The Yada Yada Prayer Group Gets Caught Read Online Free PDF

line. “Even the word makes me want to throw up. That’s how I knew I was pregnant in the first place. Coffee I love. But that was then. This is now. Tea I’ll take. And . . .” She hesitated.When she spoke again, she had lowered her voice. “I could use the company, Jodi. Ben took me to the doctor yesterday. Doc gave the usual song and dance about all the risks of a pregnancy ‘at your age.’ Risks, schmisks. I told him this baby is a miracle! What do I care about risks? But Ben—he thinks I’m dead and in the casket already. All that’s left to do is pick the color of the flowers. Nuts he’s driving me!”
    From the background I heard Ben yell, “I heard that!”
    Ruth never missed a beat. “Sure. Come on over, Jodi.We’ll have a grand time.”
    I hung up the phone gingerly.Wasn’t so sure about that.

3

    A n hour at the Garfields left me as edgy as a Mexican jumping bean. The tension between Ben and Ruth had crackled through the house like a loose livewire. I couldn’t be sure if it was simply fondness disguised as bickering, or if one of them was about to blow a gasket. I wanted to debrief with Denny when I got home but found a note instead saying he’d gone up to Evanston Hospital to visit Mark Smith. Rats. I wished we’d coordinated our “holiday” better. I hadn’t seen Mark (or Nony for that matter) since last Sunday, when a Medicar had showed up at New Morning Christian Church’s new home in the Howard Street shopping center.
    New Morning (Mark and Nony’s church) had been renting space from Uptown Community (our church) while they searched for a new place to worship.The vicious attack on Mark by members of a white supremacist group had forced our two churches—one mostly white, the other mostly black, sharing the same space—to ask some hard questions: Were we going to let the actions of this hate group fan the embers of distrust and division between us? Or would we seize the opportunity to show the world—no, show ourselves —that God’s love and unity were more powerful than Satan’s lies?
    Heady stuff. Of course, none of us knew where this line of thinking would actually take us. But last Sunday, New Morning had invited Uptown to a joint celebration of God’s provision n the large unfinished storefront they’d found. New shopping center. Great location for outreach. Adding to the jubilation had been the startling headlines that same morning: an unnamed “female member” of the Coalition for White Pride and Preservation had fingered those responsible for the attack on Professor Mark Smith. An arrest was “imminent.” I wanted to keep shouting, “Hallelujah! ”
    And then the Medicar had showed up, with a beaming Mark Smith in a wheelchair, still swaddled in bandages from the beating that nearly cost him his life.Didn’t know how Nony talked the doctors into letting Mark out of the hospital for a few hours. But when Nonyameko Sisulu-Smith had wheeled her husband through the double-glass doors—well, that’s when the celebration of God’s goodness really rattled all those plate-glass windows. Probably rattled all the shopkeepers trying to do business in the shopping center that morning too.
    I’d really meant to get up to the hospital this past week to see Mark and Nony, but just getting the teenagers off to Cornerstone fried all my good intentions. Hadn’t even had time to do more than catch the headlines about the arrest of two men identified as White Pride members. But Denny had good news when he got back from the hospital a couple of hours later. “Nony says Mark can come home sometime next week. It’s just . . .” He leaned against the kitchen counter, sweat beading his forehead, sipping the glass of lemonade I handed him. The temperature was hiking up to the high eighties for the weekend. Huh.Wouldn’t want to be