Redeeming-Love-By-Francine-Rivers

F R A N C I N E R I V E R S
He stood, stunned. Alternately hot and cold. Her words had gone
straight through his breastplate.
She put her hand over her face because she couldn’t bear the look on his.
“Anything else?” he asked quietly.
“No,” she said, her mouth jerking. “I think that about does it.”
Michael didn’t move for a long moment. Then he took the shirtwaists she
had laid out. He jammed them back into the drawer and banged it shut.
Then he walked out the door.
He was gone so long, she went to look for him to ask what he wanted
her to do. He wasn’t in the fields or in the barn. He wasn’t down by the
creek. She wondered if he had gone to the Altmans. Maybe he had ridden
over to see Paul to tell him he was right about her, more than right.
The horses were in the corral.
She kept thinking of her father, and she was afraid.
She thought hard and realized one other place he might have gone. She
put on a coat and took a heavy blanket from the bed and headed for the hill
where he had taken her to see the sunrise. Michael was there, sitting with
his head in his hands. He didn’t look up when she reached him. She put the
blanket around his shoulders. “Do you want me to leave? I know where the
road is now.” Coaches even went by on occasion. “I could find my own way
back.”
“No,” he said hoarsely.
She stood looking at the sunset. “Do you ever get the feeling God is playing
some horrible joke on you?”
“No.”
“Then why, when you love him the way you do, would he do such a
thing to you as this?”
“I’ve been asking him.”
“Did he say?”
“I already know.” He took her hand and pulled her down to sit beside
him. “To strengthen me.”
“You’re strong enough already, Michael. You don’t need this. You don’t
need me.”
“I’m not strong enough for what’s yet to come.”
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