Mercy Creek When Grace Sat in the Last Row
Chapter 1: The Pew Nobody Wanted to Talk About Grace Bennett sat in her car outside Mercy Creek Community Church with one hand still wrapped around the steering wheel and the other resting on the little stack of unpaid bills she had shoved into her purse before leaving the diner. She had not meant to bring them to church. She had meant to leave them on the kitchen table, beside Lily’s cereal bowl and the coffee mug she never finished, but worry has a way of following a person even into holy places. That is why the Mercy Creek Day 4 YouTube story about the empty chair in the back pew matters so much, because sometimes the most important spiritual lesson is not learned by the person standing at the front of the room, but by the person wondering if they still belong inside it. Grace had spent the last few days watching Jesus walk through ordinary places in town, through a grocery line, through old family anger, through rain-soaked fear, and through the kind of weariness that makes ...