There and Back Again

While vacationing in New Zealand with his father Whit and their friend Pastor Wilson Knox, Jason Whittaker has stumbled into a mystery. The group has already found a young woman named Joelle Billingsley unconscious and gotten her to a hospital, puzzled over a piece of crochet she carries bearing the name "Terori," and learned from Jay, who is staying nearby with his cousin, that a smooth-talking man named Ethan has drawn Joelle into a strange group whose members are told to bury everything from their old lives.

The story picks up after the men visit Joelle's father, James Billingsley, and discover that Terori is the name of his sheepdog. Since Joelle is an adult, there seems to be little more they can do for her, but Whit worries about Jay, an impressionable young man who has spent time around Ethan's group, and decides to call Jay's father. Meanwhile Wilson spends a late night with his friend Tom, debating theology and hearing the remarkable true story of Tarore, a Maori chief's daughter whose Gospel of Luke helped spread Christianity across New Zealand. Tom presses a rare 1835 first printing of that Maori Gospel into Wilson's hands, insisting the Lord has prompted him to give it away and that Wilson is going to need it.

Over breakfast, the pieces come together. If Tarore's story mattered enough to the Billingsleys to name their dog after her, the little book may be meant for that family. Back at the farm, James explains that his late wife Carly told Tarore's story every Christmas Eve and crocheted the cloth Joelle carries. Carly died two years ago giving birth to their second daughter, also named Tarore, after refusing cancer treatment that would have endangered the baby. Joelle resented her mother's choice, and after Carly's death she rejected everything her parents taught her. James asks the men to deliver the Gospel to Joelle, since she would never accept it from him, and he tucks inside it a note Carly wrote to her daughter before she died.

At the house, the visitors first find Jay in smeared mascara war paint, rehearsing a haka for an audition at a Maori tourist village. His restless job-hopping, he admits, comes from feeling he can never measure up to his rocket-scientist father and brain-surgeon mother: "I'm the one who slipped out of the DNA chain." Then Ethan appears, sneering that the visitors' old-fashioned morality is damaging and that his generation is free to do whatever feels right. Whit calmly points out that Ethan is pushing his own beliefs on Joelle just as forcefully, and that our choices always affect the people who love us. As Ethan drags Joelle away, Wilson offers her the Maori Gospel and tells her that her mother's note is inside. Ethan furiously demands she hand the Bible over, but Joelle refuses, asking only for a little time. Before hurrying after him, she whispers for them to hide the Bible under her pillow.

The next day at the agricultural show, James runs his sheepdog through her trial and Jay performs a memorably odd Highland dance in a kilt. Then Joelle appears, calling for her dad. She has read her mother's note, which said Joelle would probably have to come to the end of herself before she could make the right choice. The note was tucked into the page about Jesus's birth, where one verse stood out: "Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart." It reminded her of the little treasures her mother made, all thrown away except the crocheted hat begun for her baby sister. Shaken by her hospital stay and by memories of the disturbing things Ethan demanded as proof of loyalty, Joelle accepts her father's invitation to come home, help raise her little sister, and work through her doubts together with him.

Jay gets his own surprise when his father steps out of the crowd, flown in overnight after Whit's phone call. Far from being disappointed, his dad praises the performance and, as the two ride a water-filled Zorb ball down a hillside, tells Jay that being a jack-of-all-trades is no failure at all: "I wish I was more like you." Jay is happily stunned. As the fathers and sons race downhill together, Whit shares a story about a busy diplomat who called a day of fishing with his son wasted, while the boy's journal called it the most wonderful day of his life. Asked why the thought came to him, Whit answers simply, "No, I'm just related to you," and the whole group tumbles laughing toward the bottom of the hill, with four more days of adventure still ahead.