Chapter 1 | Unfit Heroes
Included in the holy volumes of the Old Testament, between the chronicles of the kings and the alarums of the prophets, in a book of sayings recorded by men of ages past for the men of ages to come, there are a fair number of proverbs about the misery of living with a quarrelsome woman, and even more proverbs about the splendor of living with a virtuous one.
The great poetic climax of the book of Proverbs is a portrait of a woman so virtuous and so captivating, that the chapter number has come to be used as a shorthand compliment for notable wives. She’s a real Proverbs thirty-one woman, say all the church-going husbands, and it’s a very big compliment indeed.
The problem for Abigail Murdy, a thirty-three year old secretary who works for Grace Tabernacle Church, is that the woman in Proverbs 31, whoever she was, set the bar a little high.
That virtuous wife of some three thousand years ago brought food to her family from afar, like a merchant ship. She made her own clothes from purple silk. She opened her mouth and wisdom came forth. She rose in the dark, spun her own wool, wove her own tapestries, fed her kids, fed her husband, fed the poor, bought a field, planted a vineyard, and turned a good profit. Then after lunch, she really got busy.
Apart from wearing purple, Abby doesn’t do any of those things. Once a week, when her husband isn’t working a night shift, she cooks dinner—if using a can opener can be called cooking. She can’t produce wool or wine, and if the past is anything to go on, she can’t even produce children.
She is, however, an excellent secretary. Abby’s boss, Big Dave Wright, the founder and pastor of Grace Tabernacle, says that her two best qualities are diligence and a surefire memory. Sometimes Big Dave will ask for information he doesn’t even need, so he can watch his secretary serve up Bible verses at the same speed as the electricity moving through her brain. She’s a walking concordance, that girl.
At 8:47 on a Friday night, Abby closes the church door quietly behind her. Outside, the night is warm and cicadas are pounding out their washboard song like a middle school band, making up in passion what they lack in coordination.
Abby told the church elders that she needed to use the ladies’ room but what she really needed was a break from the board meeting, where sparks are flying over an alarming decline in weekly offerings.
She takes a seat on concrete stairs near the flagpole, and her skirt spills over the step on both sides. The skirt was roomy when she bought it last fall, but now it’s a size too small. She tugs the zipper down in back and covers the gap by untucking her floral blouse.
Even when Abby weighed less, she wasn’t what anyone would call attractive. She was born with a head of electrified brown frizz and feet that splayed out when she walked—duck feet the boys said. Abby Murdy started as an ugly duckling and never became anything else.
Abby is carrying a mini apple pie in her right pocket—actually she’s carrying four mini apple pies in her right pocket—which are packaged in noisy green wrappers that rattle every time she moves. At Bickern’s Market she can buy six pies for $2.50, so she buys a dozen at a time, and she can’t look the cashier boy in the face.
Abby tears a wrapper open and the first mouthful of sugar is calming, pleasurable, a magic carpet.
She would like to have eaten dinner with the elders earlier, when they sent her downtown to fetch a pile of orders from Frankie’s Italian Restaurant. The owner, Francesco Capone, is one of the elders embroiled in the board meeting right now, and he offers the church a fellowship discount.
Picking up orders from Frankie’s is torturous, because they aren’t just Italian take out, they’re Italian opera on a styrofoam stage, with cruel ingredients like pancetta, mascarpone, and bucatini. When Abby loaded the containers in her car, she wanted nothing more than to find a fork and work her way through a slab of lasagna. But her husband, Fielder, would be hurt if she didn’t wait to eat with him at home, because Friday is the only night of the week when he doesn’t work.
Fielder isn’t thrilled that the open-ended elders’ meetings fall on one of their Friday date nights—kingdom business or not—and he’s probably already watching the clock at home. It has occurred to Abby that Fielder wouldn’t know if she ate two dinners, but if for some unimaginable reason her boss mentioned how much she liked Frankie’s meatballs, her shame would be unbearable.
It feels good to sit outside for a few minutes. Black clouds have swollen over the last purple streaks of dusk like an ominous dough, and Abby watches an uneasy wind hassle a pair of elm trees under a street light across the road. Abby has always loved summer storms, the building tension and imminent outburst. They make her feel like something is about to change.
The entrance to Abby’s church is on the broad side of a brick building that was once Natagwa Junior High School. It’s a stern building, ornamented only with a brick chimney and an impossibly tall concrete entrance, which holds the front doors and a few miles of shoebox windows.
Above Abby’s head, a super-sized American flag is snapping out a warning about the coming storm, and beyond her steps lies a scored parking lot and then a four-lane road. A strip mall stretches along the other side, made of the usual mix-and-match components: dry cleaning, pizza, nails, cell phones, liquor, payday loans, tanning, and Chinese. The mall is called Eastfield and it was built over the grassy East Field long after her church bought the junior high building from the city of Natagwa.
Natagwa, Colorado is a classic American story: birthed by the railroad, nourished by uranium and molybdenum mines, inflated like a wind sock by the 1980’s manufacturing boom, and then snuffed out by a corporate exodus for promised lands flowing with cheap labor and tax havens, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
At its zenith, the city had upwards of 70,000 residents. But by the turn of the millennium, entire developments had been abandoned. When the housing market popped in ‘07, vacancies in the city hit an all time high, and less than a year after the big banks were bailed out, half of Natagwa’s homes were for sale, foreclosed, or lumbering toward a new trailer park.
In response, the city council launched a fervent campaign to promote tourism and printed 1000 glossy, hand-drawn maps. 842 maps are still in a box at City Hall. 13 are in a brochure rack at the Bobcat Motel, and another 77 have been used by the motel’s proprietor to cut cocaine. The illustrated map features Natagwa’s art deco hotel, colonial town hall, gold rush saloon, Bauhaus library, golf course, and roller rink.
Despite a century of epic expansion and contraction, Natagwa’s downtown hasn’t changed much. Several blocks of historic buildings are still tall and fine with stone window aprons and chiseled cornices. Most are also engraved with the cryptic symbols of the Lumines who built them—a once local mafia of carpenters and craftsmen similar to Freemasons.
The rest of the city is a meld of midwest and southwest, urban decay and country kitsch, sprawling adobe and low rent towers.
More than anything else, though, Natagwa is a citadel of Christian faith.
Much like its bigger sister, Colorado Springs, Natagwa used to be a town of blue collar workers and oddsters who felt more at home in the feral west than they did in a traditional city. In the 1980s, a minister named Ted Haggard moved to Colorado Springs, a town he described as a pastor’s graveyard, full of new-agers and satanists. By 2005, Haggard was pastoring a church with 11,000 members, and presiding over the National Association of Evangelicals.
Megachurches bloomed in the suburbs and tangential family ministries produced best-selling books followed by best-selling television networks. Colorado Springs became the beating heart of evangelical America.
The city of Natagwa was like a coal knocked out of that fire. Three years after Ted Haggard arrived in Colorado Springs, a movement called The New Ark sent a delegation, led by Big Dave Wright, to Natagwa to start Grace Tabernacle Church.
Some years later, Grace Tabernacle acquired the junior high building because it was cheap and had been constructed—by unanimous decision of the city council—in the shape of a cross. An octagonal corridor intersecting the four arms of the building was built to give students a warm walkway in snowy weather, and to symbolize eternity (which was approximately how long a school day lasted).
At the heart of the cross stood an octagonal auditorium, which was perfect for Grace Tabernacle’s sanctuary. When the church moved in, Big Dave hung an aerial photo on his office wall and there it still remains, the school-turned-church at the edge of a forest and the edge of a town, looking like a Celtic cross with a gymnasium-shaped goiter.
The sound of male voices in sharp conflict echoes from the open window of an old teacher’s lounge where the elder board is gathered, and it reminds Abby that she needs to get back to work. Every last Friday of the month, the nine elders of Grace Tabernacle meet with Big Dave to pray, troubleshoot, consider finances, and carry on the age-old theological debate known as Broncos versus Cowboys.
Abby is the only woman in the room when the elder board meets, because the New Testament is clear that only married men with obedient children are eligible for eldership. Her role is to help with dinner, coffee, clean up, and any last-minute admin needs—a role she performs with honor.
Abby was three when she learned to read, and every day since then she’s read the Bible—not just in English, but eventually in original Hebrew and Greek. The thing that still surprises her about the heroes of the Bible, is that they’re completely unfit. They’re all reluctant. Distracted. Frail. The wrong race. The wrong class. God picks absurd characters and shapes history with them.
It was something that Jesus said, too—roughly—that billionaires might be first in line for a Mars expedition or deep-water submarine, they might be able to buy laws and justice, but they almost never get into God’s kingdom.
CEOs and community pillars are also not at the top of God’s list and neither are pastors. In reality, working girls and thieves are first. Because the kingdom is for those who know they need it. God has always picked unexpected people, and He always will.
Abby’s job might be a backstage one, but her work is vital to the church—and the church’s work is vital to the city. Not everyone has a job that touches eternity.
And truly, she doesn’t mind that eternity looks like dry erase markers, lithium batteries, and mild salsa. She just wishes that on the last Friday of the month, eternity would let her go home at a set time.
Suddenly, by some collective decision, the cicadas begin to rub their timbals in unison and the chorus demands her attention. Disorganized clamor settles into a single ringing chant, which travels the heavily charged air in every direction. The trees and the night pulse louder and louder, and the static of arguing voices from the lounge is swallowed up. Abby closes her eyes for a moment.
When the song recedes, she inhales, crumples all four empty pie wrappers and repockets the evidence. She can’t throw four green wrappers in the lounge trash like a public confession, so she’ll toss them in a bin in the restroom later.
For a moment Abby pauses with her fingers on the door handle to collect herself. It wasn’t just the tension between elders that sent her outside, it was also the worry that she was about to say something inappropriate.
She’s been sitting on a piece of possibly saving information for two months now. It only took a single afternoon of research into the operations of America’s megachurches to discover a giving method that might improve Grace Tabernacle’s finances. But Abby isn’t an elder, anointed by God, and she’s not even a man, so she really has no business offering opinions in a board meeting. Even in regular companies, secretaries don’t walk around dishing advice over the shoulders of board members while they pour coffee.
Abby wipes her mouth in case of crumbs, and enters the former lounge where ten men are seated at two narrow tables pushed into a square. The lounge itself is made of two rooms and two tile patterns stitched together—blue and white checkers on one half, freckled avocado on the other.
Most of Abby’s tasks for the board are done in a kitchenette on the north end that includes a bank of pine cabinets with a sink, and a pale yellow fridge that’s perennially empty. The youth of Grace Tabernacle, like church youth everywhere, are a roving cloud of locusts with underdeveloped brains and peak metabolisms. The only snacks that endure in the building are whole wheat biscuits and discount cola.
“Perfect timin’, Abigail.” Big Dave spots his right-hand girl in the doorway. Grace Tabernacle has four secretaries, but Abby is his executive assistant, and responsible for the others. She doesn’t ask them to stay for the elder meetings because they have children.
Big Dave is hunting for something in a pile of folders. “Put a fresh pot of coffee on, darlin’,” he tells Abby, “we’re gonna be a while.”
“Twelve percent is not insignificant,” Don Bush, president of Bedrock Bank, tells the other elders.
“No,” says Borys Majewski, who manages a shipping depot and views the world over an armory of cheekbones, “but giving always falls in the summer, vacations and whatnot.”
“It doesn’t fall twelve percent,” argues Don, plumbing his coffee with a petite spoon. Despite his fancy job—and maybe because of it—the bank president seems vaguely wrong to people in town. He has the long fingers and melancholy of an aristocrat, and an outbreak of European labels in his intimates drawer. At Friday gatherings and in meetings of every kind, Don comports himself with a deference that looks soft to a western town. And to his wife.
But when it comes to Don’s realm of ledgers and balances, he’s a scalpel. “It doesn’t make sense,” he insists. “Giving shouldn’t fall if attendance is up. We’ve never had a summer this lean.”
Abby pivots open the coffeemaker’s reservoir and her research presses at the back of her lips, just like it did during the last meeting and the meeting before, but even the temptation to interrupt the men makes her heart race.
“Maybe, they’re givin’ less,” replies Borys. “Times are hard.”
“Maybe, we should make it easier…” Abby turns to the elder board with an empty coffee pot in one hand, finding herself over an invisible line.
All ten faces swivel toward her and she’s paralyzed in the glare of their surprise. She plunges her free hand into the pie-wrapper pocket. “Maybe, we should make it easier for people to give,” she finishes.
Some of the elders are amused and others troubled. Borys’s eyes become black dashes.
“Who knew?” Jokes Clay Burnett. “She can talk.”
“Well, she’s right,” says Don.
“Well, she ain’t an elder,” counters Borys.
Big Dave’s face is implacable, but there’s an unsettling lift to his brows. “Go on ahead there, Abby. You got somethin’ to say, say it. We’re waitin’.”
