The Touch by Randall Wallace

him and he drove easily down the mountain, almost casually now, seemed more at peace than before. But Lara was haunted, even more than when they left the roadside ten minutes before. A shock had hit her and had grown rather than fading like the sting of any other blow might, and it wasn’t just the collapse of her agenda that she felt. She knew she had just come face to face with a force beyond her understanding, and it belonged to a realm beyond the questions of science that she did not yet know how to answer but would solve someday. This was a mystery that Lara knew she would never answer. Yet still she asked. “After that . . . how did you go on?”
    â€œI suppose some people could say I haven’t gone on. I put one foot in front of another, but most of the time it seems to me I’ve gone backwards. For a while,” he said, “I drank.” He stared at the road ahead, where the headlights bore into the darkness. It was an hour past midnight, and they seemed the only travelers on the face of the whole earth. When he spoke again, Lara wasn’t sure if was talking to her or just talking, just telling the truth. “Faith . . . had this belief—it seemed so original to her, but she always said it came from the Bible, though millions of people have read it and not come to the same conclusion she did. It was a method she saw, that something in her spirit saw, and she said it was a way to clean your soul and make life worth living. So I try it. Especially when times are the blackest. And it’s kept me going.”
    â€œCan you tell me what it is?”
    â€œIt’s easy to talk about, but it’s much harder to do, but you can’t think yourself through it, you just have to do it to know whether it works. She believed that the best way to do a good deed was to do it in secret. If you commit an act of charity and people know you did it, it drains away the true power of the deed. If someone unknown does evil to you, you start suspecting everyone around you of harboring hate, and you hate back. But if you’re on the receiving end of a truly anonymous act of love, you begin to suspect people around you, maybe even strangers, maybe the whole world, of caring for you. You learn to believe.”
    â€œFaith was the perfect name for her.”
    Jones looked at Lara, surprised by that haunting phrase. “Yes,” Jones said. “Yes, it was.”
    Lara thought about all the checks she had written to charities, and the praise they had given her, and the strange brew of annoyance, guilt, and obligation she felt each time they contacted her with more appeals. She thought about the way fund-raisers played to the egos of their donors: the silver circle of givers, the gold circle, the platinum circle, the Chairman’s Group. Lara’s name and that of her company appeared often on the honor rolls of many charities, all of them respectable groups (and all of them chosen carefully by Blair Bio-Med’s public relations director to enhance the company’s reputation as well as its political associations). But none of that kind of giving had ever infused Lara with a sense of personal connection to any kind of internal force. She found herself wanting to argue with the concept. “What about leadership?” she asked. “We need charities, many of them—probably most of them—do good work, and sometimes somebody’s got to step forward publicly and stir other people up to do the right thing by showing them how.”
    â€œWell, sure. Sometimes people are going to know who’s done something that they’re glad got done. It was Faith’s idea to build the clinic in the mountains, not mine. Everybody thought it was me because it was in my home town, next to the church my grandmother founded, on the ground my granddaddy gave. But it wasn’t my idea to put the trailer up there and drive there every weekend and see the people who were