The Whole Town Thought I Was Their New Pastor. By the Time I Found Out, I Had Already Married One Couple, Buried a Goat and Promised to Fix the Church Roof

Here is what I did between Thursday and Monday.

I told the truth to exactly one person. Her name was Lacey Pruett, she was 44, she owned Penny the mare, and she had figured it out in about four seconds.

“You’re the horse guy,” she said, standing in her barn with her arms crossed. “Pastors don’t look at a horse’s teeth before they say hello.”

“I tried to tell them.”

“Did you?”

“Dorothy laughed at me.”

Lacey laughed too. She had the kind of laugh that makes a man forget what he was worried about.

“Here’s the thing,” she said. “This town needs a good week. We lost the mill, we lost two farms to the bank, and we lost Reverend Hollis to a heart attack last year. They’ve been waiting for this. If you tell them now, they’ll be embarrassed in front of the whole county.”

“So what do I do?”

“You don’t lie,” she said. “You just don’t preach.”

So I didn’t preach.

I buried Miss Opal’s goat under an apple tree and said a few words about loyalty, which I know something about, because I’ve had good dogs.

I helped the young couple, Kyle and Brianna, fill out their marriage license at the county office. I didn’t marry them. I drove them to the courthouse, and I stood beside them as their witness, and I told the judge they were the most nervous two people I’d ever seen and that was how you know it’s real.

I climbed up on the church roof on Saturday with my own tools and fixed the leak over the third pew. Six men from town came to help. One of them brought his life insurance agent, who sold two policies off the tailgate of my truck between shingles. Small towns are efficient.

And on Saturday night, at the potluck, Dorothy stood up, tapped her glass, and said:

“We’d like our new pastor to say grace.”

Three hundred people bowed their heads.

I looked at Lacey across the room.

She mouthed one word.

*Truth.*