Chapter One - After Midnight at the Shepard house.

1.

                Jack Shepard stood in the hallway of his house, looking at pictures of his family. His wife and him on their wedding day. Pictures of the kids from birth to today.  A montage of his life from the past ten years. It was the middle of the night, and he couldn’t sleep again. Things had happened in the past fifteen months that he could neither explain nor avoid. Wondrous but slightly scary things, as these events seemed to be leading him down a road he had not foreseen in his future. He felt at a crossroads of sorts. Down one way was what he had always known. Comfortable, pretty safe. A continuation of the life he had been building for twenty years.  Not too much change.  Down the other way was different.  It held unknown and unknowable things. At least unknowable from his current vantage point.  There were new things to learn down that road, customs of a culture that seemed at once so familiar yet in reality so different from his own. It held judgment from others who would think he was abandoning his faith, or ruining his current, comfortable life, who would roll their eyes when he told them of things that were happening. It held some risks for certain. The two reasons he could see travelling that road were the signs that had appeared, and the belief that the road that was so different would take him closer to God.