Around the Next Bend (Raspberry Ridge Sweet Beach Romance #4)

Chapter 1

This might have been the biggest mistake of his life.

“We’re looking forward to hearing you speak tomorrow, Garnet,” Mrs. Brandstetter said as she shook his hand. Her husband, Mr. Brandstetter, stood silently behind her, looking stern and serious. As he should.

Picking any pastor was not something that should be done on a whim. But a small-town church, especially one in a town as tiny as Raspberry Ridge, presented its own set of problems. The least of which was whether or not the church was going to be able to pay the pastor’s salary.

Garnet still wasn’t sure that was actually going to happen. The pastoral committee had warned him that he was going to need to retain his full-time job even after they voted him in.

Garnet didn’t tell them that he had already given his two-week notice and his last day was yesterday. He’d spent years going to Bible school around a full-time job, studying, learning and finally receiving a degree from a respected school in pastoral studies. He’d been ordained in his denomination and had served as an unpaid assistant pastor in his church in Indiana, before leaving it all behind. It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision. He truly believed the Lord wanted him here, and not just for the church.

His eyes drifted to his daughter, Dabney, fourteen years old and not very happy to be pulled out of the homeschool they had been a part of on the other side of the Michigan line, in Indiana, and to be moved two hundred miles away to the small town of Raspberry Ridge. The fact that it was directly beside Lake Michigan, and she’d basically be almost living in a beach house, had made the move only marginally better. Dabney, while mature for her age, was still a typical fourteen-year-old, and her life revolved around her friends.

The fact that he had homeschooled her from the very beginning, and that the “school” she was leaving there was the homeschool co-op where she had grown up with other homeschooled children, didn’t matter to a teen. Moving was moving.

She sat outside the window, on one of the church benches overlooking the wide expanse of Lake Michigan, with a book in her hand, her head bent, her legs tucked up around her.

She must have inherited her father’s personality, since her mother was a real go-getter. Nothing stood in Mertie’s way when Mertie wanted to get something, not even the inconvenience of a child.

Garnet smiled at the next person who waited to shake his hand. He wanted to make a good impression on the pastoral committee, even though they’d already voted to allow him to come candidate. He would preach two Sundays in a row, and then the church would vote on whether or not they wanted to retain him.

He didn’t want to think about Mertie, but how could he not? She had been his best friend as they’d grown up in Raspberry Ridge. And when she’d come to him asking for his help, he hadn’t been able to turn her down.

But he also hadn’t been able to do what she wanted him to do.

Because of that, he hadn’t been able to see her since. And he wasn’t sure seeing her now was such a good idea. He hadn’t expected her to be back in town to close up and sell the mansion her parents had left to her and her sisters when they had been tragically killed in a car accident earlier in the year.

“Welcome to Raspberry Ridge.” Homer Aiken stood in front of him, his hand out. Homer had impressed him as an intelligent man with a discernment for truth and a desire to do right. He had been slow to speak and always quick to listen.

“Thank you. It’s good to be back in my hometown.”

He and Homer hadn’t grown up together, although they knew each other. Homer was a good bit younger than Garnet.

“I’ve been leading a Bible study on my front porch at seven o’clock every morning. Even on Sundays, since there is no church. I...haven’t talked it over with the people who’ve been attending, but I think we’d be honored to have you attend, and if you’d like to lead it, it would be even better.”

Garnet appreciated this gesture of hospitality. In his experience, small towns were notoriously difficult to assimilate in. A person always felt like an outsider. Even after they’d been there for forty years. The small town he lived in in northern Indiana had been exactly like that. People had accepted him, they’d been kind to him, but they’d always considered him an outsider.

Of course, Raspberry Ridge was his hometown, although he’d been away for years.

“I’d love to,” he said immediately. If they were going to ask him, he was going to do it. He had quit his day job in order to move back to Raspberry Ridge. He hadn’t really enjoyed the sales position that he had at the company he worked for since he moved to Indiana and wasn’t going to miss the little cubicle and monotonous workday, followed by as much time as he could get with his daughter.

It had been hard to squeeze in the time he needed to homeschool her since he’d been promoted from his administrative position four years ago. Back then, he had worked from home, and his hours were flexible.

“We’ve been reading through the Bible, and we’re in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 10, but you can teach from wherever you want. My wife and I started the Bible study when she said she wanted to know what the Bible said but had never read it through. So, we typically read a few chapters and talk about them. Sometimes we get through one, sometimes more than that. I usually have Matthew Henry’s commentary and maybe a few other resources I pull up on my phone.”

“Thanks for the heads-up. I’m happy to do it, and I’ll just continue doing what you do. I’ll get a few things together so I can say a few words about that chapter and possibly up to four others.” It felt good to be given a job. To have something concrete in front of him to do.

He did have the blog that he had been working on building for the last ten years. Blogs had not quite gone the way of rotary phones, but they weren’t as profitable as they had been in their heyday.

He’d also been working on starting a TikTok channel, but in his experience, people on TikTok weren’t exactly interested in God’s word. Maybe he just hadn’t found his people yet, or maybe it was a mission field and he should keep working on it. God hadn’t shown him for sure, yet.

He shook the hand of the next person in line, nodded as they welcomed him, speaking some words about how they were looking forward to hearing him speak on Sunday. He responded and tried to project confidence.

Lord, I’m trusting this is the right thing to do. I was sure this was all Your plan, but now that I’m here, I feel lost and a little nervous. Please don’t let Dabney suffer because I made a mistake.

That summed up his years of being a dad. Everything that he did, he did with Dabney in mind.

Of course, he always had to follow the Lord’s leading, but it was always with an eye toward his daughter.

Lord, You know I had no idea that Mertie was in town.

He broke off with that thought. It had been in his mind that he needed to avoid her at all costs. As much as he didn’t want to. Over the years, it had gotten easier, and sometimes he even almost forgot about her. Although with Dabney in his home, it was almost impossible, since she was a carbon copy of her mother. In her features, anyway. Personality wise, she couldn’t have been more different.

Garnet had always appreciated the fact that God had given him a laid-back, easygoing daughter who had never been demanding, even as a baby. Her toddler years had been a dream. He watched as other parents had struggled with their children, temper tantrums and attitude were common, and at times, Garnet was tempted to believe it was his parenting skills that had kept Dabney from going down the same road, but he knew better.

He had no idea how to be a parent and had flown by the seat of his pants, reading as many books as he could on the subject and occasionally going back to talk to his parents.

Being that the only child his parents had raised was him, they weren’t a lot of help, although, according to them, he had been as easy as Dabney.

Until this point, though, he had tried to avoid being in Raspberry Ridge as much as he possibly could without being obvious about it. He hadn’t wanted to run into Mertie. Although from what he’d seen, she hadn’t gone back much, if at all.

So what were the odds that he felt the Lord had led him to come back for good, and she was here?

“Looking forward to seeing what you do with the church. I’m just as excited as the rest of the town to have it open again. It’s perfect timing for us,” Hobert Gilcrest spoke as he shook Garnet’s hand.

Hobert had told Garnet that he and his fiancée were interested in getting married. They intended to build a small house down by the dock where Hobert kept his boat and start a family.

Coincidentally, or maybe not so much so, Hobert’s fiancée was Mertie’s sister. Amara recognized him, knew him, but did not realize that Dabney was her sister’s child.

Thankfully, Dabney was always happy to sit somewhere with her nose in a book, and while people had met her, she hadn’t hung around. As far as Garnet knew, Amara had not looked Dabney full in the face. If she had, there was no way she wouldn’t see the family resemblance.

Nervousness tightened his muscles, and he had to deliberately relax his face into a smile.

“I love it when God’s timing works that way,” he said, meaning it. Obviously Hobert and Amara were starting a family here in Raspberry Ridge, and having a church, not just where they could hear the preaching of the word several times a week, but also where they could go to enjoy fellowship with their church family, would be helpful in keeping them on the straight and narrow, raising their family for God’s glory.

“I appreciate the fact that you know the importance of the church and intend to include that in your daily life. It’s encouraging to me,” Garnet said, knowing that he sounded serious and possibly even boring. People had accused him of that. He wasn’t quite sure how he had been able to become a good salesperson. After all, most of the top salespeople were jovial people pleasers with the ability to talk to anyone and with a joke always on the ready.

Garnet was pretty much the opposite of all that. But maybe it was his reliability. The way people seemed to be able to look at him and feel like he was honest and trustworthy. He just had a way about him, people said, that made them think that whatever he was saying was the absolute truth.

As well they should, since he made it a point to always speak the truth.

“Welcome to Raspberry Ridge. I’m confident that our little congregation is going to love you, and you’re going to be a part of it for a long time. Of course, you have some big shoes to fill.”

Dominic Miller stood in front of him shaking his hand. Dominic was the head deacon and the leader of the small pastoral committee. He was the one that Garnet needed to impress, not that Garnet was keeping track or making an effort to be anything other than himself. He was just going to be who he was and allow the Lord to work things out. At least, that was his plan. Sometimes things didn’t go according to plan, but God had the ability to straighten anything out.

“Pastor Calvin was a good man. You know he was my preacher throughout my growing-up years. He definitely shaped my personality and my thinking. I am forever indebted to him for preaching solely from the Bible and not trying to slant his sermons to preach what he wanted to say or support his political opinions.”

Very few people did that anymore. They took out the things they didn’t like or ignored them. And then put in things that suited their social narrative. That was part of the reason Garnet had decided to become a minister. People didn’t know what the Bible said anymore. And yet, how could they be Christians if they didn’t know what a Christian was? What a Christian was supposed to do?

The questions had bothered him, until he finally realized that God was prompting him, Garnet Irving, to become a preacher of the word.

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!

He remembered quite clearly the day he’d read that verse and realized that God wasn’t just prompting him to study more, He was prompting him to study so that he could teach others.

Sometimes the idea that God was using him, a studious kid from a small town—so small it didn’t even have a stoplight—in Michigan, to spread the gospel to his people, still brought Garnet up short.

But there was also the verse that said that a pastor should be the husband of one wife.

That verse could be interpreted to mean that a pastor should only have one wife - that he shouldn’t be divorced and remarried or polygamous. Or it could indicate that a pastor should be married. He chose to believe it meant that he needed a wife. After all, God created him to need a help meet. Others might disagree, and he would not say they were wrong, but he was not going to take a pastorate without a wife.

Lord, You said if I go, You would provide what I need. I can’t be a pastor if I don’t have a wife. It’s right there in Your word.

He and God had been having this conversation for a while. Garnet had been listening as well as he could, knowing that God sometimes didn’t move until the last minute. But Garnet had determined in his heart that he would not accept the pastorate on a permanent basis if he did not have a wife.

You’re cutting things a little close, Lord.

He figured that’s the way Daniel must have felt, when he got thrown in the lion’s den. Perhaps it was the way Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego felt when they had been put in the fiery furnace. He thought about other men through history who must have wondered at God’s timing and whether God was really going to come through. But a person’s faith couldn’t be tested if God did everything on the human timeframe, because if it had been up to Garnet, he would have had a wife fifteen years ago.