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Pam almost canceled their standing date. She wasn’t sure how she was going to pay for everything, and she really didn’t have money to go out to eat, but she figured she’d talk to her friend about it today. Although so far, they’d talked about Eleanor’s wedding, and how married life had been, and how much Eleanor enjoyed being married.
Pam was over twenty years older than Eleanor, but they had a love of horses in common, and a love of animals in general.
Although Pam was currently animal-less, since her daughters had moved out and taken the pets that they had with them.
Pam thought about getting another one, but...she just hadn’t yet, she supposed.
Maybe she could take in the Great Pyrenees that hung out around town. She hadn’t seen him for a while.
“Do you know what happened to the white dog that used to walk around town?”
“I don’t know. I saw him just before Franklin’s charity gala, and I think I saw him a couple of times over winter, but whoever feeds him maybe took him in for the winter. It was a pretty bad one.”
They had a record amount of snow in February, but the warmth of March had made everything melt. It was still muddy, and the rain that they just had the past couple of days hadn’t helped anything.
It had suited Pam’s mood though.
“We don’t have to do this on Saturdays anymore,” Pam said, looking at her food studiously. She didn’t know how else to break her news.
“We don’t? Is there...something you’re not telling me?” Eleanor asked right away.
“I know Saturdays are often your busiest days, since you have your clients who work during the week bringing their pets in, so it would probably work for you better if we did it on a different day.”
“But Saturday was the only day that works for you because you teach school the rest of the week.” Eleanor paused. “Unless you don’t teach school anymore?”
“I quit. Two days ago.”
“Without a notice or anything?”
“Yeah. They were going to suspend me without pay because I talked to a girl in my classroom who was crying. I told her about Jesus. I got in some big trouble for that, there was a huge backlash, and I just resigned.”
“I’ve heard about some of it, but I guess I’ve been kind of preoccupied with settling into married life. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“I don’t think it’s been in the papers too much. Blueberry Beach isn’t a huge school. Most of the parents are small-town folks with those values, and they would be upset about it. I think this type of thing goes on a lot more than what we’re aware of. It has to. How can Christians teach in the school and not talk about God?” She knew there were still Christians in the school. And she knew there were Christians who followed the rules. But as a Christian, God commanded that they talk about Him. How could they follow God’s commands and still work in an area that didn’t allow them to do that?
She supposed it was a moral dilemma, or maybe something that each individual teacher would have to have an answer for. But it was kind of shocking that in their country, this was what it came to.
She would never have thought that about the United States. Not when she was growing up anyway. Things had changed, a lot. Sometimes she couldn’t believe how much.
She also knew, before she got herself all depressed, that God was in control. And He knew exactly what was going on. Sometimes, when a people was persecuted, they had a tendency to cling more tightly to their faith, to deepen it and to grow it. God knew that too. Maybe that’s what His intent was. Maybe too many people in America had become surface Christians, not really caring about their faith, or about God, or about sharing it. Maybe they needed a little persecution to cause them to dig in deeper and grow.
Whether that was God’s intent or not, that seemed to be happening to her. After all, she had definitely stepped out in faith.
“What are you going to do? You don’t get unemployment when you resign, do you?”
“No. I... I bought the inn.”
“You didn’t!” Eleanor smiled. “You’ve been talking about that for years. I am thrilled for you. Except... It’s going to take a lot of money to fix it up.”
“I know. I’m going to talk to my mom.”
“I’ll pray for you.” Eleanor didn’t have to say any more. Eleanor had met her mom, and typically after her friends met her mom, they tended to avoid her when her mom was around.
Her mom was not the easiest person in the world to get along with.
They talked for a while, with Eleanor sharing all of Pam’s excitement about the potential for the inn. It was a huge job, though, a huge undertaking, and not one that Pam was going to be able to do by herself.
She had talked to Mark about it, since he was pretty handy, and in the winter, he wasn’t very busy. If she spent most of the summer working on it, she knew he’d give her a hand this winter once his landscaping business slowed down. They might be able to have it open next year this time.
