“You didn’t know why it was wrong to take the credit for your friend’s recovery, but you didn’t need to. Satan tempted you as he tempted Moses, but in this case you did what Moses didn’t, or couldn’t: first understood, then withstood.”
Now he hung in the black, blind but not deaf, listening for the voice, the one Reverend Gene Martin called the still, small voice of God. Reverend Martin had listened carefully to David’s story not once but many times over the last seven months, and he seemed especially pleased by David’s recounting of how he had felt during the conversation with his parents after he had finished talking with Mr. Ross. “You were completely correct,” Reverend Martin had said. “It wasn’t another voice you heard at the end, especially not the voice of God . . . except in the sense that God always speaks to us through our consciences. Secular people, David, believe that the conscience is only a kind of censor, a place where social sanctions are stored, but in fact it is itself a kind of outsider, often guiding us to good solutions even in situations far beyond our understanding. Do you follow me?”
“I think so.”
“You didn’t know why it was wrong to take the credit for your friend’s recovery, but you didn’t need to. Satan tempted you as he tempted Moses, but in this case you did what Moses didn’t, or couldn’t: first understood, then withstood.”
“What about Moses? What did he do?”
Reverend Martin told him the story of how, when the Israelites he’d led out of Egypt were thirsty, Moses had struck a stone with Aaron’s staff and brought water gushing out of it. And when the Israelites asked to whom their thanks should be directed, Moses said they could thank him. Reverend Martin sipped from a teacup with HAPPY, JOYOUS, AND FREE printed on the side as he told this story, but what was in the cup didn’t exactly smell like tea to David. It smelled more like the whiskey his dad sometimes drank while watching the late news.
“Just one little misstep in a long, hardworking life in the service of the Lord,” Reverend Martin said cheerfully, “but God kept him out of the Promised Land for it. Joshua led em across the river—nasty, ungrateful bunch that they were.”
