Page 5 of A Cowboy's Convenient Marriage

He didn’t know anything about selling cars, and he couldn’t think of too many things that were as different from spreading the gospel and sharing Jesus with people as being a used-car salesman, but he’d always been a quick study and a good learner. And Aunt Karen would be happy to see him, unlike pretty much everyone in this town.

He thought about telling his parents. They would believe him, but they would still be sad. Disappointed. Concerned and worried. He definitely didn’t want to worry his parents. He also didn’t want to have to face his siblings. Although he would. His sisters would probably be okay, but his brother was going to laugh at him. His brother had left the faith long ago and thought that everything that Cash was doing was pointless.

Lord, this isn’t going to help Randy at all. I’ve been praying for years that he would come back to You, and this is just going to make him laugh and tell me how much time I wasted serving a God who would allow this kind of thing to happen to me.

Of all the people in his family, Randy was the one who would believe the rumors about him.

Lord, is this Your way of humbling me? Because I can already see that it’s going to take a lot of humility to get through this.

Humility and silence. Because there was no point in defending himself. He couldn’t seem to stop the arguments in his head, the ones that defended his honor and his character and his integrity. He would never do such a thing,never.

Although, the idea that pride goeth before a fall made him reevaluate. Maybe he could have done such a thing. Not that he had, because he hadn’t, but for him to think that he would never, could never, was probably wrong. Anyone could do such a sin if they didn’t have the proper guards in place. That was why he had those guards up. To keep himself from ever stepping off the straight and narrow path. Not just because he wanted to live a righteous life, but because he loved God, loved Him with all his frail, puny, human love he was capable of. It wasn’t nearly like the love that God loved him with. But he wanted to do everything in his power to serve God and bring honor and glory to Him.

Lord, this goes against everything I’ve lived for. You of all beings know my heart and how much I long to live for You. And yes, this is going to make You look bad. Why are You allowing it?

He had no answers.

Chapter 3

“Ijust have this feelingI can’t shake that something’s going to happen.” Ada finished paring the potato and rinsed it underneath the water in the sink before cutting it up into little pieces and putting them in the pot that was heating on the stove in the bunkhouse. The Clybourn family usually had Sunday dinner together, but sometimes by the time they’d done all the chores, gone to church, got home, and finished up anything that they hadn’t gotten done before they went to church and got the food cooked, it was the middle of the afternoon before they finally ate.

“You mean you don’t feel like that all the time?” Lois asked.

Lois was Ada’s youngest sister, and she just recently graduated from college. Ada should have known better than to try to talk to her about it. She was too young, too new to this whole adult thing, to understand that the feeling Ada had was different than anything she felt before.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Priscilla said as she opened up a package of ground beef and dumped it into the skillet that had been heating on the stove. “It’s just that feeling that you need to be ready, because something unexpected, something you couldn’t even imagine could possibly happen, is going to happen.”

Lois just looked confused, but Ada nodded. That was exactly right. Priscilla ought to know. She’d had plenty of those kinds of things happen to her in her life.

Ada’s life had been much different. Boring. All she’d ever done was live at home and work with her family. Most of the time, she knew that was exactly where God wanted her, and she didn’t regret never branching out to do anything else. She knew everyone said that she should travel while she was young before she got married and she should have all these experiences and all that, and she’d just never bought into it.

If God wanted her to have those experiences, she’d have them. But she wasn’t going to live her young adult life for herself, because what was going to happen? All of a sudden one day she was going to wake up and decide that she should use the rest of her life to serve the Lord? And then all of a sudden she was going to be a good servant?

That wasn’t how that happened. It happened one day at a time as she built a life of service and love for God. She couldn’t spend ten years living for herself and then think that she was all of a sudden going to become a great Christian at some random point.

Even Christians she knew had fallen into the trap of the world telling them that they needed to live for themselves and travel and experience things while they were young and put off marriage.

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