Ephraim is a cake half turned . . . (Hosea vii.viii)

Michael Martin walked out of the meeting of the leadership team shaking his head in amazement. The vote to call him as the new senior pastor of Camel Creek had been unanimous, no dissension, no hesitations whatever. Michael did not have the same gifts that Chad did, but at the same time he was certainly in the same league. He was professional, cut, chiseled. His slacks had a crease in them that could cut weeds if he walked through a field of tall grass, not that he did this very often. His one idiosyncratic feature was that he always looked like he was chewing beef jerky whenever he talked, but most people who even noticed it thought it made him look masculine in that jaw-jutty way that you see in Eddie Bauer catalogs.

The call was effective almost immediately, and Michael was invited to “share” his inaugural message the Sunday after next. The reason for the delay was that the leadership team wanted the extra time to run an ad campaign so that they could start this new era off with a bang. The church leadership was prepared to spend a great deal of money in order to market the “under new management” theme, and the ad boys in the basement were all over it. Their ads extolling the virtues of flexibility in changing times, adaptability in the face of difficulties, and going-with-the-flowness in the event that your church was ever caught in a flash flood of scandal, were ads that were hip, ironic, self-effacing, detached, and exuded a coolness unto death. The team had pulled a couple of all-nighters, and they now had in hand a flurry of ads that were calculated to bring all the straying sheep back home again. And, it must be said, they knew their business.

During the scandal, before Chad had accepted the pressure to resign, these graphics impresarios had been just so many advertising hounds locked in the kennels of indecision, with the raccoons of market share running through the woods pretty much as they pleased. It had been a genuine trial for them all. But now with the resignation in hand, the leadership knew what direction they were going, and the woods were soon filled with the sounds of their baying.
And they did know their business. If we peek ahead just a few pages to see if the congregation will in fact be coming back, we can see that is exactly what will be happening. Camel Creek was about to come roaring back—on all eight cylinders—into the life of their community. Those who had left had taken their stand for principle, kind of, and their brief exile among all the other area churches had reminded them how much they didn’t like the few remaining traditional services out there. And on top of that, neither did they like the wanna-be contemporary services with congregations under two hundred, because the drummer was almost always lousy, and the bass player pathetic, largely for size-of-gene-pool reasons. So pretty much all the Camel Creek Diaspora were ready to be talked into coming back. They were already checking the newspapers for the long anticipated ads. They weren’t really looking for repentance; postmodern irony would do.

When the leadership team extended the invitation to Michael they also asked him what he thought his message was likely to be. He had seen their invitation to become the senior pastor coming, and so he was ready with his answer. “I would want,” he said, “to speak on ‘Integrity and Healing.’” A number of heads bobbed up and down around the table. Encouraged, he expanded his little sermonic trailer for them.

“We must never allow integrity to become the enemy of healing. We must never allow healing to become the enemy of integrity. Only in this way can our church recover its footing, its love, and its missional zeal.”

This was not really supposed to mean anything in particular, but the elders were not about to press him on it. All they wanted was for smooth words to flow over them (and everybody else in the audience) like molten butterscotch, and it was looking as though they were going to get everything they were paying for, which was quite a bit of butterscotch.

Martin had been far more discreet about his amours than Chad had been, and speaking quantitatively, if illegitimate dalliances were corn, his Nebraskan combine had not cut so wide a swath, and this meant that many on the leadership team did not even know that they were getting a minister like unto Chad. They most certainly did not know that they were getting the actual fondler of Robert P. himself, but all that did not come out until long after the last page of our story here. And as edifying as it would be to tell the story of how Michael eventually blew up one day, while pastoring another church in quite another city and state, we will refrain. His ten-year tenure at Camel Creek was serene and placid—idyllic conditions for water skiing on, which he certainly did.

The ad boys did their magic, the team in the financial department wrote checks to media outlets like crazy, and when the Sunday morning in question rolled around, the place was packed like the local college gym would be if some cow town university inexplicably made the sweet sixteen one year. The atmosphere was as electric as a gathering as mellow as this can be, with everyone there prepared to get the full neck massage. Maybe electric is the wrong word. Expectant, that’s it.

“Integrity. Integrity and healing. Healing. Healing and integrity,” Michael began. The congregation settled comfortably down in their theater seats. Aaaaaahhhhhh.

* * *

Johnny Quinn was sitting with Brandy in the upper section of the auditorium, near the back row. It was ten minutes after the close of Michael Martin’s address, and Johnny was still reeling. Integrity, he thought. Healing, he thought. Both of them together, he thought. Brandy sat quietly by him. She could tell that great forces were contending with one another in his soul. “Wow,” he finally said aloud.

“Yeah,” she said. “Double wow on me too.”

“What a blessing,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“This is a God thing.”

“I agree, Johnny.” She nodded—pretty, simple, innocent.

And with her acknowledgment that it was a God thing, it suddenly dawned on Johnny that this was the time he needed to do that other God thing. He needed to ask Brandy to marry him. After that police officer had exhorted him about this in his brief foray into pastoral ministrations, Johnny had accepted this course of action as the inevitable will of God. But he had still needed to make the math work, in order to figure out how to pay for a larger apartment and all that other stuff. He hadn’t been able to do that. But here . . . clearly, Michael had delivered a message that was a God thing. And if one God thing had happened here in the auditorium, just a few moments ago, why not another God thing? Why the heck not?

“Brandy,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

She was startled, but smiled widely. She had a beautiful smile. “Johnny! Of course I will.”

He extended his hand and she put her hand in his. “I don’t have a ring yet. We can go shopping for one tomorrow.” She nodded happily, and then leaned over and kissed him. They got up, holding hands, and walked slowly down the aisle, turned left, and headed out toward the escalators. They chatted happily as they glided down toward the first level. When they got to the bottom, they started to work their way outside. The lobby area was still quite crowded.

Before they got to the doors, Stephanie Nelson saw them from across the way, and called out, “Johnny! Johnny Quinn!” Johnny thought he heard someone calling, and so he stopped, puzzled. Stephanie wound her way through the crowd, and came up from behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. Johnny turned around, still in the pleasant glow of the great faith step he had taken. He was still nervous about it, but was certain he was doing the God thing.

“Johnny, the leadership team asked me to talk with you. Dennis Johnston has decided to move on—he has taken a position in Illinois at Sandlefoot. The elders asked me to ask you if you would be interested in taking his place for us.”

Johnny’s eyes widened. This was a leapfrog promotion over a number of others that he would certainly have thought would have been asked first. And he was aware of how much Dennis had been hauling down. He . . . he could afford Brandy now. Brandy was beaming at him, really proud. “I . . . I would be honored,” Johnny finally said.

Dennis had decided to head for the tall grass because he had once been involved in an unwitting ménage a trois with Michael Martin and one Sandy Duncan, a character of note and a disc jockey over at the KING radio station. When Martin had been the choice to replace Lester, Dennis thought that getting while the getting was good would seem to be the voice of prudence, before a day of real reckoning came down upon them all. “Fire on the mountain, run, boys, run” about sums up his feelings on the matter. Camel Creek had to have some kind of reverse mojo going, and Sandlefoot had been after him to join their team for some time now. This was a something of a miscalculation on his part because Camel Creek was actually entering into its golden decade, and Michael Martin did not receive his reap-what-you-sow comeuppance until after he became the senior pastor at another church entirely—Sandlefoot Community, come to think of it.

After Stephanie had offered Johnny congratulations, and told him to check in with her at her office tomorrow to work out the details of his work agreement—“which will be more than acceptable, I can assure you”—she retreated back into the diminishing crowd.

Johnny and Brandy stood, staring at each other. “A God thing,” they both said at the same time, and then laughed. “Now I can afford that ring I’m getting you,” Johnny said. They were both thrilled and delighted, and walked out through the doors leaning into one another. They had a short engagement, just two months long, and they only messed up one time during that whole engagement.

* * *

Sharon Atwater had decided to take the package they offered her. It would have been insane not to. Michael Martin wanted to start the whole senior pastor operation over from scratch, and remove, delicately, as many members of the old office guard as he could. The fewer people from the Chad days, the better he liked it. The subject had been broached with Sharon with great professional sensitivity, and Sharon had responded with a corresponding professionalism. “Oh, I would love to move on,” she had said. “I just can’t afford it. I have to work at least a couple more years before I could move back to Tennessee. I have been planning to go live with my mother, but I would want to help her, not be a drain on her . . .”

Some discrete calculations had been made about what Sharon could likely save up over a couple years, both in her retirement package and elsewhere, and she was offered a severance package that it would have been criminal negligence to refuse. The added benefit of getting away from the gravitational pull of Camel Creek was compelling to her as well.

And so it was that Sharon was busy clearing out her desk, and sorting out the office files, preparing them for her replacement, a one Misti Cooper. Misti was competent, sweet, and a quick study. She was also cute and virginal, and made the kind of visual first-impression statement that Michael thought most necessary to make during these, alas, cynical times. During their two week transition, Misti would come in during the mornings and Sharon would check her out on all the various office procedures. In the afternoons, Sharon would go through all the files and decide what could go in the archives, what could be thrown away, and what she should keep. She had a few personal files of her own here and there, and she was now seated in her rolling office chair in front of one of them.

Many years before, she had been in the second row of that infamous class taught by the equally infamous Jim Wilson. The talk had been on confession of sin, and the effect of it had been the equivalent of dropping a hand grenade in your average living room goldfish bowl. Sharon had (for some reason) saved the handouts from that meeting, and was sitting awkwardly in her chair now, holding the manila folder in her hand, trying to figure out why she had done that. There was something that looked like a confession of sin graph, and another handout with a bunch of Bible verses all over it. Sharon squinted to make out the marginalia she had scribbled on the papers at the time. Damn fool was one comment. Superficial idiot was another. She had been among the displeased in that class, but now a wave of sadness swept over her. At that time she had been in love with Chad, and had been hoping that his wandering attention would return to her. But he never had, and the verses no longer seemed insane to her, the way they once had. She sat there for fifteen minutes, trying to make up her mind about the three sheets of tattered paper. Throw it away or not? Suddenly the phone rang, and Sharon got up without dropping the papers in her trash can that she had dragged over. When she picked up the phone, she placed them carefully in the box for moving stuff that was sitting on her desk. It did not seem like an important act at the time, but those papers would make even more sense in Tennessee.

* * *

Charles Peaborne had literally wet his pants when it had first dawned on him what Miguel had done to him. He was not a brave man in the best of circumstances, and the only time he could be prevailed upon to put up any kind of a show of courage at all was when the stakes were remarkably low—something that other parties to the conflict would be unlikely to be willing to fight over. Paper clips, toner cartridges, grades of copier paper were the way to go. Everyone else would always just roll their eyes at some point, and after a certain amount of time and energy was expended on the quarrel, would just capitulate so that Peaborne would go expend his energetic and remarkable abilities of focus elsewhere. This he would usually do, and so a brief respite for the victim of his dudgeon would be earned thereby.

By this means, Peaborne had come to fancy himself a natural member of the warrior caste. He had been on a retreat once where he sat naked in a little teepee pouring water on hot rocks, and this had helped to release his inner wildness. He talked about that experience frequently as though he had been one of the six hundred who had ridden into the valley of death. In short, he was a coward who had absolutely no idea that this is what he was. He was an irritating midge that some could occasionally be persuaded to brush at absently, or blow half-heartedly off their lip, but he was not the formidable foe that he fancied himself to be.

Except that there had been that one time when he actually got to Miguel, and the level of irritation was such that it prompted some level of action after Charles Peaborne had disappeared around the corner. That didn’t usually happen. But Miguel determined that he would not get mad, but rather just get even, and so he had quietly adjusted the bookkeeping set-up. The arrangement needed an overhaul anyway, but Miguel tweaked it so that if there were any women getting checks from Camel Creek, and said women had, on one or more occasions, engaged in some form of sexual congress with the Chadster, and she was receiving these checks for that reason, Miguel made sure that he had copies of those checks with Charles Peaborne’s self-important flourish of a signature right smack on the bottom of them.

Rourke had obtained copies of those checks from Miguel’s attorney, who was as cooperative as Miguel had been, and when he had shown these checks to Charles Peaborne, and explained what the checks perhaps indicated, that was when Charles Peaborne had wet himself. This had happened at the courthouse, in their first conversation. Rourke was all understanding, and had a hunch within the first few minutes that Charles Peaborne knew nothing whatever about the payoffs, but he needed at least a few more interviews to make sure. Those interviews occurred over the course of a week or ten days, during which time Peaborne lost about fifteen pounds, and slept erratically if at all. He was so eager to convince Rourke of his innocence of all monkeyshines that he actually behaved in such an odd way that it kept Rourke asking questions for an extra interview or so. But when Chad resigned, and it became apparent that no one at Camel Creek was going to pursue him for paying hush money to his former bedchums, the whole line of questioning became pointless. But by this point, Charles Peaborne had become greatly chastened by his interviews with the law, had taken down his web site, gotten a job selling office supplies at Staples, and assumed what might be called a low profile, which he maintained for the rest of his life.