Chapter 11

Cassie

As I heard the words they sounded easy, but actually telling Yirmeyah that I didn't have faith in God was about the hardest thing I'd ever done. I had believed for years, since I was a little girl, that I was a Christian, and that I did believe Him, and then to find out so simply that while I trusted Yirmeyah without question I didn't trust God that way was a horrible shock. I heard myself using these short little sentences – like Yirmeyah, actually – which weren't the way I always talk even though I don't try to talk that way, it just comes out, and I knew from hearing them that I was in distress. But inside I just felt kind of calm, like nothing was happening, or like maybe the shock was so great I didn't feel anything.

"Yirmeyah," I said, "can you teach me to have faith?"

I don't think I've ever seen anyone look so compassionate. "I can't do anything but tell you the Good News, Cass." He'd suddenly shortened the diminutive of my name even further, just in the past few minutes. "Only the Holy Spirit can teach you faith." His hand moved, as though he wanted to reach out to me but had restrained himself. "I'll tell you the story as many times as you want to hear it. I'll pray for you. I'll pray with you. But only God can give you faith."

"Why are you doing this for me, Yirmeyah?" I heard my voice, and if I had to describe it I'd say that it had tears in it.

Yirmeyah jerked away, turning around on the bench so that he was facing away from me, but he didn't move so quickly that I didn't see him blush as dark as I'd ever seen him. He folded his hands between his knees and hung his head, and I could see his back moving as he breathed deeply. I almost reached out to him then, wanting to put my hand on his shoulder and comfort him if that's what he needed, but I thought again and just clasped my hands tightly together.

After a minute or two he turned around, sitting sideways on the bench and looking directly into my eyes. "I'm sorry about that, Cassie. It was an all right question, but it hit me ... it hit me where I live." He blushed again, and I could see him struggling not to drop his eyes from mine. "Cass, I've got to tell you something, and it's going to be hard for me. I want you to please just listen till I'm done, 'cause I'm not sure I can do this any other way."

He paused, and I knew he was waiting for me. I nodded, remembering my earlier trust in him and knowing that this was an even greater act of trust that he was asking of me, and knowing that if ever I made a promise I had to keep it was this one.

"Okay, thank you." He took a deep, deep breath. "Cassandra," he said, and he hadn't called me that since January, "I love you. I love you of course as your pastor. I love all my people, as a shepherd loves his sheep. And I love you as my sister in Christ, or I have loved you that way, because I thought you were. I love all my brothers and sisters that way." Another deep breath, and that dark dark color came up in his face and blazed from his normally pale forehead, for he had laid his Stetson aside as we talked. "But I also love you as a man loves a woman. I haven't said anything till now, because it hasn't been fittin'. I'm just a kid, and you're one of my people, and it ain't right for me to make passes at you. But you wanted to know why I'm willing to help you with this. That's why. I want to help you because I love you as one of my people. I want to help you because I love you as my sister in Christ, as I thought. And I want to help you because I love you."

As he spoke I felt that warmth in my belly that I'd felt before, on that day when I'd abandoned my flirtatiousness and simply been a woman. And I knew then that something had started way back then, on that day, that was going to complicate my life, and Yirmeyah's life. I felt my face getting warm, and knew I was blushing, but because Yirmeyah had made himself look at me when he spoke, I made myself look at him. "I don't know if I love you," was what I said.

I didn't know how to read his expression. I couldn't tell whether he was hurt by my not being able to say I did love him, or happy because I couldn't say that I didn't love him. Maybe it was both, and I suppose that if I'd been in his position, hearing that kind of thing, I'd have been both too. "Cassie," he said, "I'm not asking you to say anything. I'm not asking you to love me, except as you love your pastor, and as you love a brother. Perhaps I shouldn't have said what I did, but I wanted to answer you honestly. And that's all I was doing."

"I know you were, Yirmeyah, and I appreciate it, and I have to admit that having you say it was a joy to me, and something humbling, because I can't think of a better man anywhere. But when a man tells a woman he loves her, she has to respond. I just hope I haven't hurt you with my response." I could hear my voice trailing off into a near-sob as I spoke the last sentence.

"You haven't, Cassie. Any hurt I feel is my own heart trying to lead me in ways that aren't right." And as he said it I knew that even if I perhaps had hurt him, he wasn't lying – he was dealing with his heart and resisting going down roads that he knew, or at least believed, were wrong for him and for me.

"Yirmeyah," I said, and against my will, almost apart from my will, my left hand inched out along the bench until it was near, though not quite touching, his right hand. "Yirmeyah, if anything you said could make me love you, that would do it. For you to prefer pain over injuring me is more than I can ever deserve, and I feel like I ought to love you for that if not for anything else."

"Cassie, you have just described the reaction of faith to God's gift to us in Christ Jesus." As he spoke of Christ Yirmeyah's voice grew stronger, not loud, but not the weak and yearning voice it had been before. "I appreciate what you've said to me, and about me. But if by thinking of you first I've caused you to think you ought to love me, then how ought you to react to God? He thought of you first. He gave His own Son for you, when you didn't deserve it – when what you did deserve was destruction. If you're going to love anyone for being selfless on your behalf, love God." And he pointed upward, a gesture that was surely unconscious, as all his gestures were, for he "talked with his hands" as he put it.

"I know that," I told him. "You've been preaching it to us for five months now. And I know you're right. But ... but I just don't have the response within me."

He looked down now, looking at our hands so close together, neither one reaching to actually touch the other, but the closeness seeming to me in that instant a more intimate thing than an embrace. I snatched my hand back and folded it with the other in my lap. Yirmeyah's hand didn't move, and in a moment he said, "'I do believe; help my unbelief.' Can you pray that prayer, Cassie?"