The Visitation Part 39

The thought chilled me. "I don't want to end up like him."

"So how did he end up the way he is?"

"The same way I got where I am, to hear him tell it."

"That's spooky."

The waitress checked back. "Everything okay here? Can I get you anything?" The food was great and we were fine. She made her exit.

"So how are things with you?" I asked.

"Better." She smiled a whimsical smile. "Remember that list of three items from our first meeting?"

I probed my memory. "You and your congregation aren't getting along, Brandon Nichols isn't Jesus . . . and Michael the Prophet is your son."

"The third one is still a problem, but the first two . . ." For a moment she looked at the falls outside the window. "I'm moving into an irreversible situation. Jesus has become an issue for me, and some-not all-in the congregation don't want me going there." She smiled. "Still, like it or not, I'm there. I'm starting to address him by name, starting to view my faith as a relationship. I'm sure you know what I mean."

I tried not to fully express my joy lest I embarra.s.s her in public. "I know what you mean."

"Travis, I've been to seminary. I've been an ordained minister for ten years, and I was married to an ordained minister for fourteen. Gabe and I did all we could to bring out the best in people, but- it's one of those things you only see looking back-there was always an evasive, missing element: relationship. Jesus was a religious abstraction, a historical figure we discussed and debated but didn't know." She looked around the room. "Some of my parishioners would make an issue of my having dinner with an evangelical, fundamentalist, Pentecostal whatever-you-are, but they'd be missing the point. It's not my church or your church or which tradition is right or how many candles we light-it's knowing Jesus for who he is."

Oh, I was enjoying this. "Preach on, sister."

She preached on, leaning so low toward me that her earrings almost went in her spinach. "And I think that's Justin Cantwell's problem. Plenty of church, but no relationship." She settled back in her chair and thought a moment, the white, cascading falls reflected in her gla.s.ses. "Maybe Michael's problem too."

"But . . ." I really wanted to ease her pain. "There could be a new beginning here, a new twist to the story."

She gave a weak smile. "Let's hope so. Who knows? Maybe if Michael's mother knows the real Christ, she can somehow wean him from a false one."

I smiled at her. "I'll concur with that."

She abruptly switched subjects. "So how long did you pastor in Antioch?"

"About fifteen years."

She leaned back as if for a better view and said, "Tell me about it."

"Oh, there's not much to tell. . . ."

"How'd you wind up in Antioch in the first place?"

I closed my eyes and could see the memory playing through my mind like an old home movie. Some memories just never fade. . . .

IT WAS A CALLING that made no practical sense. Marian was working at her company in Los Angeles and doing well. I had my teaching degree and some great prospects for employment in elementary education. Our budget was finally starting to look healthy. We'd moved to a bigger apartment and bought new furniture. We even had a second car.

And then Dad called. Some folks wanted to start a Pentecostal Mission church in a little eastern Washington town called Antioch. He just thought I might like to pray about that. No pressure; he was just letting me know. I said I'd pray about it, and I did-"Dear Lord, I hope they find somebody"-and immediately put the subject aside. It came back. Sitting in our living room and hearing the police helicopter circling the neighborhood for the fifth straight night got me thinking about living in a quiet place and being a pastor again. Then I thought of Northwest Mission. No way, I thought. Never again.

I mentioned Dad's call to Marian. "They're dreaming," I said.

"Maybe not," she answered, but said nothing more.

A week later, a voice from my past called: Brother Smith, the dean of men when I was in Bible college. He now held a position with the Northwest District of the Pentecostal Mission, and noticed how I'd taken pains to maintain my credentials. Perhaps I'd be interested in taking a new church in Antioch, Washington.

"Well who's running it now?" I asked. I didn't want another territorial battle with somebody already there.

"n.o.body," he said. "You'll have to run the whole show, start it from the ground up. It'll be your church, Travis. It'll be your vision." Brother Smith was no stranger to my nature, or my ill.u.s.trious ministry career thus far. He knew I'd find the opportunity tantalizing.

And I did. My own church! No religious machinery already in place. No customs or traditions to fight against, no one to say, "Well that's the way we do things here!" No Sister Marvins, no Brother Rogenbecks. Just Marian and me.

I tried to talk myself out of it, reminding myself that for the first time in our marriage we had some stability, some hope for a normal life. But the more I talked to the Lord and myself-aloud, pacing about the apartment-the more stirred up I got and I couldn't sit still. "It'll never work," I told the mirror. "Would it work?" I asked the Lord.

What about Marian? She had a good job with a great salary and chance for advancement. I couldn't ask her to move to Antioch, Washington! I looked for Antioch on a map. It was marked with the tiniest little circle available. She'd never go for it.

Brother Smith gave me some phone numbers in Antioch. I made some calls and got some details.

I knelt by our bed and prayed some more. After I rose from my knees, I started preaching to the empty apartment. I already had a great idea for my first sermon. I'd talk about relationships, I thought. We didn't have a big city church, but we had each other, and that was what mattered!

Oh brother. What's Marian going to think?

"Lord, if this is your will, then speak to Marian's heart. Give her a peace. No, not peace. Make her excited! Make her want to do it!"

I was excited. The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. I couldn't wait for Marian to get home.

I was out of school and still waiting on a steady job, so I was pulling my weight by fixing dinner every night. Marian would scribble out instructions each morning and I'd give it my best shot. That night, when she got home, I served up pork roast and stir-fried vegetables over rice, and brought up the subject of Antioch.

"How many are in the church now?" she asked.

"Well, I talked to a guy named Avery Sisson. Right now there's him and his wife and their four kids."

She held her fork in midair. "And?"

"That's it. Right now there's no Pentecostal Mission church in that town."

"Why should there be?" She wasn't trying to be difficult. It was a fair question.

My answer was just as fair, I think. "I don't know. According to Avery, there isn't another Spirit-filled church in Antioch, and according to Brother Smith, the district thinks it's time to get a church started there. Avery's looked at a church building. It used to be an old Congregational church, but now the guy next-door owns it. He says we can rent it or buy it from him."

"And what would we do for a living?"

"Avery says I can work for his brother in construction until I get a teaching job. Antioch has a grade school and a high school."

She took another bite of stir-fried vegetables, chewed a while, thought a while, and then said, "What are you feeling, T. J.? What's in your heart?"

I looked down at my plate, a little reticent. "I think maybe I'd like to find out more . . . you know, think about it."

She reached over-we always sat close together-and tapped on my heart. "What's in here?"

I took a moment to search out the answer. "I just . . . I just want to do, you know, what Jesus did: I want to go about doing good. Win some souls, change some hearts, bring some light into this world. I want to tell people about Jesus because he's a wonderful Savior and Friend."

"You think G.o.d put that in there?"

I actually got choked up. "Since I was a kid."

She gave me that smile that always made me feel like a conqueror, and then she rose and hugged me from behind. "Then we'd better check it out."

MR. FRAMER owned the building, and met us there. "It needs a little fixing up. It hasn't been used for a church in fifteen years."

Standing there on Elm Street with Avery Sisson, his wife, Joan, and Marian, I saw only future potential, not present condition. The plywood over the windows, the paint peeling off the lap siding, the wrinkled, moss-covered roofing didn't discourage me at all. This was an adventure, a vision to be fulfilled.

"How's the roof?" Marian asked.

"It leaks," said Framer.

"What about plumbing?" I asked.

"Just a sink in the bas.e.m.e.nt and no toilet. There's an outhouse out back."

"Any pews?"

"Burned 'em. There's nothing in there but a bunch of lockers."

The old chapel sat forlornly in the middle of an unmowed field, looking as discarded and neglected as the rusting harrower, burned-out van, and immovable old bulldozer that sat in the gra.s.s alongside it.

Mr. Framer led us through the gra.s.s and weeds to the front steps. "That bulldozer belongs to my son. He can come and move it if you want. I don't know where that harrower came from."

"What happened to the van?"

"Kids set it on fire. I was hoping to sell it, but now . . ."

The front door sounded like it hadn't been opened in a while. Inside, Mr. Framer turned on the lights-the building did have electricity and four simple chandeliers hanging from the vaulted ceiling. It was cold in there. It smelled musty. The floor was old tongue-and-groove planking painted gray.

All we could see was lockers. Stacks of them. Rows of them. Ugly, green battered lockers.

"My son got these lockers when they tore down the old high school. I don't know what he was planning on doing with 'em, but they've been sitting in here for eight years and I'll be happy to get rid of 'em."

I squeezed through the lockers to the front and found the platform and the square footprint of unpainted planking where the pulpit used to stand. I stood on that spot and looked back at my congregation-three people and maybe Mr. Framer, standing among the lockers. I could see pews in that room and a hundred people filling them. I could see sunlight coming through the windows, feel the warmth of the oil stove, and hear the sound of singing. I could see people kneeling at the front pews and at the foot of the platform. There were Bibles and hymnals in every row, and boxes of Kleenex up front.

And the bell! "Does the bell work?"

Mr. Framer walked to the back of the room and unlooped the rope from its hook on the wall. He gave the bell three gentle yanks to get it rocking, and then we heard it ringing from the steeple outside, clang, clang, clang, like a sound out of history, a sweet, oldtimey voice of hope reawakening in a new generation. Marian broke into a wide grin and clapped.

"Praise G.o.d," I said, and beckoned to Marian. She joined me on the platform and looked out over all those lockers in the yellow light of the chandeliers. "What do you see, Marian?"

"We could put the piano over there. And maybe we could get some carpet to run up the middle and sides. We need a cross, a big cross to go on that wall. What about cla.s.srooms?"

Mr. Framer looked at us funny. "It's got a bas.e.m.e.nt with a sink, that's all."

We went down the steep, narrow stairs. The bas.e.m.e.nt wasn't much more than a crawls.p.a.ce barely high enough to stand in. It was dark and tomblike, smelled of earth and dead mice, and the floor timbers hung low above our heads, festooned with spider webs.

"We could divide this into four, maybe five cla.s.srooms," I envisioned.

"Where are we going to put the bathrooms?"

"There's an outhouse out back," Mr. Framer reminded us.

I tried the sink. The water came out a rusty brown. "We could fit a kitchen in here, I suppose."

"It's going to be a lot of work!"

"All in good time. A building does not a church make. We could meet in our home while we're fixing this place up."

"As soon as we get a home."

We could read each other's eyes. This was it. We had to be here. This was where G.o.d wanted us.

"We'll take it."

"WELL, it needs a lot of fixing up, but if you want to put the work into it, I'll count that as rent."

To this day I'm not sure what it was, a storage shed or an old bunkhouse or perhaps a shop. It sat out behind Mrs. Whitfield's place between her barn and her chicken coop, roughly ten feet deep and forty feet long, with a sagging shed roof, three doors, eight four-paned windows in the front and four in the back. It had shiplap siding on the outside, and on the inside, bare studs and the backside of the shiplap. It was divided into three rooms, all cluttered with farm machinery, engine parts, old lumber, poultry feeders and brooders, and broken bales of straw. The middle room had a toilet and sink. The wiring was exposed and very basic: a bare light bulb in each room and maybe an outlet or two nailed to the bare studs.

The roof was good. Mrs. Whitfield had it redone just a few years ago. The floor was good-as much as I could see under all the junk.

"What do you think?" I asked Marian.

She cringed, and then she gave the place her best try. "That could be the living room. This could be the kitchen, and maybe we could put a wall in here to make this the bathroom. We could make a bedroom out of that last room, but we'll have to put in a closet."

"Dad'll help us. If it's church, he's in."

"My dad'll help too. He loves doing things for his kids."

Avery nodded confidently. "One month and you won't know the place."

I turned to Mrs. Whitfield. "We'll take it!"

WE WERE STAYING with the Sissons, sleeping on a borrowed hide-a-bed in their garage and sharing two bathrooms with Avery, Joan, and their four kids. Our small, apartment-sized collection of furniture and almost everything else we owned was locked in a rented storage s.p.a.ce in Spokane. We would be living in a renovated shack between a barn and a chicken coop, and pastoring a church without a usable building for who-knew-how-long. Neither one of us had gainful employment and we had only three to four months of savings.

But we were the happiest we'd been in five years of marriage.

22.