Never Too Late by B. Lynn Goodwin

Author:B. Lynn Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633936089
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2015-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

RICHARD CONTINUED ASKING me to marry him. Either I changed the subject or ignored the question. Though I cared for him very much, something wasn’t quite right, and I still couldn’t name it.

Then, one morning in November when he spent the night at his place, he called me up and his voice was bubbling with excitement. “Guess what,” he said, and went right on without giving me a chance to respond. “I got into my car and reached for the pack of cigarettes I just opened. It wasn’t there or in my pockets, so I checked the console and the glove compartment.” He said it all in one breath. “I even went back inside to see if I left them on the counter. When I couldn’t find ’em, I put out a fleece.”

A strong proponent of trusting fleeces, he believed that they showed what God wanted you to do. In the Book of Judges in the Old Testament, a man puts a wool fleece on the threshing floor. He tells God, “If there is dew only on the fleece and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said.” The next morning, the ground was dry and the fleece was damp, so he had his answer.

Because I don’t trust fleeces as much as Richard, I didn’t say anything. No problem. He was too excited to hear me. “If I put the new pack of cigarettes in the garbage can, I told the Lord I’d give up smoking. So, I walked over to the garbage can, opened the lid, rummaged around, and sure enough, there they were.”

“So, you’re giving up smoking?”

“I promised God. I’ve made a doctor’s appointment to get the patch, and until then I’ve found a way to cut back. I’ll show you when I get home.”

“Get home?”

“Can I come for a sleepover?”

Giggling I said, “Of course you can, little boy.”

Three days after Richard said he had to move out, we started having sleepovers again. No surprise. As long as we didn’t do it every night, this was okay again. Why? I never asked.

When we were together that night, he lit up a cigarette, took two puffs, and said, “Watch this.” He took the remaining cigarette, put it out in the lid of one of his pens, and stuffed it back in his cigarette pack. “Two or three puffs are enough to satisfy me. I’m still not ready to quit cold turkey. I’ll get my patches from Kaiser in ten days.”

He continued to sit on my leaf-strewn back patio and smoke in a cushioned, iron chair that my parents had purchased when they were setting up housekeeping. True to his word, though, he always put the cigarette out after two or three puffs. Belief is a powerful thing. The jury was still out on whether I would ever use a fleece in my own life. If it gave him a reason to stop smoking, I was delighted.

The

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