Second Chances: 10 Christian Short Stories of Faith, Forgiveness and Redemption: 2

Ten people. Ten moments where the door is still open.A priest tells his shrinking congregation that the church will probably close, and is quietly relieved to be rid of it. A woman wins the lottery and hides the ticket in a winter coat because she is happy with the life she already has. A plumber sits in the back pew of the church where he was married, working out how to tell his wife what he has done. An orphaned girl keeps the key to a house nobody lives in anymore.These ten stories are about ordinary people at the point where they can keep going the way they have been, or turn.Nobody here gets a miracle. A father who drank his family away has to pick up a telephone and dial a number he has carried in his shirt pocket all week. A young woman who has been lying to her mother for a year and a half has to say so out loud. A boy who put an old woman in a hospital bed has to write to her without asking for a single thing back. What they get instead of miracles is a door somebody left unlocked, and a person on the other side of it.Some of these stories are funny. One is about a young man who falls in love with a priest's niece and discovers that the priest guards her like a man with a business to protect. Some of them will sit on your chest for a while. All of them are set in kitchens, parish halls, sheds, hospital corridors and parking lots, among people who work for a living.Warm, plainly written, and free of easy answers. Written for readers who want their faith on the page the way it actually turns up in a life: late, sideways, and usually through somebody else.