“Do you see why I’ve been so quiet, what I mean when I say I have a lot on my mind?” Christopher asked finally.
I nodded.
“I’ve been talking to the Lord about all of this too—even though I haven’t been talking to you about it as much as maybe I should have,” he added with a smile. “But so far there just haven’t been any answers.”
“There will be,” I said. “I have confidence in your ability to hear the Lord when he speaks.”
“I’ve been trying to listen. But if he’s speaking, his voice is awfully soft.”
“He’ll show you what to do when the time comes.”
“Would you pray with me?”
“Of course.”
We quieted ourselves as we sat there close together. I was so thankful that we’d talked. Just getting it out in the open helped me feel so much better. But I knew that simply talking wouldn’t help Christopher through the predicament of uncertainty. He needed to know what to do.
“Father,” said Christopher softly, “we come to you in some perplexity concerning the future. But you are our Father, and our concerns are really no concerns at all once we lay them in your hands. So I do that at this moment—I lay my uncertainties and anxieties and questions and concerns in your hands. Take care of us, Lord. Do with us what you will. And show me what you would have me do. Until that time, let me honor you by serving those around me with the loving heart of a friend and the willing hands of a servant. Thank you for caring for us, Lord. Amen.”
What was there for me to add that would not have been mere words? Christopher had prayed what there was to pray.
Quietly, therefore, all I added was a soft amen of my own.
Chapter 21
Christopher and Alkali Jones
Immediately when Christopher came into the house one evening a day or two later, we all knew he had big news.
He’d been gone most of the afternoon. He’d told me he was going into town, but when he wasn’t back by suppertime I was beginning . . . not to worry exactly because I knew I had nothing to be anxious about, but to wonder what he’d been up to for so long.
We were all sitting at the supper table with his empty plate vacant when we heard his horse ride up. Then a few minutes later, when he burst through the door.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“From that big smile on his face, I’d say he’s been up to no good,” said Pa with a grin of his own. It was so good to see them both smiling at the same time again.
Christopher took off his hat, hung it on the peg, then walked over slowly to the table and sat down, everybody watching him, waiting for him to say something.
“Well, are you gonna tell us or aren’t you?” said Zack finally. “The rest may be able to sit there like cats has got their tongues, but I want to know what’s up.”
Christopher threw back his head and laughed, then began dishing food onto his plate from the bowls as I handed them to him.
“I spent the afternoon with Alkali Jones,” he said.
“Alkali—nothing’s wrong, is there?” asked Pa. Mr. Jones had hardly been around all week.
“Nothing at all. Quite the contrary, in fact,” answered Christopher, taking a bite of roast beef. “If you’ll all just go back to your suppers and let me get a little food into this hungry stomach of mine, I’ll tell you all about it.”
We all began eating again, and gradually Christopher filled us in on his visit with Mr. Jones.
“A couple of weeks ago,” he began, “Alkali began to be on my mind. We’d been working close together up at the mine one afternoon. We had talked some, but it wasn’t that particularly—nothing either of us said. It was just that I began to see him in a new light, began to see him as a person just like me.”
He paused and thought for a moment, then smiled.
“You know how it is sometimes,” he went on. “You’re acquainted with someone for years, but all the while they remain impersonal to your eyes. You never see inside them. Then all of a sudden, one day you look and behold them in a new way, see expressions on their face that pierce your heart, maybe see a vulnerability or a loneliness in their eyes. You find yourself amazed that you didn’t see them this way before.”
As he spoke, Christopher looked around at the rest of us. There were a few nodding heads, and it was clear we knew exactly what he was talking about. We’d all had exactly that same experience with people we’d known. Almeda especially was listening intently. She loved Christopher so much. Sometimes when he spoke like this, she would start crying, just from being so happy that I had a sensitive, caring man as my husband.
“Every time this happens to me,” Christopher continued, “I find new places opening up in my heart for the person God is suddenly revealing to me. What else can you say but that all at once you love that person . . . maybe, for the first time, a little bit like Christ himself loves him.
“Well, that’s how I felt toward Alkali. I had always thought he was an interesting old character. But now I just suddenly found that I loved him in a new and deeper way than before.
“When a love like that blossoms in your heart, it changes everything about how you relate and interact. When you love someone, you can’t ignore them or behave impersonally to them. You immediately want to reach out and help and find ways to go out of your way for them.
“That’s what I wanted to do for Alkali. For the next couple of days I couldn’t find enough to do for the dear man! I was nearly obsessed with trying to find ways . . . just to love him as Jesus would if he had been working alongside him. Of course I had to keep what I felt mostly inside, or else he’d have thought I was doting on him. I didn’t want him thinking I thought he couldn’t hold up his end of the work.”
Christopher paused and took a few bites while we all waited for him to continue.
“Then that evening came when you, Drum, spoke about the future of the mine, and Alkali said we ought to try in a different direction. And ever since . . . well, it’s no secret that we’ve all been wondering within ourselves what the future does hold.”
He paused, and a few nods went around the table.
“Anyway, since then Alkali hasn’t been around much. In fact, there were three or four days when we didn’t lay eyes on him at all, and I began to wonder what the future held for him, too—not in relation to the mine, but in relation to God.
“As I lay in bed two nights ago, I found myself praying for him again. As I did, the thought struck me that he was an old man. I felt the Lord might be speaking to me, telling me that perhaps Alkali didn’t have that much time left.
“‘Is that why you opened my eyes to him, Lord?’ I asked.
“But I didn’t sense any answer coming, only that he was my brother and that I was to continue to love him.
“Then yesterday—you remember, Drum,” said Christopher, glancing toward Pa, “Alkali showed up again to work, and we were all up at the mine. But then about midway through the morning he said he wasn’t feeling well. Then Nick kidded him and even tried to coax one of his stories out of him, but he couldn’t even get a chuckle out of him. Not too long after that, Alkali went home for the rest of the day.”
Pa nodded, a deep look of concern now on his face. The supper had by now grown cold, and nobody was thinking about food by this time.
“He was coughing pretty bad, too,” said Tad.
“Yeah, now that we’re talking about it,” added Zack, “he did look more than a mite paler since we’d seen him last. I noticed that he seemed more tuckered out than usual.”
“I noticed, too,” said Christopher. “And as I was praying for him last night, I realized that those are the kinds of things you just can’t ignore unless you want to wake up one day and find out that you waited too long . . . and by then it’s too late. That’s when I decided—right when I was praying—that today I was going to go see him and talk about some important things with him.”
Christopher paused and took a deep breath, suddenly conscious,
I think, of how long he’d been talking and wondering if we were getting bored with it.
Becky got up to get the coffee. A glance around the table was all Christopher needed to make him continue. Every one of us loved Alkali Jones, too, and we were anxious to know what had gone on between them.
“So I went to see him out at his cabin this afternoon, and that’s where I’ve been ever since.”
“How’d it go?” asked Pa.
“What happened?” asked Almeda almost at the same instant.
Christopher laughed.
“He invited me in, surprised to see me. He’d been lying down and was only half dressed. The place was a mess—”
“Always is,” put in Pa.
“The sweet old man!” said Almeda, and I could tell the emotion of Christopher’s story had gripped her.
“He offered me a chair, the only one in the room I could see, and he sat down on the edge of his bunk. It was cold in there, and I noticed there wasn’t a fire in his stove. The day was warm enough, but you know how the cabin sits in the shade. So I asked if he’d like me to build him one. He said he’d be much obliged. He’d have done it himself, he said, but he was just too bushed, and he’d been in bed most of the day. I asked if he’d had anything to eat. He said he hadn’t.”
“Oh, but why didn’t he—” began Almeda, but then stopped and turned away, her eyes filling with tears. She put a handkerchief to her face and was silent.
“He had some wood, so I built a good fire, and while it was warming the place up, I went outside and chopped up a good supply from his logs into smaller pieces and brought enough inside to last him a couple of weeks or so. He followed me out—he didn’t have any shoes on, just socks—and we chatted while I chopped up the wood. Then we went back inside, and I put together a pot of what I could find from what he had into a soup and set it on the warming stove. We chatted some more, but I wanted to get some food into him before getting down to the business of why I had come.
“People can’t concentrate too well about serious things when they’re hungry. That’s one thing I have always noticed about Jesus in the Gospels—that he was always intensely practical about food.
“Anyway, after an hour or so, after we’d shared a couple bowls of my watery soup, and walked around a little outside together, and when the cabin was warm and comfortable, Alkali and I sat down again, me in the chair, he on the edge of his bunk, and I finally got around to the reason why I felt God had prompted me to come visit him.”
Chapter 22
A Disarmingly Direct Question
Since Christopher was there and I wasn’t, I’m going to let him tell you about the rest of his conversation with Mr. Jones in his own words.
“Alkali,” I said as he and I sat there, “tell me about the condition of your spiritual life.”
He just sat there, staring at me with a bewildered expression for a few seconds, not knowing what to think.
“I ain’t sure there’s anything much to tell,” he said finally. Then he laughed. You know how he laughs?
(Here I can’t help intruding, because now we all laughed as we listened to Christopher.
“Hee, hee, hee!” laughed Tad, and it was a pretty good imitation.)
“I ain’t even sure I got what you call a spiritual life,” Alkali added.
“Everyone’s got both a physical life and a spiritual life, Alkali. Including you. It’s just that some people’s spiritual side is mostly asleep, so all they’re aware of is the physical.”
“I reckon that’s likely to be me,” he said.
“Then, let me ask you something,” I said. “Have you ever had any kind of personal spiritual experience?”
“How do ye mean?”
“Have you ever had an experience of salvation?”
“Ye mean at one o’ them there revivalist meetin’s—gone up t’ the front cryin’ and wailin’-like, an’ fallin’ down on yer knees?”
“I don’t necessarily mean that,” I said.
“Good thing,” he replied, “’cause I ain’t never done nothin’ like that, that’s fer sure. Not sure I want to, neither.”
“No, I meant something more personal than that. It might not have had anything to do with a church service at all.”
“Ye got me a mite confused there, Braxton. Ye talkin’ about religion that ain’t got t’ do with church? Next thing I know, ye’ll be tellin’ me it ain’t got t’ do with heaven neither.”
I couldn’t help chuckling. “Actually, Alkali, that’s true,” I said. “If the Bible can be trusted, being a Christian doesn’t have much to do with heaven. It’s about how we live here and now.”
“Ye don’t gotta be religious t’ git t’ heaven?”
“Not according to what Jesus said. All he spoke of was what we do, how we live—whether that spiritual part of us is awake and making a difference in how we live . . . right now.”
“Not sure I ever heard o’ such kind o’ religion.”
“I’m not talking about religion at all, Alkali, but about God and you . . . and whether the two of you’ve ever had dealings together.”
He just looked at me without saying a word, so I went on.
“Have you ever felt like God was talking to you?” I said. “Have you ever prayed when you were by yourself? Have you ever thought about whether God was up there or not and wondered what he might think about you, Alkali Jones?”
“I reckon I prayed a time or two.”
“Did God ever answer your prayers?”
“Guess not that I could tell. Reckon he coulda, but I just didn’t know it.”
“You’ve never felt that God was talking personally to you?”
“Didn’t figure he talked personally t’ folks nowadays. Figured that was fer Moses and them long-time-ago fellers.”
“He speaks today, too,” I said, “though in different ways. You ever wondered about whether God was up there or not?”
“Sure, ain’t ever’body?”
“I think so. You ever wondered what he thinks about you?”
That one caught him off guard, and he had to ponder it a while.
“I ain’t sure,” he said finally. “I ain’t exactly thought about it jist like yer sayin’. Though when a body does somethin’ wrong, ye can’t help wonderin’ if the Lord’s gonna strike ye down.”
“You think that’s what God’s like, waiting to strike folks down when they do things wrong?”
“I reckon. Ain’t it?”
“Not if what the Bible says is true.”
“Huh . . . what about hell an’ all that there brimstone stuff?”
“That’s in the Bible, all right, but not when God’s character is being described. The Bible says that God is loving and kind and good. Jesus says he’s our Father, not some great monster who’s waiting to pounce on us when we do something wrong.”
“But I know he don’t like it when folks does bad.”
“Of course he doesn’t. But not because he’s waiting to punish them, but because he knows they’ll be happier if they’re good. Punishing people isn’t the first thing on his mind.”
“So, what is?”
“God wants to love his creatures. That’s what he wants to do more than anything. He made us, after all, for no other reason than that.”
“Than what?”
“To love him and to be loved by him. But if we keep the spiritual part of us asleep, there’s no way he can show us that he loves us.”
“Well, how does a body wake it up?” he asked.
“That’s the personal experience of salvation I asked you about before. You’ve heard about being born again, haven’t you?”
“I reckon I heard about it. Don’t reckon I know much what it is, though.”
“It’s nothing more than waking up that part of you that’s asleep, that spiritual part of you that God put inside every man and woman. When he made us, he put a little piece of himself way down inside us. The trouble is, most folks don’t know he put it there. When most fol
ks think of life, they think all it means is being physically alive. They don’t realize there’s an even more important part of life waiting down inside them to be awakened—be brought into life, just like being born.”
“Never heard nothin’ about all that.”
“Most people haven’t.”
“Why don’t God just wake it up? Why does he put it inside folks, sleepin’ like that? Don’t seem t’ make much sense. Seems like God’d know better’n that.”
I couldn’t help laughing. It makes me chuckle again just to tell about it. Alkali was so honest about it that he took me off guard.
“I’m not exactly sure, Alkali,” I answered him, “but I think it’s because he doesn’t want to do the waking up himself. He wants to give us a share in the waking-up process. He wants us to wake ourselves up.”
Alkali didn’t say anything for a minute or two, and I could tell he was thinking hard about everything I’d said. I just waited. Finally he spoke up again.
“All this time,” he said, “I been around plenty of folks that was religious enough. Even ol’ Drum got religion hisself after his family come and after he got hisself hitched. There ain’t no mistakin’ that he’s been a different feller since then. The whole town sees it and respects him fer it. So maybe that’s what yer sayin’ about wakin’ up that religious side o’ ye. An’ I reckon, watching ’em all like that, I’d have t’ say it looked kinda nice t’ me, but no one ever told me how to get in on it myself.”
“I’ve seen you plenty of times in church,” I said. “What do you think when you sit there listening to talk of spiritual things?”
“Yeah, I been in church plenty o’ times, and the Rev. is pretty good. I mostly like what he says, but I still always kinda thought o’ myself as a visitor.”
“Why do you go, then?”
“Don’t know. T’ see folks, I reckon. Guess I figured ye was supposed to go t’ church. Don’t get me wrong, I like what I seen happ’nin’ in Drum and Nick, though at first I weren’t none too sure. I always hoped when the time came for me t’ pass over t’ the other side, I’d be right with the Lord and that he’d have favor on an ol’ coot like me. But I wasn’t never too sure.”
The Braxtons of Miracle Springs Page 9
