Read The Visitation for Free Online Page B

bouncing his theories off me. “He said he was coming here to visit friends. What friends? Who else are they going to play tricks on?” He sniffed in frustration. “You see the problem I’m up against? This whole thing is so religious, it’s not going to look good for a cop to be poking around interfering.”
    Finally I thought of something worthwhile to say. “Brett, I understand the Antioch Ministerial is meeting tomorrow morning to talk about all this. Since it’s a religious thing, if anyone is going to know the latest details, the ministers will. Maybe you ought to drop in and find out how extensive this stuff is and if anyone else has seen either one of these . . . whatever they are.”
    “Are you going?”
    God works in wondrous ways. “Yeah, I’ll be there.”
    I called Kyle when I got home, told him I would go with him to the ministerial meeting, then braced myself. To his credit, he didn’t gush all over me as I feared he would. After four months, he was starting to learn.
    IMAGINE A TIRED OLD DOG, lying in the road, suddenly finding itself wrapped around the axle of a speeding truck. That’s how I felt my first five minutes with Kyle Sherman. I was tired and feeling old, I hadn’t shaved, the place was a mess, I was planning on a quiet session of journaling. And suddenly, there he was.
    “Praise God, brother! I’m Kyle Sherman! Just came by to share the love of the Lord!”
    His greeting had the same effect on me as that soup kettle they used to bang on to wake us up at summer camp. He was standing on my front porch in brown slacks, tan sport jacket, blue shirt, and Looney Tunes tie, and had a big, gold-edged Bible in his hand. His brown hair was slick with mousse, he was grinning like a Cheshire cat, and he was in high gear.
    I knew he wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness; they always travel in twos and compliment you on your house.
    He couldn’t be a tax assessor because he wasn’t carrying a clipboard with the plot plan on it.
    He wasn’t a salesman because he carried no samples.
    But like all three, he hadn’t called first. He just showed up. I wanted to kill whoever told him where I lived.
    “You’re the new pastor?” I asked. I wasn’t curious. I was amazed.
    “Guilty as charged, brother!” He was so jubilant, so on top of it, so young.
    I let him in because it was the right thing to do and invited him to have a seat wherever he could find one. He stepped around the model airplane I was working on, dug a man-sized space in the magazines and newspapers that covered the couch, and had a seat.
    “Nice place you have here.”
    I’d left the pastorate a month before and had not returned to Antioch Mission since. Call me picky, call me a grouch, but I expected Kyle Sherman to know there had to be a reason. The moment he opened his mouth I knew he didn’t have a clue.
    When I ate dinner at Judy’s, nobody I met there talked about church. We talked about fishing, baseball, country music, cars and trucks, and the condition of the roads. We argued about politics and local issues. We even talked about religion and spiritual matters, which I didn’t mind, not at all.
    But we did not talk about Sunday school attendance, the church van, the outreach program, or the Blessing Barrel. We didn’t haggle over the Sunday morning song list or whose job it was to change the sheets in the nursery. We didn’t talk about the budget and the offerings or the need for an ongoing children’s ministry, or whether we should allow Dee Baylor to fall on the floor every time we prayed for her. Potlucks and men’s fellowships and ladies’ Bible studies and the struggling youth program never came up.
    But Kyle started right in talking about all that stuff as if I’d asked him for an update. I wouldn’t go near the church, so he brought it to me. “The youth group’s going to have a lock-in this weekend/Dave White and Brother Norheim showed up for men’s prayer breakfast. Is it always just those two?/I’m