It was peaceful there. He wasn’t online checking his e-mails, his phone messages, his Facebook or Twitter accounts, or worrying about any of that nonsense. He wasn’t LinkedIn and that was fine.

He was lying next to his son assuring him that everything was going to be okay.

And it is going to be okay.

Sure. The lightning could strike down a tree that could crash into their house and this room. But that wasn’t very likely. Instead, the threatening sounds and sights were really not threatening at all.

Gregory felt safe as long as Daddy was nearby.

The more Kevin thought of this, the more humbled he was.

He found tears streaming down the sides of his face.

Why can’t I have the faith of a child, a faith so secure in his father?

He had a long way to go.

A long way.

In that bed next to his son, Kevin prayed that Gregory’s two little brothers would be okay.

He really wanted to believe that God heard those prayers.

Kevin thought of a lyric from “Silent Night” that had been playing on the radio as he drove home: “Glories stream from heaven afar.”

He wanted to believe that those streaming glories could reach Greenville, South Carolina, too.

The Storm

The rain pelted the thin tin roof of their trailer and leaked somewhere inside this tiny mouth of a bedroom. Thomas could hear the drops falling but couldn’t turn on the light to find it since the power was out. He’d left his mother and sister in the living room talking by candlelight. He’d said he wanted to go to bed, but he really wasn’t physically tired.

He was tired of being unable to do anything.

I might be some hero at the high school but here I’m still just the teen who can’t provide for his mom and his sister.

Someone else should’ve been there.

Someone strong and faithful.

Someone they could look to for strength and faith.

Instead, his father was long gone.

In his room, Thomas realized there was a time in his life when he looked up to his father. It was before the drinking made him emotionally frozen like a statue and as undependable as the roof above him. Dad wasn’t always like that. When he was younger, his father used to do things. A lot of things, in fact, like repairing stuff that needed fixing and cracking the occasional joke.

When Mom told them that she’d seen him again recently, it made Thomas hopeful that the man he remembered tiny glimpses of might still exist. Maybe he had changed again, this time for the good. Thomas wanted to know. He also wanted his father to know how they were doing.

I want to see him again. Before Christmas.

Mom still hadn’t found a job, and he was still waiting to find one too.

Something tells me Mom didn’t tell Dad the whole story about how we were doing.