Page 46 of Cowboy Falling Hard
After a short text conversation with Daphne, Powell had been given permission and had eagerly gone off to stay overnight with her new friend.
“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll join you. I need to stretch my legs.” Dwight stood from his chair, setting his bowl of snapped beans on the table.
“Of course, I don’t mind.”
If he’d been as funny on their date as he had been sitting at the table with Mrs. Brown, just chatting, cracking jokes, talking about anything and everything, she would have begged him for a second date.
As it was, she was wondering how she could ask him if he might still be interested. Maybe, after he’d gotten to know her, he’d decided that he didn’t want to date after all. That would be the kind of irony that seemed to define her life.
After all, he seemed to be very happy with their agreement to just be friends.
“We won’t be long, and you can text me if you need me,” she said to Mrs. Brown as she walked to the kitchen door.
“Oh goodness, if you guys left right now, you’d still have helped me far more than I deserve. I appreciate it. I’d have been working on beans all week if it weren’t for you.”
“We won’t leave until you’re done. We’ll be back.”
Dwight had said something similar earlier in the afternoon, and Orchid had appreciated it. She didn’t want to start a job and not finish it. Sometimes a person didn’t have a choice, but when she committed to something, she liked to give everything she had and not back out. Not just because it was a part of her personality and a point of integrity, but because she had people who had done that to her before—bailed on her when she was depending on them.
She wanted to be the kind of person that people could depend on, not the kind of person other people were constantly wondering whether she was going to mean what she said or not.
They walked outside, onto the porch and down the steps. The sun was sinking low on the horizon, and it wouldn’t be long until darkness settled down.
They walked toward the barn slowly, silently, just enjoying the glow settling on the horizon and the gentle breeze that drifted across the yard.
Reaching the fence that surrounded the empty corral beside the barn, they stopped, still without saying anything.
Orchid put her forearms on the top rail and rested her foot on the bottom.
Dwight turned toward her, leaning his hip against the post and shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Thanks a lot for staying. I know things didn’t quite go the way we had planned, but...”
“It’s like we took the sermon that was preached this morning and went out and put it directly to use.” There was laughter in his tone, like he’d never done anything like that before.
“Funny how God worked that, wasn’t it?” she said, never putting the two together until he just said something. “I had tucked it away in my mind, because I knew that was something I could use improvement on. I figured I’d think about it some this week and try to figure out what I could do.”
“And you were doing it without even realizing it.”
“Yeah. Not that I want any kind of pats on the back for it. I wasn’t thinking about that. I just saw she needed help, knew we could do it, wanted to talk to you about it.”
“Same with Mr. Brown. Maybe, sometimes doing right is less about deliberately making a plan and carrying out that plan, and more about gathering the knowledge in your head, until what you do naturally is what you should do, because you train your brain to think that way.”
“Wow. That sounds a little bit like modern psychology. But it makes sense. You always hear that the Bible is powerful. When you read it, listen to it, hear it explained, it makes sense that it would change your brain. Change you.”
“Exactly. Change you.”
They were quiet for a bit, and while Orchid didn’t know what Dwight was thinking, she knew she was considering how much she needed to change. How much she wanted to grow. How much she wanted to be better. And so often, she was trying to do as much as she could and was too busy to take time to do more than read a verse or two in her Bible, closing it and running away to do her good works.
“That kind of brings new meaning to the story of Mary and Martha and how Mary sat at Jesus’s feet, and Martha was busy. Maybe Mary ended up accomplishing more because she had trained her brain first before she tried to do anything, while Martha was getting things done but maybe not the way God wanted or not the things God wanted.”
“That’s speculation, but I could agree with that. All throughout Scripture, God is clear that you accomplish more when you wait for Him, as much of a paradox as that is.”
They stood in silence, thinking, but then he continued like he hadn’t stopped. “I suppose it’s a bit of a paradox, too, when you try to promote yourself and you end up doing the exact opposite. You have to wait and let God promote you. And then it means something. But a lot of times, the way He promotes isn’t the way we think it should be done.”
“It’s like God lifting up the humble.”
“That’s right. There’s power in humbleness, because it’s God’s power.”