Excerpt: May Love Surround You Always

"It feels great to be home for the holidays," sighed Luke Painter with contentment, as he did at this time every year.

"Yes, but which home?" laughed his best friend, Derek Knight. "You've had three already. I've only ever had one!"

"Make that four," Luke quibbled. "I was born in San Francisco, I spent four years with you at Patmos Divinity School, then lived here in Magna for a spell, and finally moved to Vermont."

"You'll always have a place here with us, if you ever decide to come home for good," Derek's wife Hope offered generousy, as she dandled her twin sons, Ben and Sam, on her lap.

Luke's wife Teresa had her own hands full with two-year-old Jonah, but she didn't want to be left out of the conversation. "I think we've finally settled down," she smiled, "which is more than I can say for Jonah at the moment."

The two couples and their three toddlers made a pretty tableau indeed, seated by a cosy fireplace at the manse adjoining Gethsemane Church. Draped in sweeping loops across the mantelpiece, garlands of holly and cranberries reflected the ruddy glow of the hearth. The brightness of the flickering flames glinted and gleamed off highly polished brass candlesticks.

The wintry world outside was cold and icy, but added in its own way to the lingering jollity and merriment of the day after Christmas. The full moon illuminated the gently rolling hills of Vista Vale like an enormous floodlight. December winds sifted the snow on the lawn, scooped it up like cupsful of powdery confectionery sugar, and dusted it all over the clear, brittle windowpanes. There, as if the windows had been encrusted with glittering fine-cut diamonds, frost formed a tracery of feathery ferns, the only vegetation other than dark, aromatic conifers to be seen at this time of year.

In short, both within and without, the room was filled to overflowing with light and warmth, joy and laughter, love and friendship.

But the moon, the hearth, and the candles cast shadows too. "Does anybody else notice them?" Luke wondered. "Or am I the only one? Do the shadows loom larger for me because of the darkness that still shrouds the depths of my heart?"