Free The Scent of Lilacs by Ann H. Gabhart

the locust blooms, I thought I was going to die. That God had sent me this last blessing, like a gift from home before we got blown out of the water. It was certainly a possibility that night.”
    “And then his hand was on your shoulder. Was it hot? Or cold?” Jocie said.
    “I wouldn’t say hot, or cold either.”
    “It had to be something,” Jocie said.
    “True. Let’s see, how can I describe it? Maybe like a towel you get off the line in the summertime that’s warm from the heat of the sun. Comforting. Perfect. And while it wasn’t heavy, it wasn’t something you could shake off even if you wanted to.”
    That wasn’t a particularly good description, but it seemed to satisfy Jocie.
    “How did you know it was God’s hand?”
    “I really don’t know. I don’t think I did at first. I just knew I wasn’t afraid of dying anymore, that I felt completely different than I had five minutes before.”
    “The peace that passeth understanding,” Aunt Love put in.
    “That must have been it,” David agreed. He remembered thinking that if this was the way it felt to die, then it wasn’t going to be so bad. He’d had regrets. Especially the baby on the way he’d never see. And then the peace had gone deeper into his soul and wiped away even the thought of regret.
    The needle on the sonar screen had been going crazy. The submarine had been bouncing in the waters as the charges went off around them. The man next to him had been trembling as he tried to operate the controls to rotate the sonar, but David hadbeen as calm as if he were drifting along in a rowboat baiting a hook to drop a line down into a sun-dappled stream.
    And then a message had begun flashing on the screen in front of him. “YOU WILL PREACH MY WORD.” All capitals. Dark green one flash. Red the next.
    “I thought maybe I’d lost my mind,” David told Jocie. “We weren’t using that screen, didn’t even have it turned on, and even if it had been operating, it showed echo signals, not words. But there they were. Red and green flashing words. I yelled at the officer in charge to come look. I don’t know what I expected him to see.”
    “Flashing words, I suppose,” Aunt Love said.
    “But he didn’t,” Jocie said.
    “Well, I’ve never been sure. Maybe he did see them and thought he was slipping over the edge. Or maybe he thought the message was for him. I always intended to catch him by himself and ask him straight out sometime, but I didn’t.” David could never decide whether he was afraid the chief officer did see the words or he didn’t.
    “But what happened?” Jocie asked.
    “I came home and started working at the newspaper and preaching.”
    “No, I mean then. The officer came over, didn’t act like he saw any flashing words anywhere, and then what?”
    “The words disappeared. The locust bloom scent was gone. I could smell the guy next to me sweating again. My shoulder felt empty. Really empty. And the sonar showed an enemy ship practically right over top of us. The chief officer sounded the attack alarm, and we went into battle mode and sank the ship.”
    “But you weren’t afraid anymore,” Jocie said.
    “Not of dying,” David said. There had been new things to fear. Having hallucinations. Preaching. Telling Adrienne. And being a light in the crushing blackness that still surrounded them.Knowing people were dying because radio waves had bounced off their ship and showed up on his sonar. It was war. War and death could not be separated.
    He hadn’t wanted to die. He hadn’t wanted to be the reason others died. He hadn’t wanted to preach. Not then. But God had said preach, so what else could he do?

J ocie liked hearing the story of her father’s calling. She knew her father was special, but the fact that God had singled him out just proved it that much more. Of course, her father said everybody was special in God’s eyes, but everybody didn’t have a story to tell like her father’s.
    She talked to God all