The Editorial

Jake Winters is a cross-country truck driver. He drives 120,000 to 130,000 miles a year, and he drives alone. He likes it that way. He's single with no responsibilities, cares or worries except delivering his loads on time, and that's just the way he likes it. He has never had a passenger in his truck. He's fiercely independent and that's the way he plans to keep it.

In the first of the family friendly Jake Winters series, The Load, Jake drives to the town of Slippery Gulch, Montana, to pick up machinery going to Reno, Nevada. AB a result, things are never the same for Jake again.

It seems that Jake has been picked for a very special assignment, but it wasn't his company that picked him. It was an assignment from God.

Although Jake considers himself to be a Christian and believes in God, he's a convenience Christian. He calls on God when he needs him then conveniently forgets him until the next time. Now God needs Jake. He's been called on to answer the prayer of a child.

In Jake's first trip to Slippery Gulch, he meets Peter Stevenson. Peter is a charming little kid but severely neglected. On his second trip, Jake learns something far more troublesome: Peter has also been severely abused. After his mother's death, his abuse escalated to murder. It is learned that his father murdered Peter in 1901 at the age of six. Peter is a ghost. Yet, Jake is imposed upon to provide the childhood to Peter that he never had. Peter grew up lonely, fearful, friendless and loveless.

Jake, a burned out schoolteacher, doesn't want anything to do with children, and now this. Why is he the one picked for this assignment? Is he up for the task? What if he fails? Does Jake have the patience to deal with a six-year-old? But not just any six-year-old. Peter died before the Wright brothers flew. His last words before death had been, "Please Lord, give me a friend." Can Jake be the answer to a little boy's prayer stated over one hundred years ago? If so, why?

Then there is Peter. Although covered with dirt in rotting clothes and starving, he is cute. He is also polite, kind and thoughtful. Yet as a living child, he never knew friendship or love. Why? What was his life really like? And why was his final prayer answered? What is this kid?

How can Jake become a loving, caring father figure? And how will Peter, a product of the nineteenth century, adjust to the computerized twenty-first century? Come along and discover Peter's past and their future together.