Christian fiction audiobook scripts

Dana sat in the hospital parking garage with the engine off and both hands on the wheel. Level three, row G. She had read the sign so many times it had stopped meaning anything. She closed her eyes. "Lord, I don't know how to ask for this. I've asked for parking spots. I've asked for good weather for the church picnic. I've never asked for anything that mattered this much, and I don't know if I'm allowed to be this afraid and still say I trust You. So I'm just going to tell You. I'm scared. He's only nine. And if You could..." She didn't finish. Her phone buzzed on the passenger seat. It was the nurse, and the nurse was saying the word stable.

Four a.m. is the loneliest hour on the ward. The monitors hum and nobody calls my name. I keep a sticky note inside my badge holder. My grandmother wrote it out for me the week I passed my boards. 'He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.' Psalm 121, in her careful King James. I touch it before every door. Tonight I touch it twice.

Emmy Caldwell had promised herself two things when she left Merritt, Georgia. She would never again sit in the second pew of her daddy's church, and she would never again speak to Wade Harlan. It took the town eleven hours to break both promises. The second pew was the only seat left at the Sunday service. And Wade Harlan was the one who slid in beside her, smelling of cut hay and coffee, holding a hymnal open to the wrong page. He leaned over during the second verse. "Welcome home, Em. Your daddy's been praying for this for six years." She kept her eyes on the hymnal. "And you?" He turned to the right page and handed it to her. "Longer."

Eliab the baker had burned two batches that morning, because his mind was not on the ovens. It was on the widow. Everyone in Nain knew her. She had buried her husband four winters ago, and now the bier carried her son, wrapped in linen, out toward the gate. The whole town walked behind it. Eliab walked too, flour still on his sleeves. At the gate they met another crowd coming in. A teacher from Galilee, the people said, and his followers, dusty from the road. The teacher looked at the widow. Eliab would remember that look for the rest of his life. It was not pity. It was the look a man gives his own mother. "Do not weep," the teacher said. Then he touched the bier, and the men carrying it stood still. "Young man, I say to you, arise." And the boy sat up, and began to speak, and Eliab dropped the loaf he had forgotten he was holding.

I went to church for one reason, and it was the coffee. My wife had been going for a year after the layoff, and I had been dropping her off and sitting in the truck. Then it got cold, and they had a coffee urn in the lobby, and the last pew was close to the door. So that was my seat. Last pew, aisle side, coat on. I didn't sing. I didn't close my eyes when they prayed. I watched the clock above the baptismal and drank my coffee. The ninth Sunday, an old man sat down next to me. He didn't say anything during the service. At the end, when everyone stood, he put his hand on my shoulder and kept it there. "I sat right here for three years," he said. "Coffee's better up front." I didn't move up front that week. But I took my coat off.

The church secretary always turned off the sanctuary lights herself. Twenty-two years, every Wednesday, nine o'clock. So when Carol heard the side door click at nine fifteen, she knew it wasn't the pastor. He had gone home with the flu. She stood very still behind the organ. The red exit sign gave the aisle a thin glow. Footsteps. Slow ones. Someone who did not know the building. Her phone was in her purse. Her purse was in the office. The office was past the footsteps. She pressed her back to the cold wood of the organ and moved her lips without a sound. Be my shield. Be my shield. You promised to be my shield. The footsteps stopped at the front row. And then a young voice, cracked and frightened, said, "Is anybody here? I just need somewhere to sleep."

Dear Thomas, The church put your name on the prayer board again this Sunday. Reverend Ames reads it out every week now, right after the hymn, and every week I hold my breath until he says the word 'safe'. Your mother is well. She has knitted you four pairs of socks and swears she will mail them all at once so the Army can't lose any. We sang 'It Is Well' this morning. I couldn't get through the third verse. Mrs. Lindqvist held my hand and sang it for both of us. I pray for you at the window every night, the one that faces east, because that is the way you went. Come home, Thomas. God keep you until you do. Yours, always, June

Day three of giving up sugar for Lent. I have alphabetized the spice rack. I have cleaned behind the refrigerator. I have read the ingredients on every box in the pantry, and I now know that sugar is in my ketchup, my bread, my peanut butter, and, somehow, my salt. I am not doing this well. But every time I want a cookie, I pray instead. And I have never prayed this much in my life.

Ada Stoltzfus had delivered three hundred babies in Lancaster County, and not one of them had waited for good weather. This one was no different. The snow had been falling since noon, and by the time Samuel Beiler's buggy reached her lane, the drifts were up to the horse's knees. "It's Miriam," he said. "It's too early." Ada had her bag in her hand before he finished. The Beiler farmhouse was warm and too quiet. Miriam lay in the back bedroom, pale, her hands knotted in the quilt. Her mother sat beside her with a Bible open on her lap and her lips moving. Ada washed her hands in the basin, slowly, the way she always did. It gave her time to pray. Gott, my hands are old. Make them steady one more time. She knelt by the bed and smiled at Miriam as if it were the most ordinary night in the world. "Now then, liebling," she said. "Let's meet this little one." Near midnight, a thin, furious cry filled the room, and Miriam's mother closed the Bible and wept.

Pastor Reyes asked if I wanted to say something at the funeral, and I said no. Then I stood up anyway. I told them my father fixed things. Lawnmowers. Fences. Other people's marriages, sometimes, over a cup of coffee on the porch. I told them he couldn't carry a tune and sang the loudest in church every Sunday, and that it embarrassed me for twenty years. I told them that the night before he died, he said he wasn't afraid. He said, 'Son, I know exactly where I'm going. I've been reading the map my whole life.' I looked out at the room full of people he had helped. And I said, 'He was right.'

In the city of Tessaly, the lamps had been dark for a hundred years. People said the oil had run out. People said there had never been any oil at all. Oren the watchman didn't argue. He climbed the north tower every night anyway, carrying the old brass lamp his grandfather had carried, and his grandfather's grandfather before that. It was empty. He knew it was empty. He trimmed the wick anyway. On the night of the long frost, a child stood at the bottom of the tower and called up to him. "Why do you keep climbing, if there's no light?" Oren looked down at her. "Because the King said He'd come back at night," he said. "And somebody ought to be watching." When he turned back to the lamp, the wick was burning. Small, and steady, and warm. It was enough.

Lorraine had worked the counter at the Lone Star Diner for nineteen years, and she knew a man who'd hit bottom when she saw one. She set the plate of eggs in front of him and didn't leave. "Mind if I say grace for you, hon?" He looked up, surprised. "Haven't prayed in ten years." She bowed her head. "Then I'll go slow."

The reapers moved through the barley in a line, and Ruth followed far behind them, where the field was already bare. She kept her head down. A Moabite woman in Bethlehem learned quickly to keep her head down. By midday her back ached and her basket held barely enough for one supper, let alone two. Naomi would say it was plenty. Naomi always said it was plenty. Then Ruth noticed something strange. Behind the reapers, in the stubble, there were whole handfuls of grain. Not scattered. Laid down. As if someone had dropped them on purpose. She looked up. The owner of the field stood at the edge of it, talking to his foreman, not looking her way at all. She bent and gathered the handfuls, and for the first time since leaving Moab, she let herself hope.

I have kept the king's lions for twenty-six years. I know their moods better than I know my own wife's. The night they lowered the Hebrew into the pit, I did not sleep. Not for him. For the lions. They had not been fed in two days, by order, and a hungry lion makes a terrible noise. There was no noise. That was what kept me awake. All night, nothing. At dawn the king himself came running down the steps, still in his night robe, shouting the Hebrew's name. And from the pit, calm as a man answering from his own garden, Daniel answered. I looked down. The lions were lying around him like dogs around a fire. I have kept the king's lions for twenty-six years. I have never once seen them that quiet.

Zacchaeus was the richest man in Jericho and the shortest, and on that particular morning only one of those things was a problem. The crowd was ten deep. So the chief tax collector of the whole district hitched up his expensive robe and climbed a sycamore tree. He had just found a good branch when the teacher stopped right underneath it, looked straight up, and called him by name.

The Quaker farmhouse on the Ohio road had a root cellar under the kitchen, and only three people alive knew it was there. Hannah Whitcomb was one of them. She stood at the stove stirring a pot she did not need, because a woman at a stove was ordinary, and tonight she needed to be ordinary. The signal was a hymn. Anyone coming in the dark would hum it at the back door. If she hummed it back, it was safe. Near midnight she heard it. Thin and shaking. 'Steal away, steal away to Jesus.' She hummed it back. She had the trapdoor open and the family below in less than a minute. A mother, a boy, and a baby wrapped in a feed sack. Then lantern light swung across the yard. Horses. Men's voices. Hannah closed the trapdoor, set the braided rug over it, and went back to the stove. When the knock came, she was stirring, and she was praying, and her hand did not shake at all.

Reverend Elias Pike rode a circuit of nine towns across the Kansas prairie, and he preached the same sermon in every one of them. His bishop had written him about it. Twice. Elias wrote back that the sermon was about loving your neighbor, and until one of the nine towns managed it, he didn't see the point in moving on to a new subject. In Coldwater, nobody came. In Medicine Lodge, three people came and one of them was asleep. In Ashland, a rancher threw his Bible into the creek, then waded in after it. But in Protection, a town that had buried its schoolteacher that spring, the whole town came. They sat on wagon beds and fence rails, and when he finished, nobody left. So Elias stayed and preached it again.

October 14th, 1918. We lost eleven today. Sister Agnes says I must stop counting, but I cannot seem to. The ward smells of camphor and the windows are open in the cold, because Doctor Hale believes the air helps. I do not know if it helps. I know it makes the boys shiver. I held Private Ostrowski's hand at four o'clock. He asked me to read to him, so I read the Twenty-third Psalm, because it was the only thing I knew by heart. He said the words with me until he couldn't. I am so tired that my bones hurt. But tonight, the boy in bed nine sat up and asked for soup. Sister Agnes and I stood in the hall and laughed like fools.

I packed three suitcases for a ten-day missions trip to Uganda. Three. One of them was mostly dry shampoo. I thought I was going to help. I had a plan. I had laminated Bible verse cards. On the second day, the church we were visiting threw us a welcome meal. A real one. Chicken, rice, matoke, sodas they must have saved for weeks. The children sang for forty minutes straight and never once looked at a phone. I sat on a wooden bench and realized I had never in my life been welcomed like that. Not at my own church. Not anywhere. Pastor Okello asked me to pray over the meal. I opened my mouth, and nothing came out, so he put his hand on mine and prayed for both of us.

It is two a.m. at my first youth group lock-in. So far, the fire alarm has gone off once, the pizza has run out twice, and a seventh-grader named Tanner has locked himself in the baptistry. I am standing outside the baptistry door, holding a broom, a flashlight and the last slice of pepperoni as a peace offering. Lord, I prayed for a ministry. I did not specify the hours.

We had been on the list for four years, and in four years I had learned to stop running to the phone. So when it rang on a Tuesday, I let it ring twice. Then I heard my husband's voice from the kitchen, and the way he said my name, and I knew. She was born in Tulsa at six in the morning. Seven pounds even. Her birth mother had asked for one thing, and it was that we raise her in church. We drove all night. I don't remember the drive. I remember the hospital vending machine, and the stiff waiting room chairs, and the nurse who finally put her in my arms. My husband looked at me. We had picked a dozen names over four years. 'Hope,' I said. And he nodded, because there had never really been any other.

The water in Miller's Creek was fifty-two degrees in April, and Hank Dobbins knew it, because he'd checked it with a thermometer that morning and almost changed his mind. He was sixty-one years old. He'd been sitting in the back of Shiloh Baptist for thirty of them, telling everybody he'd get around to it. Now the whole congregation lined the bank in lawn chairs, and Pastor Greene stood waist-deep in the current, holding out his hand. Hank waded in. The cold took his breath clean away. 'Hank,' the pastor said, 'is Jesus your Lord?' 'He is,' Hank said, teeth chattering. 'Took me long enough.' When he came up out of the water, the whole bank was on its feet, and his granddaughter was hollering louder than anybody.

Small group met at the Hendersons' on Wednesdays, and the rule was that whoever hosted made the dessert. Karen had made lemon bars. Nobody had touched them yet. They'd gone around the circle with prayer requests. A job interview. A mother-in-law's surgery. Somebody's dog. Then it was Leah's turn. She had her hands wrapped around a mug she wasn't drinking from. 'My husband and I haven't really talked in a year,' she said. 'We just share a calendar. And I've been too ashamed to say it, because everybody here thinks we're fine.' Nobody said anything. The refrigerator hummed. Then Karen got up, crossed the room, and sat down on the arm of Leah's chair. 'Honey,' she said, 'Bill and I were there for three years. Let's pray. Then I'll tell you everything.'

The storm hit Pemaquid Point a little after nine, and by ten the power was out across the whole peninsula. Nell lit the oil lamp in the keeper's cottage and tried not to look at the window. Somewhere out there, Caleb Thorne was bringing his lobster boat in late, the way she had begged him not to. She opened her grandmother's Bible to the page that was already creased. 'He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.' She read it out loud. Then she read it again, louder, over the wind. At eleven, the door banged open. Caleb stood there soaked to the skin, his yellow slicker torn at the shoulder, grinning like a fool. 'Saw your lamp from the channel,' he said. 'Steered by it the whole way in.'

After the Sunday singing, Jonas Lapp offered to drive Katie home in his open buggy, and her sister kicked her under the table until she said yes. It had started to snow. Big, slow flakes. Halfway down the lane, without a word, Jonas reached behind the seat and tucked a wool blanket over her knees. 'Denki,' Katie said, and it came out barely a whisper.

Bishop Amos Fisher had known the decision was coming for six months, ever since his youngest son left the Ordnung and drove away in a borrowed pickup truck. Now the boy was back, standing at the edge of the barn where the families gathered for church, in Englisch clothes, with his hat in his hands. Every eye went to the bishop. Everyone knew the rule. A man who left after baptism was to be shunned until he confessed before the church. Amos stood. His knees ached. He had preached on the prodigal son more times than he could count, and every time he had believed it was about somebody else's boy. He walked across the straw, past the benches, past the silent families, and stopped in front of his son. 'Komm,' he said quietly. 'Your mother kept your plate warm.'

Under Fernhollow Hill there was a kingdom of badgers, and in the kingdom of badgers there was a rule: never, ever dig toward the light. Pip had broken that rule four times before breakfast. 'One of these days,' grumbled Old Brannoch, the keeper of tunnels, 'you'll dig straight into trouble.' But Pip had heard a story. A very old one, told only in whispers. That above the hill there was a King who had once come down into the dark himself, to find the creatures who were lost there. So Pip kept digging. And one morning, with dirt in his whiskers and his paws worn sore, he broke through. Warm light poured down into the tunnel, gold and gentle. And a voice, kind as a summer evening, said, 'There you are. I've been waiting for you.'

The summer I was nine, the last tent revival came through Coffee County, Alabama, and my mama made me go every single night for a week. The tent went up in Earl Tidwell's hayfield. Folding chairs, a plywood stage, sawdust on the ground so your shoes wouldn't sink in the red clay. Electric fans that just pushed the heat around. The preacher was a skinny man named Brother Lyle who sweated through his shirt in the first five minutes and didn't care one bit. I sat in the back with my cousin Dale, throwing sawdust at the girls and counting how many times Brother Lyle said 'hallelujah.' We got to a hundred and four on Tuesday. But on Friday, the last night, the whole tent sang 'I'll Fly Away,' and Miss Ophelia Banks, who was ninety years old and blind, stood up and sang the high part. And I quit counting. And I quit throwing sawdust. And I've been trying to sing it like her ever since.

Chaplain Roy Benning had spent nineteen years walking the cell blocks at Huntsville, and he could tell the men who wanted to talk from the men who wanted him to leave. Marcus Reed wanted him to leave. Had for two years. Roy kept stopping by anyway, every Thursday, same time, same nod. This Thursday, Marcus was sitting on his bunk with an envelope in his hands. It had been opened and read so many times the paper had gone soft. 'My daughter wrote,' Marcus said without looking up. 'First time in eight years.' Roy waited. 'She says she forgives me.' Marcus finally looked at him. 'I don't know how to do that, chaplain. Be forgiven.' Roy pulled the plastic chair over and sat down. 'Nobody does at first,' he said. 'Let's start with reading it to me.'

The man who killed my partner got twenty-five years, and I sat in the second row for every day of the trial. I'd been a cop for fourteen years. I knew how it worked. You do the job, you close the case, you go home and you don't think about it. I thought about it every night. The prison letter came on a Monday. He'd found God, he wrote. He was asking for my forgiveness. I read it standing over the kitchen trash can. I was going to throw it out. Then I remembered my mother, on the porch, the summer I was eleven and furious at my brother. 'How many times, Annie?' she'd asked me. 'Seventy times seven.' I didn't throw it out. I didn't answer it either. But I put it in the drawer where I keep my badge.