LOST, BUT FOUND (EXCERPT)

“Mr. Carlisle asked if you could please join him in the meeting room,” his secretary said.

“Did he say now?” Greg asked, thinking about all that he had to do. He didn’t think he could take out time to attend a meeting. But he had to of course.

“Yes, he did.”

“Did he say anything about what the meeting is about?”

“Of course not.” His secretary’s tone said that it was none of her business and that she didn’t concern herself with things that were none of her business.

Greg sighed. “Thank you Gloria,” he said before hanging up.

A few minutes later he was walking down the corridor toward the meeting room with the report he had been reading in his hand. He might still get a chance to read it while the meeting was going on. He raised his hand and turned the knob and pushed the door in. The door opened and he looked into the room and stopped in his tracks.

Sitting around the rectangular table that took up most of the space in the room, were all the members of the board of trustees. The only vacant seat was opposite Bob Carlisle who sat at the head of the table.

“I’m sorry,” Greg said, standing at the door, “I didn’t know I was supposed to attend a meeting today. I don’t remember being told about a meeting.”

“Don’t worry about it Greg, just come on in,” Bob Carlisle said, a slight smile on his face.

Greg walked slowly into the room and closed the door behind him. He wondered why he suddenly felt uneasy about the whole meeting thing. In the past few months, he had rarely got to meet with the members of the trustees’ board and now here they all were looking at him and trying to pretend they were engrossed  with the papers on the table in front of them.

“Sit down Greg,” Bob said pointing to the vacant chair, looking at some papers on the table before him.

Greg sat down in the chair. He looked round the room at the other men sitting around the table but it seemed no one wanted to look at him. Bob Carlisle cleared his throat and Greg looked at him.

“We understand that you seem to be doing quite well in getting up to speed about your responsibilities at the church,” Bob began. “We are quite pleased at how you seem to have fitted in so easily into the way things are done here. We know that you probably have your own ideas about how things need to run and we are grateful that you’ve adapted to the way things run and not tried to rock the boat. Bill Wilkinson speaks quite highly of you,” Bob added with a slight smile.

Instead of making him feel relaxed, the compliment actually made him feel more nervous. It was like the gift before you were stabbed between the shoulder blades. “Thank you,” he said. “I think quite highly of him too.”

“As you know, Bill will be retiring in a couple of month’s time,” Bob continued, wiping sweat from his face with a thick towel, “and you will be taking over from him. We have always believed that out of the people we interviewed, you were the person best suited for the job of pastor here and that position has not changed. However, we have come to believe that there needs to be something more.”

Greg couldn’t be absolutely certain but if anyone had asked him, he would have said that his heart stopped for a few seconds after that. Thoughts and pictures began going through his mind. Were they saying that the job was no longer his? Were they saying that after nearly four months of telling him that he was the person they wanted, they no longer thought he was the right person? If they had been having second thoughts, why had they let him waste his time?

Trying to suppress the thoughts, he shook his head. Moistening his dry lips with his tongue to tried to focus on the issue at hand. He shifted in his chair, trying to get more comfortable. “I thought you just said that I was the best person for the job? I don’t understand. What has changed?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

“We believe that while a person might have a calling to be a pastor and the gifts to go with it but that is not enough.”

Greg turned to look at Prentiss Marshall’s sallow face. “So what else is needed?”

“As Paul told Timothy, one of the qualities of a man who desires the office or bishop or deacon must be that he is a man who has control over his family,” Prentiss said.

“Yes,” Greg said, still not understanding where this was all going.

“Therefore would you say that you are a man who has control over his family?” another person asked.

Greg couldn’t remember the name of the person who had just asked the question but remembering his name was the least of his concerns. “I don’t understand what you mean by “control”,” he said.

“Do your wife and your daughter obey you?” Prentiss Marshall asked. “Does your wife submit to you? Or does she believe in women’s rights and believes you can’t tell her what to do? Is your daughter unruly and does she believe she doesn’t need to obey your commands?”

The questions came at him quickly without giving him a chance to answer the previous one. “You make it sound as if I’m supposed to be some kind of dictator who goes about issuing orders everyone has to obey,” he said, trying to stay calm. “I don’t think that is the way Paul meant it.”

“Are you aware that your daughter has been going out with an undesirable boy by the name of Peter Carver for the past 3 or 4 months?” Peter Reed asked.

To say Greg was stunned was an understatement. Jessie had a boyfriend? To be honest, the only friend he knew that his daughter had was Anna and that was because she had been to the house a few times. This was the first he was hearing that Jessie had a boyfriend. And it wasn’t nice hearing about it from other people.

“No.”

“So, don’t you think that who your daughter goes out with should be something that you are concerned about?” Thomas Reed continued. “Especially since cannot be too careful in this age of sexual permissiveness.”

“Are you implying that my daughter is sleeping around?” Greg asked him through gritted teeth.

“I am not implying anything,” the other man said. “But the fact is that the boy isn’t even saved and we all know what boys his age are capable of.”

“Does your wife know about this relationship?” Bob Carlisle asked.

Greg was immediately about to answer “no” but he stopped himself. He couldn’t really be sure if she did or not. “I don’t know.”

The men all looked at each other. “So, what you’re saying is that your wife knows about your daughter’s boyfriend but she refused to tell you about it?” Prentiss Marshall asked.

Greg wanted to deny immediately that Ruth knew anything about it. Again he was stopped by the fact that he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t vouch that she didn’t know anything about it. “I don’t know if she knows about it.”

“So you admit that there is a possibility that you wife knows about it and is keeping that fact from you?” the other man questioned.

“You make it sound like a fact,” Greg complained.

“I didn’t say it was a fact,” the other man said with something close to a smug smile on his face. “I only asked if there was a possibility that your wife knew about your daughter’s undesirable relationship and was keeping it from you.”

“You need to answer the question Greg,” Bob Carlisle said.

“There is a possibility,” Greg answered reluctantly. He would be the first to confess that he was ashamed. He was ashamed that he had been so caught up in his work and what he thought God wanted him to do that he had neglected his own daughter. He couldn’t remember the last time they had really talked. He had left everything to Ruth because he had felt that what he was doing was more important. Now he was finding out that other people knew more about his family than he did.

“What does your wife have against Bill Wilkinson?” Bob Carlisle asked.

“Excuse me?” Greg said.

“I asked what Bill Wilkinson had done to offend your wife?” he said, repeating the question.

“He hasn’t done anything to her....,” Greg began.

“Then why does she dislike him almost to the point of hatred?” Thomas Reed asked cutting him off.

Greg shook his head as he tried to clear it. “She doesn’t hate him ...,” he denied.   

“Then why does she refuse to talk with him?” Thomas Reed said, cutting him off again. “He said that he had made efforts to talk to her to resolve whatever differences there might be between them but she has rebuffed him.”

“I haven’t heard anything about that,” Greg said truthfully. “We went to their place for lunch some months back and I know that my wife was angry about something she heard from someone about Bill but I never knew that there had been any moves to settle issues between them.”

“Tell us about this story your wife heard,” Prentiss Marshall asked. “What was it all about?”

“I really don’t know much about it,” Greg said lying. “It was something to do about what a former member of the church said about Bill.” He wasn’t going to be the one to tell them about the allegation that Bill had referred to the woman’s unborn child as a bastard. Especially when there was no proof.

“So your wife decided to believe the word of a former member who might be bitter over an imaginary slight?” Prentiss Marshall concluded. “So she thinks that Bill could have done what this woman accused him of without hearing his own side of the story? So she decided to act as judge and jury and find him guilty? That doesn’t sound very Christian to me.”

This whole thing was getting out of hand Greg thought. Going by the questions and the revelations, it seemed he was the only one in his family the men had a good opinion of. Actually, they had a terrible opinion of him as well. While they thought he had the qualities of a great pastor, they also thought he was ineffectual as a husband and father and that he was someone who did not have “control” over his family. They thought his wife was not submissive and not worthy of being called a Christian. And worst of all, they thought his daughter was sleeping around.

Bob Carlisle coughed. “As I said at the start of this meeting, we believe that you are the best person to be the pastor of the church. However, we feel that there are certain issues that need to be resolved with your family before we can in good conscience recommend you for the job permanently. You do understand don’t you?”

Greg nodded. “I understand.”

JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson publishers.http://bookstore.westbowpress.com/Products/SKU000194087/Deceptio.aspx and LOST, BUT FOUND available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DPLLEUQ/. You can follow him on Twitter @Cruz_JCReal