Where There's a Will...

The Barclays crowd the arrivals area to meet George, who has been away in Washington for a week. Jimmy complains that being the only man in the house was the longest week of his life, and Mary teases that the trip has been the third in two months. George admits there is more to it than a business seminar: the head office in Washington has offered him a job, and the family might have to move.

At home, George refuses to let the news settle into gloom. He has not decided anything, he says, and the most important thing is not the salary or the commute but what God wants the family to do. He asks his children to help him figure out God's will. Donna and Jimmy offer the obvious starting points, prayer and Bible reading, and George adds one more: talk with someone you trust, because God often uses other people to make His will known.

Jimmy takes that literally and marches to Whit's End to have Mr. Whittaker simply tell him the answer. Mr. Whittaker gently refuses. A trusted friend gives advice and suggestions, he explains, and anyone who claims to know God's will for someone else's life should be treated with great care. Pressed for methods, he mentions that some people read their circumstances as open and closed doors, and some put out a fleece. Jimmy hears fleas and worries about the dog they do not own, so Mr. Whittaker tells him about Gideon, the soldier in the book of Judges who laid a fleece of wool on the ground and asked God to leave it wet while the ground stayed dry. It happened, but Gideon realized the test proved little, since ground dries faster than wool anyway. He asked for the reverse the next morning, and got it. Mr. Whittaker adds that a fleece should be used carefully, if at all. Jimmy hears only the word fleece and leaves delighted.

Donna spends the night at Jessie's, and the two girls hunt for the answer in the concordance at the back of Donna's Bible. They look up will, and the verses seem to ask a great deal of them. They look up go, and land on the Lord's command to Abram, which Jessie dismisses at once. They look up wait, find more verses about waiting than about going, and settle on Psalm 27:14. To Jessie the case is closed. They pray, inviting God to speak up if He disagrees, sit in silence, hear nothing, and take the silence as confirmation that Donna is staying in Odyssey.

Meanwhile George and Mary talk after the evening news. Mary has prayed harder than she ever has and arrives at the conclusion that the decision is George's to make, which is not the help he was hoping for. Then the phone rings. Mr. Cole, the general supervisor of the Washington office and George's boss's boss, is in Chicago for a convention and would like to drop in on Odyssey tomorrow.

At breakfast George produces a wool sweater he found lying in the middle of the front yard. It is Jimmy's fleece, and Jimmy only wants to know whether it was wet or dry. Told it was dry, he announces that God has cleared the family to move. Donna announces the opposite, and the argument is still going when Mr. Cole telephones for directions to the house. George urges everyone to relax and carry on with a normal Saturday, and then the whole family scrambles to clean, vacuum and tidy until the children are sent off to Whit's End to be out of the way.

There Mr. Whittaker hears both cases and corrects both. Finding God's will is not a competition, and the Bible, prayer and fleeces are not crystal balls. Jimmy repeated Gideon's error, looking for a sign without allowing for what would have happened anyway. Donna pulled verses out at random and, Mr. Whittaker suspects, only listened for the answer she had already chosen. What God says, He says clearly, he tells them; it is people's listening that usually needs work. The way to know God's will is to know God, the way Donna knows Jessie well enough to predict what her friend would do. He sends them back to start over, praying less for a sign and more for the person who needs to hear from God the most - their father.

Across town, George is showing Mr. Cole the town, pointing out Whit's End and the ball fields where he is meant to coach Little League. Mr. Cole says he has not come to apply pressure, only to gather impressions that no application form can give. He is certain George is the right man for the job. What troubles him is whether the job is right for George. The Barclay family life is good, he says, too good in some respects, because succeeding in Washington will demand far more time away from them than George realizes. His family, he says plainly, could get in the way of his success. George asks whether he is being told to choose between the two, and Mr. Cole answers that it is something to think hard about.

That evening the children are settling in for a video and popcorn when George slips home. He has turned the job down, and Odyssey will have to put up with the Barclays a while longer. When Mary asks what decided it, George tells her it was God's will, and that it could not have been any clearer.