Read Online A Touch of Grace by Lauraine Snelling - Free Book Online

work quite joyfully. Whatever would his father and grandfather think of this? Would they be pleased he chose a path for himself or see it as a desertion from the family business?

    Sunday gave him even more time to think. He attended church with the Bjorklunds as he had before. While he knew some of his church’s background, his family did not attend services often, only on specific community occasions, and they’d not told him he couldn’t attend church in Blessing. The hymns and the liturgy all were unfamiliar, but he had no trouble following along in the hymnbooks. The psalms he’d been taught by his grandmother on his mother’s side. Any spiritual heritage had come from the little he learned from her. He wondered if the Bjorklunds knew of his background, but he had no desire to share it unless someone asked him.
    The words of the Scripture for the day were read in Norwegian. His mind leaped forward two rows to where Grace sat next to her father with Trygve on her other side. Would that he were sitting in her brother’s place. Do I have a crush on her? The thought jerked him upright in his seat.
    Pastor Solberg caught his attention when he read the verses again in English. “Jesus was talking with the disciples when one of the leaders of the synagogue stood and asked him this question. ‘Master, which is the great commandment in the law?’ Jesus said unto him, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Simple, isn’t it?” Solberg continued. “We’re asked to do only two things—to love our God and to love those around us.” He smiled out over his congregation. “So simple and so easy to say, but what about when someone disappoints you? When someone gets angry at you or you get angry at them? And the last line, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself,’ does that mean you have to love yourself? And how do you do that without seeming prideful, a nasty sin according to other Scriptures?”
    Jonathan waited for him to answer his own questions. He knew he had disappointed his father on many occasions, often no matter how hard he tried. He knew that sometimes he was jealous of his older brother Thomas, who it seemed could do no wrong. He shifted in his seat. His mind took off across the continent to remember one of the times he’d stood before his father’s desk, knowing he deserved the scolding but wishing for one word of approbation. He remembered the sorrow in his father’s eyes. Was God like that?
    Last Sunday the pastor had talked about how much God loves His children. Did he believe in a God who loved His children or in a God who set up rules too numerous to be fully obeyed? And most important, wasn’t this the same God of the Old Testament and, according to Pastor Solberg, the New Testament also? So go talk to him , he heard himself thinking. I will. Or maybe I should ask Ingeborg . While he always called her Mrs. Bjorklund to her face, in his mind she’d always been the Ingeborg of his father’s memories.
    As everyone rose for the final hymn, he watched Dr. Elizabeth, who was playing the piano. She looked to be a bit green around the mouth and eyes. Go tell her you could take her place and play for Sunday services if you could have some practice time on the piano . He flexed his fingers. He’d not played for more than a month, but that was one thing he did well—even his father said so.
    As the congregation was dismissed, instead of playing until everyone was out of the church, Dr. Elizabeth got up and hurried out the back door.
    Within a few minutes, while the men gathered in small groups talking, the women had brought the food from their wagons and were setting dishes and pans out on the long tables set up on sawhorses in the shade of the cottonwood trees planted years earlier. The children ran between the church and the