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life. How could he win the world for Jesus when he couldn’t even convince a congregation of fifty people to cooperate with each other?
    Each time he accepted a new pastoral call he began his work with enthusiasm and prayerful dreams; each time he boxed up his books and commentaries he vowed that the next church would be different, but it never was. In North Carolina and Georgia and Boston and Vermont, church people were the same . . . and so was he.
    Time and time again, he had failed. The word tasted sour, but at least it was honest. He’d never really been honest with himself until today. He had moved from church to church, not because God had called him to be a leapfrogging servant, but because he had repeatedly grown weary of contention and longed for a clean slate.
    When the notion of leading a stubborn flock became completely unbearable, he retreated into the safety of academia. Teaching was far less stressful than pastoring, and a professor’s job was nine to five, with occasional late hours required for faculty events and grading papers.
    Winslow let his hands fall to his knees as he lowered his gaze to the chilly slab beneath him. A man didn’t often have an opportunity to survey his life from a detached perspective, but his church had given him that opportunity today. When he stared at that portrait in the gilded frame, for the first time he saw the small, weary eyes, the double chin, the uncertain, lopsided smile. The man in that portrait clutched the Bible to his chest as though it were a shield designed to hold life at bay, and his bald head sug- gested aloof intellectualism, a man afraid to risk human contact. Even the cut of his suit seemed unnaturally conservative and restrained.
    He recognized the picture, of course—Edith had obviously given them a copy of the photo he’d had taken in Boston. But the man who filled the Heavenly Daze pulpit each week was the same man, mired in a rut as old as Methuselah.
    Winslow lifted his eyes to the heavens, where night had spread her sable wings over the Atlantic. “What am I to do, God? I don’t like the person I saw in that picture.”
    Far out at sea, bright arteries of lightning pulsed in the swollen sky, followed by a low throb of thunder. Winslow waited a moment, hoping to hear the inner voice that had urged him to action on other occasions of his life, but he heard only the wind, the waves, and the distant sound of approaching rain.
    Why had he come to Heavenly Daze? The question begged an honest answer. The call had come at a time when teaching had grown predictable, and something in his heart had yearned for another chance to prove himself as a pastor. After all, he had gone to seminary in order to shepherd the flock, not teach, and the small congregation of Heavenly Daze seemed like a wonderful opportunity. He wasn’t expecting a group of saints—you could put any two church people in a room and have them emerge an hour later with three different opinions—but he and Edith thought the island would be a safe place to fulfill their call to the pastorate. Perhaps they would even retire there.
    He’d made certain the pulpit committee from Heavenly Daze understood his strengths and weaknesses—he wasn’t the world’s most stirring orator, and he loathed that particularly preacherly habit of ending every other word with an extra “uh” syllable (pick up-uh, your Bible-uh and turn-uh to the Gospel-uh of John-uh), but he was willing and able and faithful. And so, when Olympia and Edmund de Cuvier appeared in his office with a firm offer to pastor the Heavenly Daze Community Church, he had gladly accepted it.
    Another memory flitted through his consciousness. He’d gone to seminary with a talented fellow, Roland Wiggins, who had seemed to have everything a clergyman could want—quickness, charisma, and people skills. When Winslow encountered his first problems with bickering church members, he