No Friend Like an Old Friend

Connie Kendall boards a crowded bus for home after an overnight trip to Chicago, where she has retrieved the luggage her younger sister Jules forgot at a bus station weeks earlier. Still grumbling about Jules's carelessness, Connie takes the last open seat next to a friendly stranger named Wilson Knox. To her surprise, he is headed to Odyssey too, and he turns out to be the new pastor of Odyssey Community Church, Connie's own church. Wilson explains that this is his first church ever. After seminary, inspired by Mark Twain's travel book The Innocents Abroad, he spent years "doing a Twain" as a traveling missionary, planting churches around the world with the help of a generous sponsor.

When Jules calls begging to borrow Connie's brand-new red sweater, Connie flatly refuses, then vents to Wilson about all the trouble her sister causes. Wilson gently points out a character in the parable of the prodigal son who fits the situation, and it isn't Jules. It's Connie, acting like the grumbling older brother. Stung, Connie protests, but Wilson admits he had his own older-brother moment in middle school, and he tells her the story.

Young Wilson was a rule-following tattletale, the kid everyone loved to hate, constantly dragging two science club members he calls Ave and Al into Principal Farley's office. When the principal orders the three boys to get along, Wilson proposes they enter the university's Young Scientist Competition together and donate the 250-dollar prize to the school. Farley brokers a compromise to split any winnings, and Wilson pushes through his pet project: a baking soda volcano, which Ave scornfully calls a kid's experiment. Ave suddenly becomes suspiciously cooperative, so Wilson sneaks up on the boys' treehouse hideout, the Castle, and overhears the truth. Ave is secretly synthesizing luminol, a chemical that makes even invisible traces of blood glow blue, an experiment he believes "will help revolutionize how law enforcement solves murders." He plans to enter it in the competition without school approval.

The next day Wilson marches Principal Farley into the lab and catches Ave red-handed. But in the office, just as punishment is about to fall, Al bursts in and confesses everything. His mother works long hours standing in a warehouse despite a painful foot problem, and with his father gone, the family cannot afford the procedure that would fix it. Ave has been planning all along to win the prize and give Al the money for his mom. Moved by the circumstances, Farley decides on consequences but no expulsion, and even allows the luminol experiment as a second school entry. Wilson is outraged that the rule-breakers seem rewarded, and he admits to Connie that even knowing Al's family was hurting, he just wanted to throttle the boys, the very word Connie used about Jules. It took him years to learn the lesson he now shares: "Being right isn't always the same thing as being loving." When we face difficult people, he says, we love to pray for God to change them, when we should really pray, "Lord, change me." Connie asks whether Ave won and helped Al's mother, and Wilson happily reports that he did both.

At the Odyssey bus stop, Jules meets Connie wearing the forbidden red sweater and braces for a scolding. Instead Connie wraps her in a hug, telling her the sweater looks good on her. Then Whit arrives, greets the new pastor warmly, and calls him Ave's old nickname for him, Willie. Connie realizes the truth: Ave is short for Avery, as in John Avery Whittaker, and Al is Whit's old friend Jack Allen. Whit set up the whole thing, telling Wilson about the church opening and about Connie and Jules. There is one more surprise: Wilson married Whit's sister Charlotte, making the new pastor Whit's brother-in-law. As the two old friends tease each other about who was really the bully back in school, Connie interrupts with the last word: "Welcome to Odyssey, Pastor Knox."