At the Peak of Dawn

Being a single 20-year-old male in the small town of Temple, Texas wasn’t easy. The older ladies in church always asked who the lucky lady was and then gave him a disappointed, sympathetic look when he blushed and said there wasn’t one. Every week was the same thing. The Sabbath was supposed to be a joy-filled day of rest, but instead Abel Corin’s Sabbath afternoons were a bit depressing. He would sit in his dorm room and think about how he always imagined his life to unfold: he’d find the perfect girl, graduate college, get a job, marry that girl, and then live to be a hundred with her. But the perfect girl had never shown up. It wasn’t anything he’d done; at least he hoped it wasn’t. He was always a pleasant guy to be around and although he wasn’t vain, he considered himself a pretty decent looking guy. He wasn’t often chased by girls, but he’d thought that the girl God intended him to be with would just appear from thin air. Because in his mind, she did...