Tag Archives: Christian fiction

The Arrogant Pulpit

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He could thunder with the best of them, drew crowds from all across the county. His Bible was cracked with the whacking it took upon the pulpit. His fingers were gnarled from curling them heavenward to draw down the fire upon men who drank too much and woman who cackled like hens behind their husband’s backs. His eyes were fixed in that perpetual stare of hard earned judgment that can only come from the self-indulgence of over-fasting.

His posters got the saints to whispering about the coming revival and the back-sliders to mocking about the coming judgment which in the hubris of both parties was really the same thing gone sour on both ends like an overripe banana.

In the end when everyone stood before the judgment seat: The preacher found his sermons were hay; The saints discovered that their revivals were straw;  And the backsliders found that false repentance leads only to the fires of Hell; But one soul…one soul found humility in between the thunder and the gnarly fire. That soul bent his knee. The King Of Ages nodded his head in approval toward that one soul and with the voice of many waters said “Well done!”

 

 

It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill. 16The latter do so out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. 17The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains. 18But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice. Phil. 1:15-`18

each one should build with care. 11For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw,13their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. 14If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. 15If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames. 1 Cor. 3:10-15

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. 3 If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing. 1 Cor. 13:1-3

This post was written in response  to “All In A Word’s” writing prompt: HUBRIS

You can find their other contributors here:

http://13thfloorparadigm.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/all-in-a-word-writing-prompts/

 

The Celebrant: This Was Us Pt. 5.5

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Part five of the Celebrant turned out to be so long I felt the need to break it up into two pieces for the sake of my blog family. So this week you get two installments instead of just the one. I hope you enjoy! If you have missed any of the previous parts of Nathan’s Story it can be found here: http://wp.me/P39vIx-EQ

The Celebrant 5.5

The Christmas concert was paper snowflakes and tacky tinsel glittered over with the dulcet tones of untuned flutophones. It was magic after the highest order. Under its spell I became an addict to melody and rhythm.

After Christmas I started the trumpet.

In Fifth grade I got a paper route and bought myself a  dented French Horn.

In sixth grade it was the guitar.

In seventh the saxophone.

In eighth grade I joined the high school chorus as an alto and began piano lessons.

I was no prodigy. I was an addict. I would play the music until the music played me. The song it sang pushed me by increments away from my family. I think they missed me.They never said; So I just filled the hole inside with sound.

In the late eighties as Paul and I prepared to enter high school the stock market went bust. Adam’s bank account exploded. He focused his business in do-it- yourself hardware and camping supplies, two growth industries it seemed. With the money he made from his good -end- year Adam moved us out of the house on the hill to one of the new developments springing up all over Winchendon. Treasure heights was a block of large modular homes cut into the side of Mount Pleasant just below the Olde Center of town. Benjamin Street banked right onto Fiesta Dr. which curved left onto Celebration Dr. ,left again onto Gala Blvd and finally left once more onto Extravaganza Way.

The Dahlstrom family moved into number  2 Celebration Dr. a giant blue Edwardian affair complete with Grecian columns holding up the front porch roof. A giant brass chandelier swung over the stoop lighting the way into the foyer, a sunken living room to the left and a full dining room to the right. The Kitchen which ran the length of the house at the back was built around a  breakfast bar with built-in double sinks. A walkout to the left side spilled onto a sixteen by twenty deck that overlooked a manicured lawn that flowed back to a one story barn running the full length of the yard.

The shed, as we called this out building, had two doors and was walled directly in half with a connecting door between the two resulting rooms.

“This side,” said Adam motioning to the left, ” is going to be my workshop.”

“And this side,” He waved to the door on the right, “Is going to be your clubhouse. It is where all your sports equipment goes Paul and where all your instruments go Nathan.”

I wanted to protest but he raised a hand for silence. “The building has its own heat so none of your equipment will get damaged and there’s plenty of room for both of you to share.’

It took us the rest of the summer to unpack and organize but by the time I entered ninth grade I was the only kid in band with a practice studio.

My addiction was effectively shut out of the house but that’s how it was discovered by Mrs. Wallender.

The Celebrant: This Was Us Pt. 5

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Part five of the Celebrant turned out to be so long I felt the need to break it up into two pieces for the sake of my blog family. So this week you get two installments instead of just the one. I hope you enjoy! If you have missed any of the previous parts of Nathan’s Story it can be found here: http://wp.me/P39vIx-EQ

 

The Celebrant: This Was Us Pt. 5

I remember a sign that hung on the wall of our band room in High School. It was by some kid from Winchendon who  made it “big” in the real world. It read  “In the reflection of running waters, a memory exists of the delicately balanced masterpiece that is our world. The Creator has spoken forth His holy portrait and we all are no more nor less than splendid echoes bouncing off the canvas of His pièce de résistance.”

I liked the thought that somehow my life was an echo of God’s voice rolling down through the ages. It did make me wonder though what He might be saying.

When I was in the fourth grade we rented a house on Tannery Hill. The grey Victorian with its scrolled facade rose directly out of the side of a graduated cliff to the right of the Miller’s River. The front yard sloped up sharply to a stone porch that wrapped around the front entrance like a granite moat. We let the apartment on the right side, three floors of dark panelled rooms and lead painted windows. My room was on the second floor at the very back of the building. The lone window   looked out over the shaded back yard and up the hill to where old trolley tracks  cut a path through the thickly gathered forest. I spent hours as a little boy wandering the woods, eating berries and pretending to be someone great and heroic in a world that did not know me yet.

That was the same year I started picking up instruments. In September the band director called interested fourth graders to buy plastic recorders to prepare a concert for Christmas.  I begged my mother to let me join. To be honest It wasn’t really music that attracted me. It was football that repelled me.  I had joined Pop Warner Football the year after Paul but unlike my stronger more coordinated brother I was a disaster on the field.

Paul and Adam were merciless. It wasn’t that they made mention of my countless fumbles, the kicks I missed ending up on my rump, or the fact that the girls on the team could throw and run circles around me. It was that they never mentioned me at all  while weekly accolades of Paul’s exploits dripped like honey from the edges of our dinner conversation.

The night I brought music up the honey froze.

“What about Pop Warner?”  Polly asked for Adam.

” I’ll do both,” I said knowing Adam would never let me quit something I had started.

“But no one in our family has ever been musical.” Mom returned.

The room was quiet for a long time.

Adam finally broke the air so heavy with anticipation, “I think we should let the boy try.”

I jumped up from my seat and ran around the table to hug my father. He tensed at the spontaneous show of affection.

“All right! All right kid! This isn’t a free ride. You practice every night just like football.” He squared me off with an eye brow of steel.

Somehow Adam understood I had discovered another piece of my puzzle.

The Celebrant: This Was Us Pt. 4

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Left side of the sanctuary six pews from the front just beside the stained glass window of Jesus in the temple. That was where our family sat every Sunday after Adam insisted we start going to church. He was none too keen on Polly becoming a Jesuscizer until she started bringing home the church ladies for tea. When he realized that most of these ladies were Winchendon’s society dames and that all their husbands perched in the spreading limbs of the First Baptist Church he was quick to join the flock.

I can still remember the first Sunday we all went to church together.  Adam sat by the sunny painted Jesus in the window. Paul was beside him. Mother sat between my brother and me. I was next to the church lady with the big feathers in her purple hat who smelled of Ben Gay and face powder.

Paul and I got coloring books again.

“Momma I’ve already colored this one?” I said as I thumbed through the same book I had been given the day mother visited Doris.

Adam leaned across the pew and shushed my face. I felt the little sprinkles of his spittle tickle my eyelashes. Mother flashed him a cross look that quickly melted under his glare.

“Well why don’t you just use the inside covers and color Momma some pictures of the pretty windows Natty?” She patted my hand.

I put  my head down and nodded. I blinked fast to get the spittle out of my eyes before Adam could call it tears. He had a thing about boys crying especially in public.

I glanced over at Paul who was viciously scribbling his second page with one brown crayon. Then I looked around for other children and noticed that many of them were engaged in the same race to cover their coloring books with as much crayon as they could. Some wielded blue crayons. Some red. One little girl had even brought her own markers and was blacking in the eyes of every picture in the book. I turned to the front inside cover of my book and carefully drew a rectangle in brown crayon.

The service began. My family stood. I sat engrossed in the triangles and squares that made up the temple around the boy Jesus. Three hymns passed and I was working on the faces of the doctors who questioned Jesus (though I didn’t know that’s what they were at the time). The offering plate slipped by and all I noticed was that the green of the money was the same color as the table-cloth depicted in the window. Doris preached. I colored. Doris gave an invitation for people to come down to the altar. I was coloring the walls around the window.

“Come on!” Adam said grabbing my hand.

He took me and my brother forward. Mother trailed behind tears in her eyes. Doris beamed.

An older man approached and drew my father away from the family. Doris began to lead the congregation in Amazing Grace.

I smelled Ben Gay. My mother and the church lady took my brother and I aside. Mom held my hand as the church lady talked with Paul. He was almost seven. He watched my father praying in the corner and nodded his head as the lady asked him questions. He bowed his head and prayed with her. My mother wept as two of her men joined her in Jesus. I held my picture close to my chest as the church applauded.

The service ended and we began to make our way out of the church. People kept stopping us.

They would shake my father’s hand and say things like “Welcome to the family Adam.”

Paul was swept away by a group of children who wanted to bask in his altar-made- celebrity.

I held my coloring book up to my mother, “See Momma. I finished the window just like you said.”

“So you did baby boy! It’s beautiful!” She gushed hugging me.

That was the day I fell in love with art.

The Celebrant: This Was Us Pt. 3

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My mother was the first “Jesuscizer” in the family; But it all really started with Dr. Seuss.

We moved from Ayer when I was three. Adam worked carpentry  in those days and had become something of a tool specialist. When an opportunity came to buy a small hardware business in the town of Winchedon forty-five minutes north, he packed us up and followed the call of Abraham. Mother was not so happy to move away from all she had known. Ayer was home and a fairly prosperous one for her. While Adam scraped and grabbed all his life for every morsel he could salvage Polly Dahlstrom grew up with at least a brass spoon in her mouth. My grandfather on that side was a banker. His wife was the proverbial stay at home mom who engaged in bridge and woman’s club. My mother  was sweet sixteen all through high school: Captain of the cheer leading squad, home-coming princess and then queen.

My father was not her first pick but when high school ended so did my mother’s magical control over the world. She went from being the big fish in a small pond to being the shrinking violet at Fitchburg State College where she went to become a kindergarten teacher. She met Adam Dahlstrom after she graduated from college Cum Laude. The September after graduation she was working at Marshalls to keep her father happy. Adam was working at Marshalls on weekends, The Sentinel and Enterprise  as a press man during the week and cleaning office buildings nights to keep the other bankers happy. My grandfather liked Adam’s industry. So Polly married Adam the following fall just as she began a career in the Ayer Elementary school system.

Adam was magically hired on by one of the leading builders in the Acton area. Mother was ready to settle into an idyllic life in the shadow of her parents. Adam it turned out liked full sun so when his opportunity came he moved himself out from under the spreading chestnut tree that was my grandfather and headed north. Winchendon was a town with no small reputation. Polly’s parents protested. Adam ignored them.

I remember my third year mostly because my mother spent the better part of it crying. On my fourth birthday my grandparents came to visit and they brought me a new book by Dr. Seuss, who it turns out was a friend of an acquaintance. Gramps managed to procure a signed copy of The Cat in the Hat and presented it to me after the chocolate cake.

That night as mother was putting me to bed she brought the book to my bedside. Smoothing down the covers she seated herself next to me and cracked the spine of the big book and read the dedication to me.

“Dear Nathan, Always remember no matter what happens in life Don’t be sad that it’s over. Smile that it happened.” Theodore Seuss Geisel. 1979

Mother read the whole story to me. I remember she had to blow her nose several times  interrupting the shenanigans of  Thing One and Thing Two. The next morning she towed me and Paul to the Baptist Church across from the drug store uptown.  She set us up with coloring books and crayons and set herself down to speak with the pastor, a gray-haired woman who called herself Doris.

Paul and I finished two coloring books a piece and several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches which Doris produced from her over-sized black purse as if by magic. The shadows were growing long before Mom and Doris said their final a-men and from that time forward Mom was a Christian, a true- blue Jesuscizer. With her it was never really an insult though. Polly meant her faith. It didn’t smack of the tin can rattling beggary I was later to see in so many others. I think that’s probably because she made the choice for herself not for someone else. She owned her faith and in the end that made all the difference.

The Celebrant: This Was Us Pt.2

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In case you missed it here is The Celebrant Pt. 1    https://josephelonlillie.com/2013/06/29/the-celebrant-pt-1/

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In the dark I heard the shrieking wail of metal on metal. I felt the clacking thunder shudder my rib cage. The air smelled of sulfur,  pine pitch and summer sweat.  I gagged as blood and vomit expelled themselves from deep inside my gut.  I sat bolt upright in bed as the darkness of my dream dissipated in the comparative light of midnight. My fingers explored the heavy covers around me expecting to touch upchuck that would insist  some part of my dream had been true. Finding nothing I drank in the air through my runny nose. The sulfur and the pitch were well gone and all I could smell in the air was the lemon of furniture polish and the itchy fragrance of white linen treated with Clorox.

The dream had plagued me all my life. It came more frequently during my times of high nerve, which means it visited more as I advanced into my teen years. The nightmare paralleled two things:  my downward spiraling relationship with Adam and every outbreak of zits. The latter would have been natural enough, I suppose. I know of no teen-age boy whose vanity is unaffected by the plague of youth. All of us react differently. My brother,  Paul, shaved the zits off his face religiously and pushed it off to old razor blades. I dreamed of life’s train running me down in the dark, engineered by a father who refused to accept me.

The fact that Adam did not love me nor I him was absolutely not natural. I wanted to connect to him but just couldn’t. To say that  our relationship was unnatural is not to say that it was uncommon. I know I am one of many who have lost their dad’s long before they died.  The bogey man of alienation comes to us all; But the fact that so many of us allow the love that should be between a father and a son to be totally consumed by differences, that is unnatural.

I spent years wondering how Adam became the driving force behind my nightmare rather than my savior from the repetitive terror. I worked through a very complicated web of differences that played out between us: He was a conservative  business man.  I was a teen-aged socialist. He was a man’s man, an arm-chair quarterback, a died in the wool sportsman and I was what my brother liked to call a band fag. Add to that my penchant for calling out every little hypocrisy I saw in my father’s church and how could we not have been at odd’s. But after many years of searching I at last found the hinge that the door of our separation hung on. It lived  in my ten-year old memory. Oddly, it all came back to the Fruitlands where my mother told me her story of the night I was born.

“That whistle was blowing the night you were born Natty. It made me glad to know we weren’t alone. All I could think as I pushed you out was how here we were in the middle of nowhere and there not 300 yards away was a whole train load of people watching me give birth.”

Adam harumphed as she finished, “It just creeped me out.”

Like most walls ours was built on a foundation of agreement.

Stella

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100_1269I took to calling her Stella after the girl who taught me English and the way. One reminded me of another: pale, luminescent, and a faint intoxicating romance that was central to both beings. Stella was both friend and foe that night. Friend because she glistened more brightly than usual. She made for less chance to stub our bare toes as we wound through the dusty streets barefoot. She was foe for the same reason. Pale lunar brightness sucked up the shadows we normally used to skitter our way unseen to the city walls.

Not that anyone really cared what we were doing. Urchins were generally beneath the notice of the Basji. We were  dogs to be kicked when in the way or starved out of existence. But not all of our friends were urchins. The police had their eyes on bigger snakes in the desert and if we could lead them to those bigger snakes then we would be temporarily worthy of a watchful eye.

I thought more than once about staying away that night because Stella was so full. I couldn’t stay away. My soul cried for its food and I knew my brother and sister still needed to hear and know the truth that the English Stella had taught me. She was gone now deported along with her parents back to that far away country of bogs and lakes. I was left alone in my hot dusty world to lead my family to the truth. So we clung to what shadows  were left and made our way to the city wall. My sister gripped  my shirt tails with one hand as we sidled along the rough stone until we found the dark brick. Fearful eyes peering out of the tiny  burka made her old beyond her years. My brother, the youngest, held her hand bravely pretending to comfort her while his own palpable fears consumed his features.

We found the dark rock that marked the way and in the distance I could see the shadow of the big dome lit by Stella’s soft glow.

“Ready?” I asked.

They nodded in Stella’s half-light.

We ran.

The  half mile to the big rock left us winded and sweating in the heat of the desert night. Still I began to sing the familiar hymn I heard in the distance through my panting. We were at Big Dome, our secret church in the desert outcropping. The little congregation looked up with fear as we approached. Then Afareen broke ranks from the little group and greeted us.

“Come children. You are welcome! Abdullah was just about to begin the reading.”

Abdullah stepped into the center of the little circle and opened the Bible and began to read by Stella’s light.

This story was born out of Lilith’s prompt, “Fly Me To the Moon”. Check out her work and the work of her crew at http://becausewerepoets.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/thursday-short-story-prompt-9-fly-me-to-the-moon/

The Celebrant: This Was Us Pt. 1

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Skin tells tales. Dolly, a friend of mine in high school,  could usually wash with soap and water just fine; But when she got agitated Irish Spring would burn the skin right off her hands like it was fire. She always used to say that was because her mother was Irish and Momma Rose was usually the source of Dolly’s consternation. At any rate it was always easy to tell when Dolly and Rosie were on the outs.  I suppose my skin speaks volumes about my own story. My upper lip is usually beaded sweat mingled with peach fuzz and while my face is generally clear that has more to do with Proactiv than the fact that acne isn’t a problem. I like to keep my arms and back covered for that reason; So swimming isn’t one of my favorite pass times. Too bad it is Paul’s. Adam likes to make the community pool a weekly family affair to highlight his favored son. Sucks to be me.

The surface never lies; It just doesn’t tell the whole story. Even straight-up  falsehoods find their anchor in some truth deep inside. You might not think so but dig long enough in your own lies and you’ll find the grain that led you down the primrose path to Hell. Trace it back far enough and you’ll find the seminal truth that made your very biggest lies so believable. That’s the problem with the stories we tell each other, whether their bold-faced prevarications or lily-white truths they’re still just bits of the whole. Happy endings are part sad and tragedies usually leave someone somewhere chuckling because they see the other side. The “Hallelujahs” and the “Aww Hells” are all mixed together and no story really ends with “The End”. We just can’t tell it all so we do our best and leave the rest to providence.

I was born in a field, or so my mother tells me.  We lived out Rte. 2 about twenty miles out of Concord just the other side of Ayer by the Oxbow preserve. Mom’s OBGYN was out of Emerson in those days and no one thought anything about the distance to the hospital. Paul had been a thirty hour delivery that nearly killed Mom just eleven months earlier. My conception was not therefore hailed with flags and fireworks. The “Should’ve used protection” comment has floated around my unhaloed head more than once. Who knew I wasn’t supposed to take that comment seriously?

Mom’s labor started sometime around  one in the morning on July fourth 1989. Adam took a shower before loading her into the car. If I’d been more like Paul everything would have been fine but  by two thirty I was popping out in one of the flowery fields alongside route 110. I hear I ruined a perfectly good picnic blanket but hey at least the upholstery in Adam’s new Ford Escort was spared the bloody mess.

When I was 10 we went as a family to see the Fruitlands and stopped by the spot where I made my world-wide debut. The field is wide and flat rising up to a stand of pines,  sentinels to all that goes on in the valley below. I realized they were there at my birth. In my ten-year old head I thought maybe the trees could tell me why I had been born. My thoughts diverted, though, when I heard the whistle and the thudding of the train pistons. The Boston to Maine cut  its course through the field of my birth. I shuddered with the sudden revelation of my life’s nightmare.  The crunching thunder of steel on steel,  the banshee screams of hydraulic brakes mixed with coal smoke sirens.

Mom remembered too, “That whistle was blowing the night you were born Natty. It made me glad to know we weren’t alone. All I could think as I pushed you out was how here we were in the middle of nowhere and there not 300 yards away was a whole train load of people watching me give birth.”

She smiled remembering her moment of fame.

The Good Shepherd Pt.11

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If you have been following the Good Shepherd, thank you. If you have missed out on some of our episodes you can catch up with them on our Good Shepherd page here:  http://wp.me/P39vIx-j1

Now here is the conclusion of our story:

The Good Shepherd Pt. 11

     The church is gone now, burned a week ago when the National Guard came and disbanded the local militia.  The deacon board voted to resist the new state ordinance. When the  of State soldiers marched into town the militia mustered on the church lawn. I stayed home and worked on harvesting the garden. Two of my deacons died in the firefight. The other five are arrested and waiting trial in Boston. All swords and bows have been confiscated throughout the town and we exist under martial law.

    The whole world is teetering on the brink of war and what’s left of the U.S. government is not going to make nice with those they see as homegrown terrorists when real terror lies just beyond our borders.    Russia, Iran, Turkey and Libya launched an attack against Israel two weeks ago. A huge army swept from the North on horseback armed with swords and bows. It’s Ezekiel 38 in a nutshell and Israel’s victory over the aggressor though prophesied has set the world bubbling with tension. England, America, Australia and Canada have launched formal protests against Russia while the Islamic world  is screaming for the blood of the Jewish people.

   The day after the attack I set up a soap box on the corner by the old candy store and began to preach to whoever would walk by. A year ago I would have been laughed off the street. Cars humming by at breakneck speed would have honked to shame me. But now that the world has slowed down and everyone is walking to town my little sideshow has become quite the attraction especially since I removed myself as pastor of the church.

I should have set myself to the simplicity of the gospel preached long ago but it took a worldwide blackout and the beating of the ever- nearing prophetic drum to make me realize that so much of my life was lived only for the now. Oh, that I could go back and make it all driven by eternity. But there is no going back. There is only grace and that is enough.

Soon I shall leave this earth. I no longer doubt any of the prophecies. I have lived through too many to think they are not real. Jesus will come and take his church away soon and then the end will come. Who knows it could be today. After all it is R………………

THE END

The Good Shepherd Pt. 10

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The Good Shepherd

The Good Shepherd

I am truly sorry I missed last week’s installment everyone. I was away at my son’s graduation in PA and did not have the access to internet or time to write that I had anticipated. Life is wonderful and moving at breakneck speed.

You perhaps need a refresher before you read the next chapter of Jerome’s story today. If so here is the link to The Good Shepherd’s page: http://wp.me/P39vIx-j1

The Good Shepherd Pt. 10

I’ve read over my entries since the God pulse took the light out of our world over nine months ago. I’m surprised at how much of this I tried to walk in my own strength. I’m ashamed that when the cold and dark rose up I tried to shut it out with a blanket and a candle rather than with prayer and the Fire of the Holy Ghost. Yet I see that though I didn’t intentionally invite Him along, God made himself the blanket.  Jesus became the crimson thread that ran  throughout, holding everything together.

He sent Silhouette to my door with the warning of what was to come. He sent Renee to me to make sure I wouldn’t run out on the calling. He sent me to the Bone Brothers even though He knew I would take the credit. He saved Oliver so she could testify for me when I would not testify for myself. He brought down my enemies and only God knows why. I certainly didn’t earn that reprieve because of my incredible spiritual devotion. I suppose that’s why they call it salvation by  grace.

It took me a while to understand that in my own way I was as Laodicean as the rest of the world. I was lukewarm even before the world descended into darkness. All that has happened was really for me and for every other soft skinned saint with a hardened heart. In the twilight of the world and the violence it has sparked the foolish virgins and the wise of Matthew 25 have been shown not by their works but by the inclinations of their hearts. My  good works came not from a heart after God but by an ingrained religiosity that demanded I do the right thing.

I kept right on preaching after Tyson’s death but my word was a razor’s edge that cut the bleeding masses more deeply and refused them the Balm of Gilead. I did the right thing but my wrong motives brought forth sour fruit fit only for the dung heap.

The entire town, it seemed, showed up for service that first Sunday after Tyson’s execution. Instead of preaching a much-needed grace and mercy upon the town I chose to rail about the vindication and judgment of the Lord upon His enemies. I could have forgiven sins and made unity. Instead I retained the sins of a dead man and fed my congregation a diet of paranoia. It was easy to do. Pulpit holders throughout the land were handing down similar rhetoric to their congregations and draining the oil of life out of their pews. We were a broken priesthood, unsavory salt, lamps unoiled and unlit.

The God pulse kept life at a one horse pace. No more cars sped the motor ways. Yet lights and internet were back. We had the telephone and Skype. At the beginning of August another God pulse rendered all the guns in the world useless. Scientists claimed it was some sort of worldwide chemical reaction that rendered gun powder inert.

The world’s answer to this latest set back was to begin training soldiers, statesmen and settlers in the old-fashioned art of warfare. Towns formed militia trained in offensive horseback riding, archery and swordcraft.

Meanwhile my congregation began to dwindle under the influence of a chronic spiritual indigestion created by sermons over-spiced with Hell and having no savor of Heaven.

We held our monthly board meeting on the last Thursday in August.

“The other churches have agreed to host them.” Tom Morgan said.

Tom was a towny who had never gotten over high school football. The idea he was laying before us for consideration was attractive to him because it involved learning to hit people. The town militias were looking for recruits. They had offered themselves as consultant- trainers for our congregation in exchange for our community’s commitment to the cause. The fact that we didn’t really know what the cause was didn’t seem to concern the board.

I sat silent.

“It’s obvious you are skeptical Pastor,” Tom returned to my reticent stare.

When I did not answer, he continued, “You are the one who is always talking about the vengeance of God. Well aren’t we His vessels…His temple? Can’t you see that we have to be ready should He choose to use us as vessels of that vengeance?”

That night the board voted to become a militia inclusive church, Tom called it igniting a fire in our sanctuary a fire that would fill our coffers. I saw it as an ice storm on the hearts of our people. I realized I had opened the front door to those cold north winds.

After the meeting, alone in my office,  I wept my first tears since the trial. I did not cry for my mother or for Anna or for Silhouette. I wept for what had been stolen from me. I wept because I realized it had been taken long before my house lost power only I had never realized it was missing. Sometime long before God pulsed I had given up Jesus. I had been content to operate my life with the fire of man-made religion. All the light and prosperity of America before the black out had blinded me to the truth of that. Only darkness could reflect what I had become. Seeing it now in the shadow of the militia church I was  being asked to lead made me realize that if I kept on this pathway I would become Tyson.

I repented.

The computer hummed a Skype call. I clicked the video link. My sister popped up from her home in Holland.

She didn’t wait for a greeting, “Jerome have you seen the news?”

“About what?”

“Israel.”