The Hour of Trial

The world has been healed, and it is grateful. On the Jos Plateau, Davou Gyang rebuilds his church in the burned shell of the old one and keeps the door open to everyone the year has broken — the displaced still come, and the singing is still the best of it.

Then the kind order completes its work. On Independence Day the nation's money is remade: every wallet, every school place, every sack of grain unlocked by a single pledge, recited under the bunting. It is offered as freedom. And a third of Davou's benches are certain they will be carried out before they ever say the words.

Davou is not the gifted one. He cannot argue a frightened heart out of its hope. He can only stay — and hold a church through the hardest question faith can ask: what do you do with a rescue that does not come?