Free Return to Me by Lynn Austin Page B

and if you repeat it often enough, you might create ugliness orfoolishness in that person. You praise them for their goodness or kindness, and your words just might create even more kindness in that person. We must be careful to speak words of life.”
    A few minutes later they reached the gate to their house. Iddo thought of his sons, how convinced they had been that the prophets’ words weren’t true, convinced that their people would never return from captivity. He wondered if their words of unbelief would now have power over them. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted the prophecies to be true because they didn’t want to return. And as unimaginable as it was to Iddo, he wondered if his sons would fulfill their own words of unbelief and refuse to walk through the door that the Holy One had so miraculously opened.

Chapter
6
    D inah lifted her water jar onto her head and made her way to the community well. Time was passing much too quickly. Ever since King Cyrus made his proclamation, the weeks had raced by like fire through straw. On the surface, her life continued the same as always as she cared for her home and her family. But an undercurrent of change crackled beneath each day, slowly growing into an inferno that threatened to consume the life she knew and loved. Dread of the future robbed Dinah of the present, as if she knew the precise hour of her death and watched time speed toward that date.
    Her friends and neighbors already stood laughing and gossiping around the well when she arrived. “Dinah! We’ve been waiting for you,” her cousin Shoshanna said. “We want to hear all about your plans for returning to Jerusalem. Aren’t you excited?”
    Dinah lowered the rope and bucket into the well shaft, as careful with her task as with putting her feelings into words. The other women looked up to her, respected her, but the truth was, Dinah didn’t want to leave Babylon. Every day she searched for a way to talk Iddo out of going. But she didn’t dare admit in public that she disagreed with her husband. “Iddo is doingall the planning,” she said as she drew the bucket to the surface again. “He said the journey would take at least three months. I can’t imagine such a long, exhausting trip, can you? It seems impossible.”
    “I think it’s exciting,” Shoshanna said. “Joel wasn’t sure he wanted to go at first, but I convinced him that we should.”
    “Shoshanna! Why?”
    “Because this is the most important thing we could ever do. If we don’t obey the Almighty One and rebuild our temple, we’ll be separated from Him forever.”
    Dinah stared at her cousin. They had worked side by side as midwives for twenty years. How could they feel so differently? Dinah quickly finished filling her jar as Shoshanna explained to the others how Joel and Iddo had produced their genealogies to prove their ancestry as priests. The women seemed interested, but Dinah simply wanted to hurry home before Shoshanna asked more questions.
    Iddo assumed that their entire family would leave Babylon together, but Dinah knew that her sons didn’t want to go. What would she do if the unthinkable happened and her family split in two, some staying here, others moving to Jerusalem? The uncertainty weighed on Dinah’s heart and interrupted her sleep. “I see a great tearing in your life,” the seer had told her. As each day passed, she tried to cling to everything she treasured, but it became more and more impossible, as if precious jewels were slipping through her fingers, lost forever.
    At dinner that night Iddo turned to their sons and asked, “How many carts will you need for your families? How many oxen and donkeys? The elders have asked all of the family heads to provide them with an estimate.”
    Their sons exchanged looks. Berekiah finally replied for both of them. “Abba, we’ve . . . um . . . we’ve decided to wait here in Babylon.”
    “What?” Iddo spoke the word with quiet disbelief, not anger.
    “We won’t be