Connie had just finished shopping. It was a pleasant day, the sun was warm, the light was high, and she was in the sort of mood where catchy, summertime pop songs spring to mind. She would never see the two men ready to grab her when she looked up toward the other man who’d asked for help. Such a pleasant smile, she thought.
In today’s discussions of religion, we often forget how radically different the idea of a single, all powerful God, espoused by those faiths that hail back to Abraham, really is. What might a typical member of the “more enlightened” Greek culture during the time right before the fall of Judah in 587 B.C.E. have thought about the monotheism of the Bible? OFB’s Timothy Butler “listened in” on such a discussion.
Peter Thomas Stevens went into room 103 with the flowers and Kevlar balloons, still thinking about what Mike Abernathy had said: “This is the second time you saved my life.” He didn’t yet know how firmly he belonged to God, and how God used him at his birth to save the soul of Mike Abernathy.
Mike Abernathy climbed into his new Camry, confident he’d made the right choice. It’d run forever; the new engines had been developing at a rapid pace, and Mike could be a man while getting “green points” too. And to think he’d be sitting in one now, after the foolish and self-serving environmental “investments” during the Obama administration—well, it was a minor miracle.
Connie Stevens was furious. She had been summoned from a firm-wide meeting by her son’s teacher. She naturally asked if the face-to-face meeting could wait, and was told instead that she should come immediately to meet, and remove, Peter from school for the day. What could he have done? She willed herself to recite “the prayers,” in the hope of escaping irrational anger at her son, the teacher, and the world.
It had been a strange 9 months for Blaine and Connie Stevens. They had it figured: he was conceived the very night they made up, starting to put their problems behind them. But it was their baby who had the problems now. Vitamin deficiencies. Diabetes. Seemingly every problem in the book had befallen their young, as yet unborn boy.
Blaine Stevens wanted to go running. He’d spent most of the last hour staring at family photos from times better than now. He and Connie have been fighting for months. Blaine half-wondered what two 28-year-olds with no children could fight about. They found things, and it wasn’t much fun.
In this short story, Ed Hurst introduces us to an semi-apocalyptic army training scene. Our protagonist faces a difficult question: what does one do when one is required to train a new group of enlisted men for a cause that seems hopeless?
Imagine an everlasting promise given from God himself. Ed Hurst offers a dramatic recasting of God's promise to David from 2 Samuel 7.
To inaugurate our new fiction and creative works section, Associate Editor Ed Hurst provides a thoughtful dramatization from the Old Testament. The text comes from Genesis 12:1-3. Join Ed in following a bit of the life of the man who would become Abraham, the story of whom begins in media res (already in progress).