The Record Keeper (Murphy Shepherd, #3)

by Charles Martin

I, as much as anyone, knew that hope is what feeds us. It’s the currency of mankind. The fuel of the soul. Without it, we wither and die.

Their scars were no longer symbols of shame but signs of survival. I made it. I’m alive. Chins once resting on chests were now lifted high.

Bones taught me that when a kernel of wheat falls to the ground, it dies alone. But if it is buried, watered, and fertilized, it puts down roots, spirals toward the sun, blossoms, and produces fruit. And what comes up is never the same as what was buried. It’s exponentially more.

Each of us walked in with a singular need: to be known. I used to think the need ended there. Repair the tear and fix the person. Wrong. What I saw happening across the streets of Freetown, from fashion to dance to photography, convinced me there is one need deeper. To be accepted in the knowing. Maybe that’s rescue.

The light shone on his back and lit the many scars spread across his skin. A few years before he’d found me in Jack’s troller, he’d been carrying a young girl to a helicopter when someone shot him in the back. The buckshot pellets produced fourteen holes, a collapsed lung, the loss of about half his blood, and six hours of surgery. The years since had produced several other holes and one long scar under his right rib cage where he’d encountered a knife in close quarters. His back was a road map of rescue.

I was caught between a love I’d never known before and a need I could not deny. When she spoke, her lip was trembling

“I know . . . this is the price I pay to love you. But . . .” She shook her head, speaking as much to my heart as my ears. “You are my one . . . and you outweigh the needs of all the rest.” Oh, how I love this woman.

We didn’t know who we were, and more importantly, we didn’t know whose we were—forever proving that identity precedes purpose. You can’t know who you are until you’ve settled whose you are.

Before you’re rescued, you first have to be lost, and to be lost you have to be someone. Otherwise, what’s lost? It’s an age-old tactic. Hitler did the same with the Jews. We had become ‘unborn.’

This is going to catch you off guard, but I’m asking you to dig down into that love of yours one more time and do something for me. It’s a big ask. I know. But one thing I’ve noticed about you—as the number of people you carry has grown, your shoulders have only broadened, and your heart . . . well, it’s bottomless.

Whose you are matters more to the soul than who you are or what you are.

People in darkness don’t know they’re in darkness because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s their world. They navigate primarily by bumping off things that are stronger. Immovable. They don’t know darkness is darkness until someone turns on a light. Only then does the darkness roll back like a scroll. It has to. Darkness can’t stand light. And it hasn’t. Not since God spoke it into existence.

Those of us who walk in the light grow weary. Our hope wanes. Fades. Darkness rages and threatens to drown us. We look around and wonder what happened. Where’d it go? Where’s the light?

“When light walks into a room, the darkness rolls back like a scroll. It has to. Darkness can’t stand light. And while we live it in real time, it happens too fast, so we watch it in memory. To know the joy, we shut our eyes and remember having seen it.”

Wanting justice, I’d kept a record of wrongs. Payment to be exacted from the guilty. On my terms. It fueled and justified my need for revenge. Bones? Bones kept a record of hope imprinted on his heart.

Sometimes, given their depth, we become little more than the sum of our wounds, and it takes someone else to see what we can be instead of what we are.