The Debt
He owed $2.7 million for the man he killed. Then a stranger paid it all.
On Christmas Eve, twenty-one-year-old Jesse Calloway drove drunk down a two-lane Texas highway and killed Thomas Avery, a beloved schoolteacher bringing home a pink bicycle for his little girl. The last words the dying man spoke to Jesse were not a curse. They were "Son, are you hurt?" and "Fear not."
Nine years later Jesse is out of prison, living in a motel room and stripping wrecked cars for cash, under a wrongful-death judgment he could never pay in a thousand lifetimes. Every morning he walks past the white cross in the ditch where it happened. He has never once been able to say the dead man's name.
Then a letter arrives. The judgment has been paid in full, to the last nineteen cents, by someone who refuses to be named.
Driven to find his benefactor, Jesse follows a trail that leads through a lawyer's office in Abilene, his estranged mother's trailer in Lubbock, and the church where the Avery family still grieves. Along the way he finds a widow who swore she would never forgive him, a son who wants him to bleed, and an old green Ford that slows every morning at the cross. The answer, when it comes, will shatter everything Jesse believed about justice, mercy, and what a debt really costs.
The Debt is a modern parable of the unforgiving servant set in the cotton country of West Texas. It is a story about the One who pays what we can never pay, and about what happens to a man when he finally lets himself be loved.
"Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt." - Matthew 18:27
For readers of Redeeming Love, Peace Like a River, and Les Mis rables: a story to read once and then hand to a friend.
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