A Distant Shore by Karen Kingsbury (books for students to read .txt) 📕

the better. The lake trail was one of the most difficult Jack had ridden, and he attacked it each time, flying along the edges of cliffs and powering up steep hills with no care for his safety.

That Thursday Jack left the condo early and rode the bike to the trailhead. He had planned to cover the whole thing, push through the narrow, tougher areas the way he needed to work through the roadblocks in his life.

One mile had led to another and another, and Jack didn’t stop for anything. He forced the bike down craggy sections of rock and along cliffs that seemed barely wide enough to hold a bike and rider. In some ways, the trail reminded him of the Cliffs of Moher, which he’d walked once on a mission in Ireland.

The faster Jack rode that day, the more he became lost in a world all his own. Like he wasn’t really in Texas at all. At first he couldn’t ride fast enough to escape the problems plaguing him. Then, one at a time, the questions began to catch up. Questions were good things, his dad had always told him.

Because the answers wouldn’t be far behind.

Why didn’t he care if he lived? Was that how his family would’ve wanted him to treat life? And how about love? Did he really want to spend his days alone? What about Eliza? Who was going to care for her? Love her? And of course the greatest question of all—was God real and if so, why had He taken Jack’s family?

The questions ran on repeat in his mind. The harder he pushed himself—the more he asked of the bike and his lungs—the louder the questions grew until suddenly he turned a corner on the trail and came to a clearing.

Easily the prettiest spot on Lake Grapevine.

His sides heaved. Jack walked the bike up the grassy hill till he reached the top. There he laid the bike down and he sat on a flat rock, and all at once he saw his whole life play out before him. The Christmas mornings and summers in Belize, the conversations around the dinner table and the way his busy parents had spent more time with him after Shane died.

Like he was watching an actual movie, Jack could see every detail.

And then he heard the voice. A voice he hadn’t heard since he was a boy.

Jack, I have loved you with an everlasting love. I still love you.

So clear and crisp were the words, Jack stood and jerked his head one way, then the other. He put his hand on his waistband, ready to draw his gun. But there was no one else on the hilltop. The trail was quiet today. Jack had only seen a few hikers the entire morning.

He dropped slowly to the rock again. “God… is that You?”

A warm wind came up off the water and washed over him. I know the plans I have for you, Jack. Plans to give you a hope and a future… and not to harm you.

Agents didn’t cry. That was a rule Jack had set for himself when he began working for the FBI. He wouldn’t let himself linger in sadness over losing Shane or his parents. And so his heart and mind and soul had become a computer. A machine capable of great heroism and unmatched courage and physical strength.

But along the way he had trained himself not to feel sadness.

Until that moment on the hill.

Tears welled in his eyes. “You love me?” Jack spoke the words into the wind. “You took my family!”

There was no answer, no voice in the breeze. But a story came to Jack, one his mother used to tell him and Shane when they were little. Before they went to school each morning.

“A boy makes his plans,” she would say, a hand on each of their small shoulders. “But God ordains his steps.”

At first Jack hadn’t understood why his mother had quoted that Bible verse. But in time the words made sense. The people of God ought not write their to-do lists with indelible ink, but rather with the faintest pencil. Because in the end, God would have the final say about a person’s story.

“This world is not our home,” their father had told Jack after they buried Shane. “God decides the number of our days. The miracle is in having had Shane at all. Every day of his life was a gift, a blessing from God.”

And there were other reminders. His mother would tell him that he was the clay and God the potter. “He will make of your days what He wants. So long as you keep loving, Jack. Love God. Love people. Don’t ever stop loving.”

Her words had filled his heart on that lonely hilltop, and he closed his eyes. Love God. Love people. Jack was very good at his job. But he had long since stopped doing either of those things. He hadn’t loved God and he certainly hadn’t loved people. Not when they could be gone in a single undertow or the instant detonation of a roadside bomb.

There on that flat rock overlooking Lake Grapevine, everything his parents had ever told him, everything he’d ever read in the Bible, all of it landed on him again, with crystal clarity. And he understood something he hadn’t before.

While he had used his life with the FBI for good work, he had missed out on really living.

Tears stung his eyes. “Good plans… even now, Lord? I’m supposed to believe that?”

And then the strangest thing had happened. As if out of thin air, a man had appeared on the trail below. He stopped when he saw Jack and then he made his way up to the top. The guy was young, black and athletic with pale brown eyes that had seemed the very definition of peace.

“Hey,” the guy said. “Can I join you?”

Jack felt himself tense up. He squinted at the man, every instinct on high alert. Had he been trailing Jack?