Rooms - James L. Rubart [52]
She closed her eyes and let her head fall back. “I know.” Then the tears came. He watched her cry for what seemed like hours. When she looked at him again, her eyes were sad. Tender.
Suddenly Julie kicked the gravel at her feet. “I saw it coming. Religion rears up and roars.” She paced in front of her car. After the third pass she stopped. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve bought into the whole Jesus-thing again, lock, stock, and Bible.”
Micah walked over to her car and leaned against it. “What about you?”
“Don’t even try. I have nothing against God. I’m sure he’s great for kids and little old ladies who like to make quilts but not for people like us.” She kicked the gravel again. “Why are you doing this to us? Come back to Seattle!”
“He’s real.”
“I don’t care!”
Micah pleaded with his eyes, but she was shutting down. He had no clue what to say. “Julie, if you would just—”
“No. Let it go.” She stood with arms folded, shoulders tensed, and foot digging a hole in the tiny stones at her feet. A sigh. Her shoulders sagged and her arms untangled. She eased over to him.
“Don’t try. It’s okay.” She stepped closer and kissed him on the cheek. “Remember me.” She walked to her car without looking back.
He’d lost another part of Seattle, this time by his own choice.
||||||||
A thick fog hugged the coast as Micah arrived back in Cannon Beach, the fog even thicker surrounding his house. Midnight. Too late, too late to talk to anyone but himself.
“How do you think it went?” the voice asked.
“Running the company together is going to be awkward.”
“Not really. It’s been years since you really ran it together. You do your thing; she does hers. And if you want hard, cold reality, Julie could disappear at this point. While it would create a momentary buzz on the radar screen, RimSoft would survive just fine.”
“True. Probably could survive without me too, based on the question she raised.”
“Which is?”
“That I need to choose that world or this one. Think she’s right?”
“No. I think we can do, should do, both,” the voice said.
“Really?”
“Absolutely. We should start brainstorming how we can use our software talents to advance the Kingdom of God.”
“Love it. Let’s start storming our brains.”
“First, I want to talk about the music room and what we created there.”
“Not bad was it?” Micah smiled.
“Incredible.”
“And what about the thoughts that popped into my head? My Rip van Winkle heart is waking up.”
“I think the thoughts were from God, but they definitely didn’t come from your heart,” the voice said. “We must be so careful when something powerful comes from God that we don’t listen to the voice of the enemy alongside it.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You lost me. What part of that experience was from the enemy?”
“A small part, Micah. But much truth mixed with a small lie makes the lie so much easier to swallow.”
“What part?” Micah folded his arms and leaned against the back wall of the room.
“Jeremiah tells us the heart is deceitful beyond all wickedness.”
“Okay.”
“And God forgives. But to entertain the idea that our heart is good and there are more good things to come out of it? No. Sorry. The Word is clear on that. Why does the psalmist sing ‘Create in me a clean heart’ unless it’s unclean? Don’t misunderstand; the Bible says our sins are washed white as snow. But to describe our hearts as good and holy? No. That’s where the subtle lie slipped in.”
“Interesting.” Micah nodded.
“God gives us a moral code we must follow,” continued the voice. “We have the choice to follow it or not. When we choose not to follow it, we sin and He forgives. But to live by the heart is a dangerous thing. We were given the Word so we will not be taken in by the deceptions of the heart.”
“I’m not sure you and Archie would see eye to eye on that.”
“Man can be deceived, Micah. The Word can’t. This is why we need to operate from the mind and not the heart. Now if we could come up with a piece of software that could help us do that 100 percent of the time . . .”
The room went silent. Micah stood. “Wow. That is something to give serious