She felt the wickedness of her heart down to her soul and wished there was something that she could do to make herself actually be nice. After all, Roland wasn’t the devil.
Just the closest thing she knew to it.
“Looks like it,” Roland said, shoving his hands in his pockets and smirking at her. “I guess I’ll just let you do what you do best, which is boss everyone around, and I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. Which will be the safest choice.”
“That’s not the way partnership works.”
His brows raised. “Oh?” he said, as though he didn’t know how partnerships were supposed to work.
“Yes. We’re supposed to give our opinions and then talk it out.”
“All right. What’s your opinion on what program we should do?”
“Well, of course we need to do Mary and Joseph. That’s the program that we always do.”
“Yeah, we’ve done that over and over again. Let’s do something different this year.”
“Of course not. Not only are we going to do what the church hastraditionally always done, but we don’t have time to work up anything else.” She felt her voice hitting screech level, and she toned it down. Or at least tried to.
“See? Like I said, I’ll just do whatever you tell me to do.”
“Well, you have to be reasonable. Of course, you can give your opinion, but you just can’t change stuff that has never been changed.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.
Nelly felt herself wanting to back out, but she knew that the church relied on this outreach to bring in people, who might normally not be in church, to hear the gospel story. It brought kids in who might not go to church every Sunday but who came during the Christmas season. It was an important outreach of the church, and she didn’t want to ruin it.
Plus, she was very aware of everyone watching them. Some of them were smiling, almost endearingly, like they remembered their high school rivalry and thought it was cute.
Nelly didn’t think it was cute. It was annoying, as annoying as the man in front of her was.
“I think it’s important that we honor our tradition, but if you have any suggestions, you certainly are welcome to tell them to me.”
“I already did. You shut me down. Let’s just figure out the practice schedule.”
She gritted her teeth. She wanted to argue with him—actually no, she wanted to grab him by the throat and smack his head against the wall, but his mother was standing right there, so she thought she probably ought to restrain herself. Although, the poor woman must be a saint and surely knew what it was like to want to grab a hold of Roland.
Be nice. Just be nice.
She had to remind herself that she was a Christian, and she was supposed to love people. Especially those who were of the household of faith. That included, allegedly, Roland.
Interesting how he brought out her absolute worst side.
After all, she was exceptionally interested in getting children into the church, along with their families, so that they could hear the good news of the gospel. Unfortunately, if she continued to spar with Roland, she would not be a very good example of how the gospel could change a person’s life.
It really had changed hers, just…sometimes she allowed her flesh to take over. Like anytime Roland was around.
Hopefully, her love for the children and her genuine desire to see Jesus be glorified would overcome these fleshly instincts to be unkind and mean to someone who really, probably didn’t deserve it, if she was being honest.
“All right,” she said in a calm tone. “I think we should practice every day of the week and have an extra long practice on Saturdays. I’m sure if we put it to the church, someone will volunteer to make food for us, and we can break on Saturdays to eat and then go back to practicing. If we have that much time, I’m sure we can pull it together beautifully.”
“You want to practice every single day and hours and hours on Saturday? There’s no need for that. We’re just doing the Mary and Joseph thing. Everybody knows how it goes. There are no surprises, and it doesn’t take that much practice.”
She almost smiled, because it sounded like he was irritated. Almost, because she was as irritated as he was and did not feel like smiling. “We’ve got to get it right. This is an important part of the church ministry. People get saved because of this. People have their lives changed because of this program. We can’t be relaxed about it.” What did he not understand about that?
She realized she was getting heated again and could tell from her peripheral vision that people were looking at her.
“We’re not being relaxed about it,” he said, putting air quotes around the word. “We’re just being reasonable. People have a lot of things to do this time of year. They don’t have time to have intensepractices over a church program that isn’t that hard to learn. We don’t have to have people giving up their entire Saturdays, cooking for us, and sacrificing time when they should be spending it together as a family during the Christmas season.”
