#1- Excerpt from “Love Waits: Book One” in the Fruit of the Spirit Series. The book is written from Gabriella’s (Gabby’s) perspective.

With probably a little too much fire in my eyes, I say, “Roger! I have been a Christian all my life! I hardly believe I was drinking milk all these years! One doesn’t go to church for as long as I have only to drink milk!”

Roger looks down at the ground, then out onto the rolling grassy hills of people all around us doing many different activities.

He fixes his eyes on something, points, and says to me, “Look.” I look over in the direction he is pointing, and I see a man with an older baby wearing a cute little dress and pink bonnet. They are about thirty feet from us. I assume that the man is the father. He is squatting down a little ways from a bench, and the baby is standing,
holding on to the bench. The father has his hands reached out to the baby, and the baby keeps shaking her head. The father just keeps his arms reached out, and he is saying something to her, but with the distance and the noise, I can’t quite make it out. Slowly she reaches one hand to her dad, but she will have to let go with her other hand in order to reach her dad. Once she lets go, she will only have to take
one, maybe two steps on her own, but she just keeps shaking her head and patting the bench as if she’s saying, “Nope, thanks, Dad, but I’m good right where I am, thanks anyway.” The father moves just a little closer, and I hear him say, “It’s okay, Debbie, I am right here. I will catch you if you fall. Trust me.” Debbie just looks at her
dad, she looks down at the bench, then she looks at him again. She takes off her first hand and reaches toward him. She edges with her
feet toward him, still holding on to the bench. “Come on, Debbie, you can do it,” I hear myself say. Her fingers are still touching the bench. She has one more step to get there, and then she will be safe and sound in her father’s arms. She smiles up at her dad, lets go, and takes one more step. She teeters and falls right into her father’s arms. She is smiling, and Dad is smiling. He picks her up and twirls her around, and she is laughing. I then notice that there were a small number of people nearby watching this event unfold. There is clapping and cheers. Roger is whistling and shouting, “Yeah! That was awesome!”

I have tears streaming down my face at what I just witnessed.

“Gabby, that is what going from milk to solid food looks like. You are letting go of what you know and trusting what you feel. You see the many ways it won’t work out, and you see the one way it will work out. You gather up enough courage and faith, and then you take that step, and that is when you ‘meet’ Jesus.”

“Love Waits: Book One” available now to purchase in paperback and download at Covenant Books https://covenantbooks.com/books/?book=love-waits It is also available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Google Play Books, just to name a few.

#2- Excerpt from “Love Waits: Book One” when Gabriella had a meeting with Pastor Jones at church.

I parked at the curb in front of my church. It was an older church, built in 1920—according to the cornerstone. I used to love coming here on Sunday mornings and for potlucks, for youth group, and various activities. But now, as I looked at this spectacular building with the amazing 1920 architecture, it didn’t feel like coming home anymore. I missed that feeling. Where did it go? When did it leave? How did it leave? And why hadn’t I noticed it before?
I opened the big, heavy door to the church, and that same smell that I always smelled hit me. It wasn’t a bad smell, like an awful odor or anything like that, but really, what was it? I walked over to the pastor’s office, and his door was open. I took a brief glance around the office as I approached the doorway; it looked exactly the same as it did for all those years as a child growing up here. He was sitting at his desk writing something down. He was an older gentleman, white hair, blue eyes. He had stood well over six feet; however, there was a bit of a stoop nowadays to his height. I was not really sure how old he was. I would guess early seventies; however, I was terrible with guessing people’s ages.
Pastor Jones looked up from his writing at the sound of my knock, and he smiled his broad smile and said, “Gabby, how wonderful to see you!” He slowly stood up and extended his hand to me as I walked over to his desk. “Have a seat, please.”
I sat down in one of the two chairs in front of his desk. After some small talk about how we were each doing, he said, “So what brings you in today?”
“Well, Pastor, to be honest, I have a lot of questions and a lot of confusion, and I was hoping that you would be able to help me.”
“Sure, Gabby, that is one of the reasons I am here. What has got you troubled?”
Oh, crud! What do I say, how do I word this? Do I actually just come out and say to my very senior citizen pastor that we have a senior citizen church? You would think he already knew that anyways; of course, I hadn’t realized it until recently.

“Umm, well…” I looked into his blue eyes that were staring back at me and I saw sincerity and anticipation of what I was going to say. I took a deep breath and just let the words come out.

“Where are all the children?”
Lines appeared across his forehead; I could tell I had confused him with only one question! Yeah, I was a journalist all right!
“Where are all the children?” he repeated back to me as if he needed clarification that he heard me correctly. I shook my head up and down.
“Gabby, what do you mean?”
“I mean that we don’t have any children here…at this church…where did they go?”
“Oh, I see.” He looked a little relieved but then a little sad. “Well, I’m afraid that I am not sure. Most have grown up and gone their own way in life, hopefully in the way that the good Lord is
taking them.”
“Yes, Pastor, but why aren’t any new families coming here? Why haven’t any children grown up and stayed here in this church? And when did this all happen?”
Pastor Jones sat back in his chair and let out a small sigh. “Oh, Gabby, I wish I had all the answers to these questions. I know that our attendance numbers are down and that our attendees are, shall we say, of a certain age—present company excluded, of course. As a matter of fact, you are the youngest member of our congregation. The next in line—age-wise, that is—is George Marshall, and he will be fifty-two this year. These are questions I ponder on, I pray on, I meditate on. Why this church used to be so full of life, so vibrant, so exciting! We used to be a multi-generational church, and I absolutely loved it! I fear we are past our prime, like the flower has definitely bloomed and winter is approaching.”
“But, Pastor, Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and He will be the same tomorrow, right? So how can this church be past its prime if Jesus is the same today as He was all those years before?”
My pastor put his elbows on the arms of his chair; he brought his hands up toward his mouth and had the fingertips touching, almost like “praying hands.” He was looking intently at me, and I felt like maybe I had just crossed a line I shouldn’t have crossed. He said, “Go on.”
In my head, I was praying, Father, what do you want me to say? You know the saying, “preaching to the choir?” Try preaching to the preacher!

Just open your mouth, and I will send the words, Gabriella.

Okay, here goes round two.
I took another deep breath, I closed my eyes and opened my mouth. “Pastor, if Jesus is the truth, the life, and the way, and this church is His church, then He should be alive and present here, right now. There is no such thing as past our prime with Jesus here. Pastor, I used to love to come here. It was another home to me. I felt loved and safe here, and there was something here that was not anywhere else, and it would stay with me and carry me throughout the days when I wasn’t here. I want that again. I want to feel like I did then when it was exciting to learn about Jesus and it was ‘home’ to be with people in the congregation. I miss that.”
There was a silence in the room. Pastor Jones looked at me, and I couldn’t read what he was thinking. After a long moment, he lowered his hands to rest on the arms of his chair. He cleared his throat.

“Gabby, I know, and I understand what you are talking about. I have a confession to make: I have not been the shepherd over this congregation like I should have. I am not about ‘new’ ideas or about ‘changing.’ I have never been good at that sort of thing. Gladys was, though. She loved meeting new people and trying new things and going out on a limb, taking that chance. She was so free, and I was always so stiff. I don’t know how or why God ever brought us two together.” He chuckled as he said, “We couldn’t have been any more different if we tried to be!” He was having a full, hearty laugh now. When he was done laughing at what he had said, he continued, “I just haven’t been the same since the Lord called Gladys home. She would probably not like seeing me or the church in this condition. I just don’t have that spark that she had, the same zeal for reaching the lost at any cost. Gumption, that’s what she had, gumption! She had it in spades—fearless she was. She was my hero—next to the Lord, of course. Oh, how I miss her. We were quite a team. She was sugar, and she was spice! Ha! I loved it!” He looked down at his hands that were now cupped in front of him. “I guess I have been lost without her these eight years. I may have been the one that carried the message, but she was the wind beneath the wings that really carried it. Without that wind, I have become driftwood, I suppose. Just kind of bobbing along.”
“Pastor, you are not driftwood. I think you just lost your compass.” I reached over on his desk and picked up the Bible. I handed it to him, and he took it in his hands. “Now you have your compass back. You just need to read it to see which way you are going.”

#3 This is when Gabriella met the very distinguished Mr. Harold Thompson when he visited the newspaper office about his wife’s obituary:

“So, Mr. Thompson, how long were you and Bella married?”

His eyes danced as he spoke, “We were married for sixty-three years.”

I felt like my mouth was hanging open—oh, it was, yeah, that’s professional. Harold chuckled at me.

“I can only imagine what you must be thinking. You are, what, twenty-two years old? And here I have been married almost three times your age.”

“Oh, Mr. Thompson, I—” “Please, call me Harold. That is my name, after all.”

Blushing, I said, “Harold, first of all, I am twenty-five, and I’m sorry for being so surprised. It’s just that I have never heard of anyone ever being married that long. Can I ask you a personal question?”

“My dear, I am here to have my wife’s obituary written. I don’t think we can get much more personal than that. Please, what do you want to ask?”

I bit my bottom lip, a habit I have when I get nervous. Twisting a pen in my hands, I asked, “How did you have such a long marriage? How did you have a love that lasted for so long?”

As he listened to my questions, I felt like he could see right through me—not physically, but the real me, the one that I don’t let many people see. A slow smile started to grow on his face.

“My dear, I had such a long marriage because Bella and I chose to. We chose ‘us.’ It was not an option to not continue our marriage. We meant our vows, for better, for worse. We had a lot of better days, and we had some worse days, too, but at the end of the day, we just chose ‘us.’ And, my dear, our love is not over now. It is still going strong. I believe I will be with her again someday. I don’t believe that God put us together for so long just to tear us apart now.”

I’ve heard people talk about heaven and hell before. I do go to church, and I know that people are supposed to get married and stay married, but to be honest, who really does that these days? Well, I guess apparently Harold and Bella do, or did. I was digesting this when Harold stood up and extended his hand to me.

“I am going to go for now, but you have my card if you have any further questions for me.”

“Thank you, and I will probably have questions. I mean, my parents are still married, but nowadays, I didn’t think people really stayed together anymore. I mean, I can’t even find Mr. Right or, for that matter, a Mr. Date for Friday night.”

Harold blushed some. “My dear, I was referring to Bella’s obituary. But if you would like to discuss the subject of ‘love,’ I would enjoy that too.”

Now I was the one blushing. How could I open my mouth and insert my foot like that? If Renee were here, she would hand me a cup of water and say, “Drink this—it’s to wash down your foot.”