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T
HE
F
REETHINKERS MEETING
was just getting started when Luke walked in through the back door. He slipped into a seat along the side, halfway toward the front, and slid his backpack under the chair. Then he glanced around. Had to be more than a hundred students packing the room, but Luke wasn’t surprised. Lori had told him the speaker would clear up any lingering doubts he had about her occasional wanderings. The talk today was on “Open Love—Relationships That Work.”

He didn’t want to miss a minute of it.

He opened his notebook and took a pen from his backpack. The speaker looked to be in his thirties, short hair and nice clothes. The look of a company president or a doctor at St. Anne’s. The man’s voice was smooth, his smile cool and confident. Further proof that Lori was right. This way of thinking wasn’t way-out or crazy. It was practical and more common all the time.

No matter what the great Dr. Baxter thought about it.

“Relationships can be painful. How many of you have seen that?” The speaker moved up to the first row of seats and made eye contact with several students.

A few hands lifted, and a general murmuring of agreement passed over the room.

“That’s because too many people work their relationships by the world’s rule book. A rule book of morality and rigidity.” He stopped and lifted his chin. “Freethinking means we take a hard look at a situation, we think outside the box, which lends freedom to all situations.” He paused. “Including love.”

He went on to talk about a relationship he’d had his first year of college. “The two of us were exclusive, playing by somebody else’s rules.” His gaze roamed the audience. “But she met a guy in her biology class, and a week later we had the breakup scene.” He turned and walked to the other end of the room. “Tears and apologies and sadness, all completely unnecessary.”

Luke pictured Reagan. They hadn’t had that scene, but they might as well have.

The speaker stroked his chin. “Now, what if we’d been freethinkers?” He let the idea hang in the room for a moment. “Love wouldn’t be boxed in by a list of archaic rules.”

He asked for two volunteers, then chose a girl and a guy from the middle of the room. When they were up front, he had them face each other and act out a scene like the one he’d just described.

The couple looked uncomfortable at first, but after a few awkward lines, they relaxed. “I met someone,” the girl said. She shrugged for effect and earned a few laughs from across the room.

“Really?” The guy raised his eyebrows. “Someone you like?”

“Yeah. I like him a lot.”

The speaker stepped in and gestured toward the couple. “Work it now; think outside the rules.”

“Okay.” The guy looked to the speaker for encouragement, and then back at the girl. “That’s cool, because there’s a girl in my math class I’ve wanted to hang out with.”

The girl took a step closer and winked. “Maybe we could double-date.”

The students burst into a spontaneous bit of applause and laughter, and the speaker waved the volunteers back to their seats.

He punctuated the air with his finger. “Perfect!” When the laughter died down, he continued. “We laugh because we’re so entrenched in society’s way of thinking.” He spoke with his hands, his eyes wide with conviction. “Freethinking takes time. But doesn’t it make sense in relationships?”

Freethinking makes sense in relationships
. Luke scribbled the words across his pad of paper. Doubts poked pins at his conscience. How had he felt when he found out about Lori’s abortion, that she’d been with another man? Betrayed. Upset to the point of almost leaving her. But since then she’d talked at length about love the same way the speaker was talking now.

Free…open…a way of expressing self through physical intimacy. One person could never be enough for a task that involved. Luke wasn’t sure.

“Think about yourself, your creative inner person.” The speaker’s voice rose. “Could one person really meet those needs, the innate desire within you to share your body with another?” He stopped and raised an eyebrow. “Now don’t mistake what I’m saying for irresponsibility. You owe it to yourself and anyone you share yourself with to use protection. That goes without saying. But within those safety bounds, free love, freethinking is very possible.”

He began to list the reasons why open relationships worked best. Multiple partners increased a person’s ability to make love interesting and satisfying to all partners. With freethinking, guilt and regret and sorrow were eliminated from the formula of love.

“Now tell me that doesn’t sound like a better deal than what the traditional rule book offers.”

Luke felt himself nodding along with the others in the room. This was exactly what Lori had been talking about, and maybe she’d been right. What did it matter if she’d spent an afternoon or an evening with someone else? The experience would make her a better lover, so why should he care?

The speaker stopped in the middle of the room and pointed at them. “Tell me this. If loving one person is right, how can loving
more
than one person be wrong?”

Once more a niggling thought scratched at the door of Luke’s conscience. Something about sexual immorality and God’s plan for love. Luke gritted his teeth, banished the thought, and tuned back in to what the speaker was saying.

“I challenge you to live life on your own terms, not by someone else’s rules.” He made eye contact with a few of them. “Love…life…your bodies. They’re meant to be shared. And a year from now you’ll never have to dread a broken relationship again.”

For a moment Luke tried to imagine what the great Dr. Baxter would think of this speaker. That he was blind, probably. Walking in darkness, ignorant of the truth. Lost. Luke used the end of his pen to scratch the back of his head. How long had it been since he’d seen his father? Two months, maybe? Yes, it’d been that long. For a moment—even though the speaker was going on about his challenge—Luke could do nothing but think about his dad, his mom…his entire family.

Did they miss him? Were they sorry for being so judgmental? for running him off and forcing him to make it on his own? Luke scribbled a series of circles around the holes in his notebook paper. If their faith meant anything, shouldn’t they accept him for who he’d become? not expect him to live life on their terms?

Nothing freethinking about that.

And his dad, of all people, a man with more education than anyone in the family. He should understand the need to challenge life, to find nontraditional answers, to push the envelope on why life existed. His dad’s training was in biology and medicine, after all. Disciplines with provable theories and exact formulas.

How could the man believe God was behind all of life when science had so many answers? A strange ache settled across his chest, and he wished he could see his father again. Just for an evening or an afternoon.

Luke shook his head.
What’s your problem, Baxter? Your old life held no answers; why question the new one?

Return to me, Son. I have loved you with an everlasting love. Return even now.

Luke straightened in his seat and gave a slight shake of his head. Who said that? The words had been whispered, as though someone was standing behind him, leaning close to his ear. He glanced over his shoulder. The student behind him gave him a strange look and focused his attention back on the speaker. Luke slunk down and turned to the front of the room again.

If the kid behind him hadn’t said it, then who?

Back when he’d been duped into believing the whole Christian thing, he’d imagined a voice like that all the time. Daily, even. But it had grown softer with time, and Luke hadn’t heard even a whisper in months. Why would his imagination dredge up such a thing now? at a Freethinkers meeting?

Luke bit the tip of his pen. Probably as a reminder. He would have to attend many more meetings like this one before the habits of his upbringing faded into nothingness and gave him the true freedom he sought.

The speaker was wrapping up, and Luke looked at his watch. Lori was out tonight, studying at the library with some friends. He hesitated and stared at the notes in front of him. Then, in a gradual morphing of grays and blacks and muted colors, the image changed, and it wasn’t notes he was seeing at all, but faces. His father’s…his mother’s. Ashley’s and Kari’s.

Reagan’s.

The ache in his heart worked its way through his body, even to the tips of his fingers. He begged his mind to change channels, think of something else.
Anything
else. But their images remained, and he heard none of the speaker’s concluding remarks.

The images of the people who once made up his world had come more than once, and each time hurt more than the last. At first Luke thought the pain came because the faces of his past made his new lifestyle hard to swallow. But now—in a room full of freethinkers, at a time when he wanted so much to embrace this new way of seeing life—now he understood the ache in his heart.

It wasn’t only that his past flew smack in the face of his present. Rather, his memories gave him the strangest feeling, a feeling he allowed for just a fraction of a second before sending it scurrying back to the cave from which it came: That he wanted to do an about-face, set out at a dead run, straight past the piles of hurt feelings and words he regretted, and on into yesterday.

Before the detours he was taking made it impossible to find his way back.

John was more tired than usual but he couldn’t sleep.

Elizabeth snored softly beside him, so he crept out of bed and made his way down the hallway to the living room and his old blue recliner, the chair where he liked to read his Bible and take in the newspaper on occasional summer mornings. Sometimes, on nights like this, he would settle back in the chair and look straight ahead at the mantel above the fireplace, at the framed senior portraits of his five children.

Brooke…Kari…Ashley…Erin…Luke.

Normally Elizabeth took on the role of family worrier, but tonight John felt uncomfortable in his own skin. The humidity was up, and even his heart beat out of sync.

Ashley was just home from New York, but they hadn’t gotten a chance to talk. When they did, he would have to tell her about the phone call. Some woman from Paris, who’d spoken to him in broken English. She needed to talk to Ashley, and when she learned Ashley wasn’t around, she pressed further. A cell phone or hotel, some other way to reach her. The call was critical. He’d questioned her about the nature of the matter. But the woman hadn’t shared the details other than one: It was critical she talk to Ashley.

He’d planned to tell Ashley the moment she got home. But she’d breezed in earlier today and collected Cole, stopping barely long enough to make small talk. Yes, they’d liked her paintings; yes, they were displayed at a gallery in Manhattan; yes, she’d seen Landon.

Then she thanked him and Elizabeth and left with a round of kisses and promises to come by sometime that week.

John stared at her photo now, the one she’d fought against her last year of high school.

“Come on, Dad, the whole senior portrait thing’s outdated.” She’d rolled her eyes and flopped down on the sofa that still stood next to his recliner. “Can’t you just take any old picture and put it in a frame?”

John and Elizabeth had insisted, and Ashley rose to the occasion. She looked stunning in the picture, her eyes a curious mix of pain and rebellion and the briefest glimmer of hope.

Was it his imagination, or had she been in more than the usual hurry earlier today? His heart told him things she hadn’t. That whatever happened in New York, some of it she hadn’t been willing to share.

His eyes moved to Erin’s picture. Dark-haired with a rounder, plainer face, Erin’s eyes told of her hesitancy, her desire to be accepted. More than the rest, she enjoyed being around family. How well would she do after Labor Day, when she and Sam headed off to Texas? Last fall their marriage had been in trouble, and now, certainly, the greatest tests were ahead. If they’d been able to have a baby, perhaps the move would be easier. At least Erin would have family of her own to take with her.

John studied his youngest daughter’s face.
Lord, give her a child. Please, Father.

Sometimes when he prayed he could practically hear God echoing a reply in his soul. But not tonight. Tonight he felt only the assurance that God had heard him, and somehow, sometime, God would answer.

His eyes rested for a beat on Kari’s photograph. She was well and happy and about to marry a man who had been her heart’s love since the two were teenagers.
Thank you, God. Thank you for delivering her, for redeeming her from the pain of her past.

But what about Brooke?

John looked deep into his oldest daughter’s eyes. She believed now, at least somewhat. She and Peter attended church, which had to be some indication of their changing beliefs. But Brooke and her husband were so private, rarely sharing about the faith that might or might not be going on in their home. And though they were more open to learning about God now, they didn’t seem as close to each other as they’d once been.