Chapter 9
Micah
My alarm goes off at five-fifteen, and I turn it off before the second pulse.
I’ve been waking up before it for the last three days. I’d like to blame the season—children’s ministry ramps up in the spring, the programming calendar gets heavy, there’s always something—but if I’m being honest, it’s not the calendar keeping me up.
I reach for my Bible before I reach for my phone.
This is the third time I’ve done the year-in-the-Bible plan.
Every time I start over, I’m a different person sitting down with the same words, and the same words land differently.
Something I read at twenty-three hits a lot differently five years later.
I’ve stopped being surprised by it and have counted on it.
I read until the room gets lighter. Biscuit shifts in his cage, rustling around with the quiet industry of an animal who has very important things to do at five-thirty in the morning, and when I close my Bible, I pray—then I lace up my shoes and go for a run.
The neighborhood is still mostly dark; the sky doing that gray-blue thing it does right before the sun commits. I hit my usual pace, the kind where my body knows what to do and my brain gets left alone, which is the part I need.
Left alone with what, exactly, is a fair question.
Lunch had been completely fine. A sandwich place on Main, midday, a table near the window.
Nothing remotely unusual about two friends setting parameters for a favor one of them is doing for the other.
Harper had her notes. She’d been efficient and clear and professionally businesslike about the whole thing, which was exactly what the situation called for, and I had matched her energy because that was the right thing to do.
The problem wasn’t the conversation.
The problem was that sitting across from her had been the most settled I’d felt in a while. And I hadn’t expected that. I’d expected the low-grade ache I usually carry around when she’s in the room. What I hadn’t expected was how easy it was.
I’d driven home afterward and sat in my driveway for four minutes before going inside.
I run an extra block. Then I turn around and head home.
The Monday morning staff meeting wraps up at ten, and I stay at the table after everyone else filters out, spreading the volunteer schedule across the conference room table like it’s a map I can navigate my way out of something with.
March is tight. Two of my lead volunteers have a wedding the same weekend as the spring family event, my curriculum order is a week behind, and I’ve got three new families coming through the intake process for our mother’s day out program who need to be placed in the right classrooms before they slip through the cracks.
I work through it methodically. Make the calls.
Send the emails. Draft a note to a parent who had concerns last Sunday about her son’s classroom transition—careful language, warm, direct.
This is the part of the job that nobody outside of ministry really thinks about: the back-channel logistics that keep the whole thing from quietly falling apart, and I don’t mind it.
I’ve always been better with systems than most people expect from someone who spends his Sundays on the floor with four-year-olds.
I’m halfway through the supply order when someone knocks on the open door.
It’s one of my volunteers—a college junior who’s been helping in the elementary room on Sundays since September. Good kid. A little too much energy before nine a.m., but he loves the work and the kids know it, which matters more than anything else.
He leans against the doorframe with the specific posture of someone who wants to ask something but hasn’t figured out how to start yet.
“You got a minute?”
I set the supply order aside. “Yeah. Sit down.”
He spends about thirty seconds doing the thing young men do where they try to make the question sound smaller than it is.
Then it comes out: there’s a girl. They’ve been friends for a while.
He doesn’t know what to do with that. What if he says something, and it changes everything?
What if she doesn’t feel the same? What if he waits too long, and she moves on?
I lean back in my chair and listen until he runs out of words.
“Here’s the thing,” I say. “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re asking what if it goes wrong, when the question you actually need to answer is whether you’re willing to keep pretending it’s something smaller than it is just because that feels safer?”
He looks at me.
“You can’t protect yourself into honesty,” I tell him. “At some point, you have to stop managing the risk and just tell the truth. The fear doesn’t go away first. You move anyway.”
He nods slowly, the way people do when something lands. Thanks me. Pushes his chair back and heads out.
I look at the supply order sitting open on the table in front of me.
I let the quiet sit there for a moment.
That was an impressive speech, Micah.
After he leaves, I pull the supply order back toward me and get back to work.
It happens again on Tuesday. Different guy, different details, same essential architecture—someone who cares about a person and has built an elaborate internal structure around all the reasons he shouldn’t say so.
I give him a version of the same counsel, and mean every word, which is the part that makes the irony almost funny.
Almost.
By Wednesday morning, my prayer is less organized than usual.
With my Bible closed on my lap, I sit on the edge of my bed in the early darkness, staying quiet for longer than usual. I know what the right thing is. I just don’t know how to do it when it’s her. When the stakes are this specific.
There’s no audible answer. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the absence of an answer isn’t the absence of presence, and I sit there until I feel less like I’m talking to a ceiling and more like I’m being heard.
Then I get up. Feed Biscuit. Make coffee.
Two days until the gala.
I change my shirt twice before I leave for Bible study.
The first one is fine. The second one is also fine. I change back to the first one, tell myself I’m being ridiculous, and then stand in front of my closet for another ninety seconds before putting on a different one entirely. Biscuit watches this from the bed.
“Not a word,” I tell him.
He blinks.
The drive over takes twelve minutes. It’s Daniel’s place this week—a townhouse off Legacy with decent parking and a tendency toward snack spreads that outperform the occasion.
The group rotates through houses, which means the vibe shifts slightly depending on whose living room you’re in, and Daniel’s is comfortable and low-lit and usually smells like whatever his roommate has been baking.
I park, grab my Bible off the passenger seat, and go in.
I administer the usual greetings as I ease into the room and tell myself I’m not watching the door.
I watch the door.
Two more people walk in. Then another. Then a couple I recognize from the young adults group, and then the door doesn’t open again for a while.
I do the rounds. Ask a question I don’t remember asking, laugh at something in the right place. I’m fine. I’m good at this.
Then Gray walks in.
Alone.
I keep my face easy. Give it a few more minutes. I refill my water. Circle back toward the living room.
Gray’s already watching me when I look up.
I hate that he clocked it that fast.
He waits, letting me come to him.
“Where’s Ivy?” I ask, keeping it conversational.
He takes a sip of his drink. “Women’s serving event. Her and Harper went together.”
I nod. “Right.”
Gray says nothing else. He just looks at me with that expression he has, the one that has been perfecting itself over the years into something that communicates ‘I see exactly what’s happening here’ without requiring him to say a single word out loud.
The study is good. Someone brings up a passage that sparks genuine conversation, and I’m present for it, really present, because that’s what this is for. This is what Wednesday nights are for. I don’t half-attend things. I don’t know how.
But on the drive home, the city quiet outside my windows, I let myself sit with it.
Two days.
Two days of knowing exactly what I feel and exactly what this arrangement is and exactly how those two things do not fit together, and then Friday night, I’m going to put on a suit and pick her up and spend an entire evening at her side.
Pretending.
I merge onto the highway; the lights spreading out ahead of me.
God, I really hope You know what You’re doing.
It’s not a complaint. It’s not even doubt. It’s just honest.
And somewhere between the exit ramp and my parking lot, the same quiet that’s been there all week settles back over me like it always does—not because anything has been resolved, but because I know Whose hands it’s in.
That has to be enough.
For now, it’s enough.