“A little,” she admitted.
“Me too.” He shifted slightly, but services hadn’t started yet, so she didn’t expect him to stand quite yet. “I looked into the river boat cruise like you asked. They’vegot one at the end of June that would work real nice with my schedule on the ranch.”
“No branding or breeding in June?”
He chuckled huskily in her ear. “A lot of agriculture, which means my brothers can spare me for a few days.”
“It’ll be humid and hot in June.”
“Sure will, but I don’t think we’re ready to go right now,” he said. “And I can’t be gone too much in the fall. There’s so much with bringing the cattle back, market day, the harvest….”
“So in a couple of months,” she said.
“Two and a half,” he said. “You’ll have had your birthday by then, and you’ll know if you can stand me for a road trip and then a boat trip.”
“A road-boat trip,” she murmured as the band started to play. They couldn’t talk much more about this right now, so Caroline put it in her pocket for later. She did want to go on a road trip with Dawson, and six months into their relationship sounded about like the perfect time to do it.
After the rousing opening number, Pastor Glover stood up and headed for her place behind the microphone. Caroline liked the woman’s sermons, and she liked her brother’s too. She always felt safe and like she was with friends when she attended church, and she settled into a restful state in Dawson’s arms as the pastor started to speak.
“When I was a child, my father was training for amarathon. He’d get up before work and run. He’d run after work sometimes. When he got faster, he did something I didn’t understand as a little girl.” She smiled out into the crowd, and she had such a way with storytelling. Caroline loved listening to her, and she tried to piece together where Pastor Glover was going in the story before she got there.
“He put books in a backpack and started to run with the backpack. Every week, he’d add another book. He let my brother and I pick them, and I tried to pick the thickest, heaviest one, thinking it would be too hard for him to carry.”
Pastor Glover gave a light laugh. “Of course, he could run with the books, and the extra weight helped him get stronger. When the day of the race came, and he wasn’t wearing the backpack of books, he practicallyflew. It was incredible to watch, almost like he’d grown wings on his feet and wasn’t burdened by anything anymore.”
Caroline suddenly knew where the pastor was headed.
“When we carry unnecessary burdens, we may start to feel like we’re strong enough to walk alone. That we don’t need the help of the Lord. That we don’t need Him in our lives at all. But my friends and neighbors, when we discard our burdens at the feet of the Lord, He makes it so we can fly. He makes it so the things troubling us—whether those be sins or mental turmoil, orphysical ailments—are like shedding that backpack. You see, when we rely on God, we’re stronger than when we carry the backpack of books. Because we’re lighter, we can fly.”
Caroline very much liked this idea of flying, of not carrying the weights life had placed upon her.
“It sounds so easy to lay your burdens at the feet of God,” Pastor Glover said next. “But it’s not as easy as it sounds. None of us likes to feel like we can’t handle the things in our lives, and it takes true humility to shed who you were before and become someone new through the blood of Jesus Christ.”
Caroline had done a lot of changing in her life, this proverbial “shedding” the pastor was talking about. But as she sat there, she realized she’d given nothing to God. She’d carried it all herself. She’dwantedto carry it all herself.
Doing so had made her stronger, but now Caroline wondered if she could fly—if she could figure out how to set down the burdens of her old self and become someone new.
The pastor continued to talk about the ways God had given them to find their way to Him, including the scriptures, the rest of the Sabbath Day, sermons like this, prayer, and more.
Caroline found herself sinking into a prayer, her eyes falling closed and everything.Lord, she thought.I want to be the person You’d like me to be. I want to trustYou explicitly and lay down the things I’m carrying that I don’t need in my backpack. Will You…Will You help me know what those things are and how to set them down?
She didn’t get an immediate answer, and her eyes fluttered open again as Dawson lowered his head and whispered, “You okay, sweetheart?”
Caroline drew in a breath that made her emotions shake. She nodded, though, because she was okay, and she had confidence that while God hadn’t answered her prayer right this moment, He would.
She turned her head toward Dawson and whispered, “Will you come to lunch at the house today?”
“Today? Like, in an hour?”
“Yes.”
“With you, Belle, and Judy?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He hesitated for a moment before he straightened and looked back toward the front. He hadn’t answered, and Caroline sure didn’t like the buzz of anxiety in her chest. She could admit that she hadn’t brought Dawson around the house much, but they’d been dating for a few months now, and Belle would have to figure out how to have him around.
Because Caroline wanted him around.