehow he’d find something more stable, more comforting? That peace and perfection and answers to the evil on earth might exist in something other than faith in God? Why hadn’t he had the rock-solid belief of Kari or Ryan or his father?

Or Peter…

Luke’s eyes widened. Peter. Simon Peter—the one who so firmly looked Jesus in the eyes and declared, “Where else would we go?” was the very same man who would deny Christ hours before his death.

Not once, but three times.

Peter—the one who swore that all the others might scatter, but he never would—was the one whose voice Jesus heard when he came into the courtyard after being beaten…the voice denying he’d ever known Jesus.

Understanding wrapped itself around Luke like a blanket. Peter knew he could turn nowhere but toward Jesus, yet barely a season later he blatantly denied Christ in front of a crowd of people. The very same way Luke had done this past year. Time and time and time again.

Lord, forgive me. What have I done?

A hundred memories screamed at him, times when he’d counted himself among those most doubting of God, those outright against God. He winced as he remembered arguing against the Creator for his class project, the one he’d worked on with Lori. There he’d been, proclaiming the benefits of humanism and encouraging others to think for themselves, not to believe the faith of their families.

So strong was the stance he’d taken against God that he’d taught himself to dislike everything about his past, his faith, even his family.

An image of the last time he saw his father flashed in his mind. He could hear himself, almost as clearly as he must’ve sounded that day in Lori’s apartment, yelling at his father, ordering him to leave, demanding that he mind his own business and stay away.

Just as clearly he could still hear his father’s reply:
“I’ve always loved you, and nothing…nothing you do could make me stop loving you. When you’re ready to come back, I’ll be waiting.”