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Praying For Mr. Wright

By Kimberly Kirkland Absher

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Chapter One


The notification appeared at 6:43 on a Sunday morning, forty-five minutes before Evan Wright needed to be at Grace Community for sound check. He was standing at the kitchen counter, coffee in hand, guitar case propped by the front door, when his phone lit up with his name tagged in a Facebook post.
He almost didn’t look.
He shouldn’t have looked.
The post belonged to Rachel. His sister-in-law. A woman he loved like she was his blood sister, which was the only reason what he read next didn’t send him directly back to bed.
“This is a stretch considering this is a book club group but I thought I’d ask since we all have similar values. Sooooo long story short my brother-in-law needs a wife...”
Evan set down his coffee.
He picked it back up.
He set it down again.
The post had been live for six hours. He scrolled to the comment count with the slow dread of a man checking damage after a storm. Ninety-three. Ninety-three people in a Christian fiction book club group had weighed in on his romantic future before he finished his first cup of coffee on a Sunday morning.
“Has to live in the Austin area or be willing to relocate! Age 34. Works remote and leads the worship team at church.”
His phone buzzed in his hand.
Calvin: Dude. Please tell me you’ve seen Rachel’s post by now.
Evan typed back: Just saw it. Is she out of her mind?
Calvin: She’s in full matchmaker mode. Fair warning. She printed responses.
Evan stared at those last two words long enough that his coffee went cold.
She WHAT?
Calvin: Dinner’s at six tonight. Brace yourself.
He put the phone face down on the counter and pressed both palms against his eyes. Outside, a mockingbird was working through its whole repertoire in the oak tree by the driveway, cycling through four or five different songs like it couldn’t settle on just one. Evan understood the feeling.
Lord, he prayed, not folding his hands or closing his eyes, just standing there in his socks with the morning pressing in around him. I know You have a plan. I’d just appreciate it if that plan didn’t involve Rachel broadcasting my personal life to ten thousand strangers.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. Rachel, who met Calvin through a hiking group she joined on a whim. Rachel, who talked constantly about organic connection and letting God write the story. That same Rachel just crowdsourced his love life on social media.
He grabbed his guitar case, slipped on his shoes, and walked out the door. Worship didn’t wait for personal crises.

***

Grace Community smelled the way it always did on Sunday mornings: coffee from the lobby, someone’s perfume streaming in, the faint cedar scent of the old pews that the renovation had never quite erased. Evan led worship here for four years. He knew every acoustic corner of the sanctuary, every sight line, every quirk of the sound board. Walking in through the side door with his guitar felt less like arriving at work and more like coming home.
He tried to let it settle him.
The worship team was already on stage when he arrived, his drummer Marcus running through a hi-hat pattern, his keyboardist Grace adjusting her monitor. They looked up when he walked in, and he managed a smile that felt close enough to genuine to pass.
“You’re quiet this morning,” Marcus said.
“Just focused.”
Marcus raised an eyebrow but didn’t push. After four years, they knew when to leave things alone.
Evan settled his guitar strap over his shoulder and ran through the opening chords of the first song, letting his hands find the familiar positions while his mind did something slower and harder. He’d been praying for the right woman for a long time now. Not in a desperate way, not with the kind of white-knuckled grasping that turned prayer into demand. Just the steady, honest kind of asking that came from believing God heard and trusting He answered in His own time.
What he had not been praying for was Rachel’s intervention.
By the time the congregation began filling in, Evan had found the quiet place inside the music where everything else went still. It was the thing he loved most about worship leading, the way the act of preparing to point others toward God required him to get there himself first. You couldn’t lead people somewhere you hadn’t gone.
He scanned the sanctuary from habit, the way a shepherd counted the flock without thinking about it. Third row on the left: Rachel, seated between Calvin and their youngest. She caught his eye and offered a smile that managed to be simultaneously guilty and completely unrepentant. He looked away before he could respond to it.

***

Dinner was at six. Calvin’s craftsman house on Brentwood Avenue looked exactly the way it always did: string lights on the porch, a pot of something good working on the stove, and Rachel’s handwriting on a chalkboard by the door with each day’s menu posted.
Calvin met him at the door.
“She organized them by compatibility scores,” Calvin said by way of greeting.
Evan stopped walking. “She what?”
“Color-coded spreadsheet. Green means strong potential, yellow means worth investigating.”
“Please tell me there are no red ones.”
Calvin’s silence lasted exactly long enough to answer the question.
“Calvin Theodore Wright.” Evan used his brother’s full name without meaning to.
“Look, I told her.” Calvin held up both hands. “Multiple times.”
The kitchen smelled like Rachel’s chicken tortilla soup, which under any other circumstances would’ve made the evening considerably better. Rachel was standing at the table with the expression of someone who rehearsed this moment and was not going to be derailed by the look on Evan’s face.
“Before you say anything,” she began.
“Rachel.”
“I screened them carefully. I have standards.” She pulled out a manila folder thick enough to serve as a doorstop. “Forty-seven women responded. Forty-seven, Evan. Do you understand what that says about you?”
“It says you have a large social media following.”
“It says you’re a catch.” She flipped the folder open with the confidence of someone presenting evidence in court. “This is Stacy from Cedar Park. Twenty-nine, teaches Sunday school, loves acoustic guitar.”
Evan pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down, because his legs made a unilateral decision about this. “Rachel. These women sent their personal information to a stranger on the internet because you asked them to.”
“They sent it to me. I’m not a stranger. I’m a person who loves Jesus and wants good things for the people in her life.”
Calvin, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, had the expression of a man who chose survival over engagement. Evan shot him a look. Calvin mouthed, “Sorry.”
“How did you come up with this idea?” Evan asked.
“I was reading a thread about someone who met their husband through a Facebook group recommendation, and I thought, Evan is wonderful and kind and has been alone since his breakup, and the world is full of good women who should see that.”
“Two years isn’t a crisis, Rachel.”
“Two years after Sandy.” She said it gently, without drama, which was somehow worse than if she made a production of it. “You closed off, Evan. You got careful. And careful is good, but careful can become its own kind of loneliness if you let it.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. Partly because she wasn’t entirely wrong, and they both knew it.
She slid the first profile across the table. He looked at it because it was easier than continuing to look at her. The woman in the small photo had a kind face. Her response to Rachel’s questions was thoughtful, genuine, something about worship music and wanting a God-centered relationship and not being afraid of hard seasons. He read it twice.
“There are twenty-two more in the strong consideration pile,” Rachel said. “Nurses, teachers, a few in ministry. All solid believers. All women who read the post and thought, yes, I’d like to know this person.”
“They don’t know me. They know three sentences about me.”
“Then meet them and let them know you.” She folded her hands on the table the way she did when she was being serious. “Gideon put out a fleece, Evan. I put out a post. Same concept, different century.”
Calvin made a sound from the counter that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“That’s not the same concept,” Evan said.
“It’s not entirely different, either.” Rachel leaned forward. “What if God used ordinary means to bring extraordinary people together? What if He uses a Facebook post the same way He used a burning bush? The method isn’t the point. The willingness to pay attention is.”
He looked at her. Petite, blonde, and fierce in the way that people were fierce when they loved you and couldn’t stand to see you settle for less than you deserved. Rachel had her flaws. Subtlety was among them. But her heart was so genuinely good that staying angry at her was like staying angry at the sun for being bright.
“Here’s what I’ll do,” he said finally. “I’ll look at them. I’m not making commitments, and I won’t meet anyone unless I feel real peace about it.”
Rachel’s face lit up in a way that made him feel slightly like he just agreed to something larger than he intended.
“And no more posts,” he added. “Whatever happens from here stays quiet.”
“Agreed.”
“I mean it, Rachel.”
“I know you mean it.” She was already sliding profile number two across the table. “I respect that completely.”
He looked at Calvin. Calvin looked at the ceiling.

***

He left at eight-thirty with the folder under his arm and his brother walking him out to the truck. The neighborhood was quiet, porch lights on, somebody down the block playing guitar badly and not caring. Austin in June. The air still warm after dark, smelling like cut grass and possibility.
“You okay with this?” Calvin asked.
Evan set the folder on the passenger seat. “Honestly? I’m not sure.” He leaned against the truck door and looked up at the sky, clear and full of stars that Austin’s light usually swallowed. “But she said something in there that I keep coming back to.”
“The Gideon thing?”
“The being open to how God works thing.” He paused. “What if I’ve been so committed to organic connection that I’ve made an idol out of the method? What if God doesn’t actually care how the introduction happens, only what we do after it?”
Calvin was quiet for a moment. His brother had always been better at listening than talking, which was one of the things Evan appreciated most about him. “That’s worth sitting with,” he said finally.
“I’m going to look at them. Prayerfully. And if none of them feel right, then I’ll know I tried, and Rachel will have to accept that some things can’t be engineered.”
“And if one of them does feel right?”
Evan opened the truck door. “Then I’ll be grateful I didn’t let my pride get in the way of what God was doing.”
“Pray for me?”
“Always do, little bro.”
He drove home through the familiar streets of South Austin, the folder on the seat beside him like an unanswered question. Twenty-three women. Twenty-three strangers who had responded to a post about a man they never met, put something of themselves into a message, and trusted it to a woman who sorted things with color-coded spreadsheets.
There was something both absurd and unexpectedly moving about that.
At a red light on South Lamar, he reached over and opened the folder. Stacy from Cedar Park looked back at him from her small photo. Kind face. He already thought that. Behind her, twenty-two more women who said yes to the possibility of something, and put hope into writing and sent it into the world.
He closed the folder when the light changed.
Lord, he prayed, merging onto the highway, I don’t know what You’re doing. I’m not sure I trust what Rachel’s doing. You already know that. But I’m asking You to be in this somehow, because if You’re not, the whole thing is just noise. And if You are, help me recognize it. Help me not be so busy looking for the right thing that I miss what’s already in front of me.
The prayer felt incomplete, the way honest prayers often did. Like starting a sentence and trusting that God would finish it.
He pulled into his driveway and sat for a moment with the engine off, the folder on the seat, the June night pressing warm against the windows.
Somewhere across town, in a way he couldn’t yet know, God was already writing the next sentence.

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