Chapter 4
Micah
New Chapter Church on a Thursday has its own particular rhythm.
Quieter than Sunday but never quite still, more like a house between meals than an empty one.
I’ve learned over the years that children’s ministry runs on two things in roughly equal measure: good logistics and stubborn love.
The logistics I handle on a spreadsheet.
The love shows up on its own, which is the part that still gets me after all this time.
By lunchtime, I am in back-to-back conversations, then running an errand, then back at my desk working through the tasks that require just enough concentration to keep my hands busy.
I am thankful it is busy enough to distract me.
Most of the morning, anyway.
My phone rings at half past noon, and I already know before I look at it that it’s my mother. Sandra Sanders has always had a God-given sixth sense when one of her children is overthinking something. With four of us to keep track of, she’s had a lot of practice.
“You sound distracted,” she says before I’ve finished saying hello.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“That is exactly what you said when you were fourteen and trying to hide that you’d backed the car into the mailbox.”
I lean back in my office chair. “The mailbox was already leaning.”
“Micah Allen Sanders.”
“Structurally compromised before I got there,” I say. “I maintain that.”
She laughs, which is the intended effect, and then she waits. My mother has always known the best way to get one of us to talk is simply to stop filling the space. It’s a technique I’ve borrowed more times than I’ve credited her for.
“There is something on my mind,” I finally say.
“Is it a girl?”
The pause lasts exactly long enough to be incriminating.
She makes a sound that lands somewhere between delight and victory, and in the background I can hear the familiar noise of my parents’ kitchen—someone talking over the television, something on the stove, at least two separate conversations happening simultaneously.
I am the third of four, raised in a house where silence was a scheduling conflict and the front door was functionally always unlocked.
My parents built something large and warm and slightly overwhelming, and all four of us turned out, in different ways, to love people loudly because of it.
“Tell me,” she says.
“There’s not much to tell yet.” I give her the careful version—a friend who needs help, an event, a question I’m still sitting with. I leave out the pantry and focus on the practical question of whether helping someone is wisdom or just a dream dressed up nicely.
She goes quiet for a bit after I’m done talking, and that means she’s genuinely thinking things over, not just gathering her thoughts to answer.
“Wait,” she says slowly. “Is this Harper?”
I say nothing.
“Micah. Is this the Harper you’ve been talking about for two years?”
“I haven’t been—”
“The kindergarten teacher.”
“Mom.”
“I’m adding this to my Sunday school prayer group.”
“Please do not do that.”
“Honey, those women are powerful intercessors—”
“Those women will start texting me,” I say. “Once you tell them, the next thing I know I’m getting prayer emojis from Miss Carol at seven in the morning.”
She dissolves into laughter, and I wait it out, rubbing the bridge of my nose.
“Fine, I’ll keep it between me and the Lord. For now.” A pause that I do not trust. “Have you talked to your accountability group about this?”
I sigh, long and resigned. “I meet with them tonight, actually.”
“Good.” Her voice carries the deep satisfaction of a woman who has just learned everything is going according to plan. “Then you have people who will tell you the truth, and I don’t have to worry.”
“You were never going to stop worrying.”
“That’s true,” she agrees cheerfully. “But now I can worry with less urgency.”
I can’t help but laugh.
“Micah.” Her voice softens into the register she uses when she means something. “Just lead with kindness. Whatever this turns into, whatever it doesn’t. Just lead with that.”
I stay at my desk for a while after we hang up, turning that over quietly. It is so simple it almost feels insufficient. But my mother has built four reasonably functioning people on that principle alone, so I figure she knows something I am still learning.
My hand taps the steering wheel to a rhythm that has nothing to do with the song on the radio.
We meet every other Thursday, the seven of us, in the back corner booth that Rosie’s Diner holds for us without being asked anymore because we have been coming long enough that Linda, the Thursday night manager, just puts the reserved sign out automatically.
Three older men and four younger ones gathered around terrible coffee and honesty that most people spend their whole lives avoiding.
It was Pastor David, the missions pastor, who initiated it, and he has the distinctive trait of a man who has weathered life’s trials and emerged with gentleness rather than bitterness—a quality I hope to cultivate in thirty years.
The others bring their own versions of that.
Between the seven of us there is more accumulated wisdom than I sometimes know what to do with, and also enough combined stubbornness that none of us lets anyone get away with performing fine when they are not actually fine.
It is the most important two hours of my week, and I have been looking forward to tonight and dreading it in equal measure.
Because tonight I am going to say something out loud that I have never willingly admitted to another person.
I have been falling for Harper Mitchell for nearly two years.
Not the version I could pass off as a casual observation or a vague awareness. The real version.
Her red hair is the first thing anyone notices, and it suits her in a way that feels almost intentional, like God matched the outside to the inside and knew exactly what He was doing.
The freckles across her nose are the second thing, if you’re paying attention.
She is sharp and has a comeback for nearly everything, and her default setting in my presence has always been somewhere between mildly combative and genuinely entertaining, which I have come to understand is actually one of her higher forms of comfort.
She does not bicker with people she does not trust. I figured that out about six months in and filed it away.
But underneath all of that fire is someone who stays late to label things on Sunday’s after church, who sits on the floor with a crying kid without being asked, who shows up for the people she loves in ways she never once announces or takes credit for.
She is beautiful in a way that catches you off guard because she is so busy being everything else that it almost sneaks up on you.
That version. The one that has been growing slowly and stubbornly through every Sunday hallway conversation and group chat argument and moment where she did something quietly generous when she thought nobody was paying attention.
I have been carrying this with a lid on it for a long time, and tonight I am going to take the lid off in front of six men who will not let me put it back on without actually dealing with it first.
Some of them know who she is. She has volunteered in the kids’ wing, served at enough church events, been enough of a fixture in the New Chapter orbit that her name is not unfamiliar.
Which means when I say it, a few of them will already have a picture in their minds, and the conversation will be real from the first sentence.
I pull into the diner parking lot and sit in the truck for a moment with the engine running.
Once I say this out loud, I cannot take it back.
Not to these men. They will ask questions and pray hard and tell me the truth even when it is inconvenient, and I will leave tonight knowing more clearly which direction I am supposed to walk than I do right now.
That is exactly what I need.
The diner filled up around us as soon as the seven of us settled into the corner booth and placed our orders.
The four of us on the younger end of the table are still finishing the catching-up that happens in the first ten minutes, the easy back-and-forth about the week, about work, about nothing in particular.
Then David sets down his mug.
It is a minor gesture, almost imperceptible, but the table knows it. It means we are starting.
We go around the way we always do, each man recounting where he is this week. Not a performance, not a highlight reel. Just the truth.
I listen to all of it. I contribute where I can. And when the table lands back on me with the patient collective attention that these men have perfected over years of doing this together, I put both forearms on the table and say the thing I drove across town to say.
“I have something I need to admit.”
Nobody rushes me. That is one thing I have learned to trust about this room.
“There is a woman; I have known her for almost two years. She attends New Chapter, volunteers in the kids’ wing sometimes, which means some of you know who I’m talking about.” A beat. “Her name is Harper.”
David nods once, slowly. Across the table, James leans back in his chair and folds his hands, and waits.
“It has not been a single moment, just two years of small ones stacking up, and somewhere in the middle of all of them I realized that I had stopped thinking of her as just a friend and started thinking of her as someone I wanted to know more deeply than I currently do.” I pause.
“I have told no one the full version of this until tonight.”
“Why tonight?” Robert asks. His voice is quiet and unhurried, the voice of a man who has heard a lot of confessions and treated all of them with the same steady care.
“Because something happened that is forcing me to stop carrying it privately and actually figure out what I believe about it.” I wrap both hands around my mug. “She asked me to be her fake date.”
The table is quiet for exactly two seconds.
“Tell us what that means,” David says.
So I do. I give them the version with all the relevant details and tell them I already said yes.
“I should have come to you all first,” I say. “I’m sorry that I didn’t. But I’ve already committed, and I don’t intend to go back on it.”
The table sits with that for a moment. Food arrives, and nobody rushes to fill the silence.
It is Scott who speaks first, cutting his food with the unhurried ease of a man who knows he does not need to compete for airtime. “Let me ask you something. When you said yes to her, were you saying yes to the favor or to the feelings?”
I consider that honestly. “Both.”
James leans forward. “And does she know?”
“No.”
“Does she have any indications?”
“If she does,” I say, “she has worked very hard not to show it.”
A small sound from Robert that might be a laugh. He covers it with his coffee.
“What you are doing for this woman is a genuinely kind thing. She asked for a friend to show up for her in a hard moment, and you said yes. This is not complicated. That is just good,” David says, setting his fork down and giving me the kind of direct eye contact that has never once failed to make me sit up slightly straighter.
“The part that becomes complicated is what happens after.”
“One evening is a gift,” Scott says. “You show up, you be her friend, you do not make it about your feelings.”
“But if it goes beyond one evening, if this fake arrangement turns into something that feels real on either side of it, then you owe her a direct, honest conversation about where you actually stand.” James holds my gaze.
“You cannot keep saying yes to being near her without eventually telling her why you keep saying yes. That is not fair to her, and it is not fair to you.”
“And it is not honoring to God,” Robert adds quietly, not as a rebuke but as a reminder. “You are a man who knows how to lead with integrity. Lead with it here too.”
I nod, turning all of it over slowly.
“One more thing,” David says, and his voice shifts into the gentler register he reserves for the things that matter most. “You have been carrying this for two years. That is a long time to hold something without bringing it to God fully and openly and asking Him what to do with it.” He tilts his head. “Have you done that?”
The question lands the way the true ones always do, quietly and right in the center.
“Not the way I should have,” I admit.
“Then that is where this starts. Before the gala, before the coffee tomorrow, before any of the rest of it. You take this to God, and you hold it open-handed and you ask Him what He wants to do with it.” A pause. “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Good,” he picks up his fork again. “Then we’ll pray over it before we leave tonight, and you’ll come back and tell us how it goes.”
Laughter moves around the table, easy and real, and something in my chest loosens in a way it has not all day.
I lean back in the booth and let it settle, grateful for the particular gift of being known by people who will not let you get away with being less than honest, and who will pray over your mess without once making you feel smaller for having brought it.