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patterns would establish, and familiarity would give space in the work; beginnings are always hectic. She worried sometimes that all her energies could be absorbed by the bigger congregation at Portland Street, leaving Brockhyrst Priory a poor second and Wiles Green to fend for themselves (which is what they were used to).
    As she went to bed at night, in the brief time before she fell asleep exhausted, Esme whispered to herself, “Don’t panic, Es,” and felt guilty that she was too tired to pray.

Two
    T he next eighteen months went by so swiftly for Esme. The ancient seasons of the liturgical year, with its balance of fasts and feasts resting lightly on older pagan foundations, wove in with the slightly different rhythms and observances of the Methodist calendar. In her new pastoral appointment, she went softly with the inevitable changes her personality brought.
    She had been asked at her first interview with the circuit stewards: “What will you do for the young people? What will you do to involve the Sunday school in worship? What will you do to improve the profile of the church in the community? What will you do about the falling numbers at Wiles Green?”
    Her answer to all those questions had been, “Nothing. I will watch, and wait, and listen. Nothing for a year, at the very least. Then, when I have seen enough to understand, where change seems helpful, it can begin. But at first, nothing. Until they trust me. Let them get familiar with the sound of my voice.”
    One of the strangest and most surprising things to Esme in her first probationer appointment had been the unsettling accuracy of the simile describing a congregation and their pastor as sheep and shepherd. The relationship centers in the voice of the shepherd. “My sheep know my voice,” Jesus had said once, long ago, and Esme had grown up thinking that to be a reference to spiritual call, but she had found it in practice to be simpler and more basic than that. When a faith community comes to know and trust a leader, that leader’s voice can bring them to peace. As the pastor’s voice opens the worship of the community, the trust implicit in the relationship gathers the people of God into one, so that their prayer and praise arises in one peaceful drift of incense smoke finding its way to heaven.
    In her first year and a half with her new congregations, already there had been the usual trickle of domestic tragedies and small emergencies. A troubled mother had poured out to Esme her concerns about a child truanting from school and making friends on the fringes of the drug world. There had been two bereavements in Portland Street families—one SIDS—and one of her Brockhyrst Priory pastoral visitors had died after a very swift illness. At Wiles Green a much-loved member of the congregation in her nineties had been diagnosed with cancer—Gladys Taylor, a sweet and gentle white-haired lady who hosted the Bible study in her small room in the almshouses by St. Raphaels Church. Gladys, unfailingly kind and understanding, restored Esme’s faith in old ladies; it was with a pang of real sadness that she heard of the diagnosis. As Esme spent time with these and others passing through trouble and anxiety, word went around that when they needed her she came. She chaired her business meetings with competence, insisting that they close no later than half-past nine—well, twenty minutes to ten if “Any Other Business” turned out heated. Her stewards in all three chapels worked well with her, and all her pastoral visitors did their work with diligence. The usual cold wars and simmering feuds seemed temporarily dormant: After eighteen months Esme relaxed enough to consider her own life beyond the occasional visit to her mother or day off window-shopping and enjoying a cappuccino in Brockhyrst Priory.
    Her minister’s diary was printed to span well beyond a year, and though she had begun her new one in