Rooms - James L. Rubart [108]
As they ate, Micah spied a young man across the aisle chatting with a brunette. The man punctuated his story with light laughter, and she joined in each time. She leaned in, relaxed, with a smile that never faded. The man kept pulling his palm away in order to demonstrate his story, only to return it to her waiting embrace a moment later.
Micah’s gaze shifted to two men, one older, one younger at another table close by. Father and son? Looked like it. They interrupted each other, recalling a fishing trip up to Alaska where everything went wrong. But to hear them tell it amid their laughter, it had obviously turned out to be a trip they treasured.
It could have been Sarah and him at the one table, Rick and him at the other. His life before them, before Cannon Beach, only dabbled at the edges of God. It was a life devoid of freedom and healing, a life without true life.
Now he had it all. Riches. Recognition. And the deepest things: Sarah, Rick, and an intimate relationship with the Creator of the universe.
“Hello? Micah?”
“Yeah?” Micah dropped his steak knife on the table, and it rattled against his water glass.
“Hey, bud, where’d you go?”
“Sorry, took a little trip in my mind back down to Cannon Beach.” He lifted his glass to his friend and made a toast. “To Sarah, to Rick, and to my King, Jesus. May His freedom advance in my life and the lives around me.”
“Wow. Nice preaching. Sounds like you had quite a time down there.” His friend clinked his glass against Micah’s.
“You have no idea.”
As the last bite of tiramisu slid down his throat, Micah decided the time to head back down to Cannon Beach was not in a few weeks but in a few days. His voice had said take five or six weeks to get things settled. But things weren’t settling in Seattle; they were settled. Going back down every weekend would be much better timing. Without Rick and Sarah, Seattle was hollow.
After saying good-bye to his friend, Micah walked out on the dock in front of the restaurant and stared at the yachts and sailboats tucked into their slips like the fingers of an elegant woman inside a white glove. Two thoughts swirled like yin and yang through his mind. First, he always meant to buy one of those boats. Second, the desire had faded to a shadow of its former self.
He stared at the stars. Why had he been given the best of both worlds?
He closed his eyes as it once again felt like God had gone mute. He chalked it up to the intensity of the past few days and headed home.
Sarah! He grabbed his cell.
Again no answer on her cell phone. “Hey, it’s me. Missing Rick, missing Cannon Beach, mostly missing you.”
The next morning he got up at 5:00 to spend some time praying and reading the Bible to try to push through the distance he felt toward God. After an hour he gave up in frustration. It was so dry it was brittle. The only voice he heard was his own, and any semblance of peace had flown.
Where was God?
Heading into work, he pondered what he missed most about Cannon Beach. It wasn’t the house, the ocean, Rick, or even Sarah. God was in Cannon Beach. Micah had been set free of chains he didn’t even know existed. But up here God seemed to be on vacation.
He popped his steering wheel with his palm. His pipeline to the Lord had dried up like a valve being shut. As he pulled into his parking spot, he admitted it had closed the moment he’d stepped through the doors at RimSoft two days earlier. He’d just been too elated and busy to acknowledge it.
As he ambled out of the elevator a few minutes past eight, he remembered his regular assistant should be back. Sure enough, a woman with blonde hair sat with her back to him in the chair Perspiration Boy had occupied the day before. Would he know her? Micah started to say hello when she turned and pranced around her desk with tiny high-heeled steps. He was too stunned to move.
“Welcome home, stranger.” She threw her arms around his neck.