The Visitation

by Frank Peretti

  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 God,” 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 classrooms?”

  Mr. Framer looked at us funny. “It’s got a basement with a sink, that’s all.”

  We went down the steep, narrow stairs. The basement wasn’t much more than a crawlspace 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 classrooms,” 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 God 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 space 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

  MARIAN AND I pastored in Antioch for fifteen years. We lived in five different houses, worked at ten different jobs. I didn’t draw a full-time salary from Antioch Pentecostal Mission until we’d been there ten years.

  Antioch Mission began with Avery and Pete Sisson and their families, and we met in Avery and Joan’s living room. Within the year, we moved into the old church building we rented from Mr. Framer, and three years after that we finally got an indoor toilet. We bought that building from Mr. Framer in 1987, the same year Marian and I got burned out of our home. We started our new building in 1990, were approved for occupancy in 1995, and moved in Easter Sunday.

  On my last Sunday in November of 1997, the church was well established in its new building on the west side of town, on a quaint knoll just above the highway. There were one hundred and fifty in the congregation, a bank account in the black, a big yellow bus that ran well, a good youth program, and the church’s name on a fancy, sandblasted sign out front.

  Fifteen years. A journey that felt so long and was over so soon, in a little town few people ever heard of. Fifteen years. Ninety-three souls saved. Twenty-three weddings. Fourteen funerals. A small retirement account, no real estate, a little savings.

  When I left the ministry, I was alone, and wondering what in the world I thought I’d been doing all that time.

  MORGAN AND I declined a dessert but asked for coffee.

  And then she just looked at me, studying me. I regretted sounding so depressed at the end of my recap. My stories tended to end on a blue note these days.

  “Give me some names,” she said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  She gave a half-shrug and picked up her coffee cup. “Just some names. People you remember from those fifteen years. Tell me some stories.”

  JOE KELMER. He was in his fifties, a rancher with five hundred acres south of town. I was working with Pete Sisson’s crew, preparing to pour a slab for a new stable out on his place. Pete, Johnny Herreros, Tinker Moore, and I were knee-deep in a ditch, digging footings and hurling dirt like a chain gang when Joe came out to see how we were doing, his hands in his jeans pockets, his face a little glum. It wasn’t like him. Usually he’d come over to check on our progress and talk so much he’d hinder it.

  “How’s it going?” We told him fine, and Pete said we were hoping to get the steel in and pour by the day after tomorrow.

  “So how’s Joe today?” Pete asked.

  “Oh, not too good,” he replied, sitting on an overturned five gallon bucket. “My bowels ain’t worth the poop that goes through ’em.”

  “What’s the problem?” I expected one of Joe’s typical complaints about the water, his wife’s cooking, or his advancing age.

  “Cancer,” he said. “Just found out this morning.” We stopped digging. “Doc says they’ll probably have to take the whole thing out.”

  We all stood in the ditch, our shovels in our hands, trying to adjust to the news and wondering what we could say.

  “We’ll have to pray for you,” said Pete. “Get old Travis here to lay hands on you and get the Lord to chase that cancer out of there!”

  Oh, thanks a lot, Pete! Set me up, why don’t you?

  But Joe just got up like a tired old man and said, “You’d better keep work
ing. I’d like to see this barn while I’m still around.” Then he left.

  I first met Joe and Emily Kelmer on another project the year before, and immediately returned, more appropriately dressed, for a pastoral call. It turned out they considered themselves Catholics, meaning that was their background, but they never attended mass and had never been inside Our Lady of the Fields. They didn’t have much use for my ministerial side, but they did appreciate my skill with hammer and saw and shovel and said so.

  After Joe gave us the news, I did pray for him. I led the guys in prayer right there in the ditch that day, and Marian and I remembered him in our prayers every evening. I trusted God. There was no way in the world I could predict what the Lord would do, but I trusted him.

  Well, God is never short on surprises. Joe told me he hadn’t been inside a church since the day he and Emily were married, but the very next Sunday, he and Emily came into our little church on Elm Street arm in arm. We’d been meeting in that building for close to three years. The lockers were finally gone. Avery and Pete had recently completed a labor of love: a pulpit, a communion table, and a matching cross for the back wall. For now, we were using any chairs folks could bring from home—folding chairs, lawn chairs, plastic chairs, and dining chairs. Joe and Emily went right to the front row and sat in two green, plastic patio chairs.

  I was leading some opening worship choruses, playing my guitar while Marian played the piano, but I let the others keep singing while I ducked aside and greeted Joe and Emily.

  “Okay, Travis. I’m here,” he said. “You can go ahead and pray for me.”

  I went back to leading the singing, my mind half on what I was doing and half on what I would have to do in a few minutes. It’s easy to pray for colds and flu, final exams, and unsaved loved ones. Most of those things work themselves out in God’s own good time. Colon cancer doesn’t do that. The worship was sweet. Mine was intense.

  “Folks,” I finally said, “a lot of you know Joe and Emily.” Those who did said hi, and Joe and Emily said hi back. “Joe’s here because he needs prayer.”

  Joe stood and faced the thirty or so people who had gathered. “I’m not a religious man. Haven’t had much time for God most of my life. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t there and can’t hear me if I want to talk to him, you know what I mean?”

  “Amen,” some said. “Praise God.”

  “And I’m hoping he won’t mind if I decide to come to him now after waiting so long.”

  He paused, perhaps to gather his resolve, perhaps to corral his emotions. “I have colon cancer. You know how it is, you get sick and you think you’ll get over it and before long you’ve waited too long. The doctor says—” He stopped. Crying was something Joe Kelmer didn’t believe in. He took a breath. “He says they’ll have to take the whole thing out, put me on chemotherapy, pump me full of drugs and whatever. Won’t be able to take a crap like most people—excuse me, I didn’t mean to say it that way.”

  He turned and faced me. “Anyway, I made God a deal. If he takes this cancer from my body, then I’ll give him my attention, first thing, above everything, the rest of my life. If he’ll give me my life, I’ll give it back to him. And that’s about it.”

  I absolutely did not know how this was going to turn out. Joe was either going to have a great reason to serve God or a great reason not to, at least in his thinking, and it was hard to be comfortable about it.

  And then, when he came forward and stood facing me, ready to be prayed for, I couldn’t banish old memories from my mind. I could just see myself standing in front of Andy Smith and Karla Dickens back in the old Kenyon–Bannister days. I could remember the episode with Sharon Iverson, the girl with diabetes who almost died at Christian Chapel.

  Well, Lord, I prayed, you know all about that. You know I don’t want to get into any kind of pretensions or showiness. I didn’t ask for this. You brought it about, and now, here we are, that’s all I know. Here we are.

  Joe was waiting.

  I took my little vial of olive oil from the back of the pulpit and put a drop on Joe’s forehead. “This oil is a symbol of the Holy Spirit,” I told him. “In the Book of James it tells us to anoint the sick with oil and pray, and the Lord will restore the sick. Do you believe that, Joe?”

  He shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

  “Let’s pray for Joe,” I said, beckoning to the Sisson brothers and Bruce Hiddle, my elders, to join me. We laid hands on Joe, and then I prayed. I don’t remember much of my prayer. I said something about Joe wanting a touch from God, and humbling himself in meek petition, and I know I requested that God would just glorify himself in Joe’s body, in the name of Jesus.

  And just like that, it was over. “Thanks for coming, Joe.”

  “Thank you, Travis,” was all he said as he sat down.

  They stayed for the rest of the service, received love and greetings from all of us, and then left.

  Monday morning we were framing up the walls of the new stable and wondering how Joe was doing. He never came out of the house and we didn’t hear a thing from Emily or anyone else. We remembered him in prayer at lunch time.

  Tuesday, it was the same thing. We watched the house to see if any cars were gone, and one was. Maybe Joe was in the hospital. Maybe he was in for tests, chemotherapy, or even surgery to have his colon removed. We couldn’t find out.

  Wednesday morning, after we’d put in about an hour, Joe came out to see us, his hands in his jeans pockets, his cowboy hat set firmly on his head.

  “Hey Joe,” I said, “how’s it going?”

  He looked straight at me, that old Joe Kelmer half-smile on his face, and said, “Guess who doesn’t have cancer anymore?”

  The silence that fell over us was just as long and awkward as when we first heard the bad news.

  I was being cautious, I guess. I actually said, “Who?”

  Joe gave his chest two little taps with his thumb.

  We were amazed. That’s all there was to it. “You’re kidding!” “Praise God!” “Are you sure?” “What’d the doctor say?”

  “Went in on Monday.” He laughed. “I told the doc something was feeling different all of a sudden and he got me right in like it was an emergency. They about took me apart trying to find something wrong. They spent two days at it and—” He gave his hands a quick wave like an umpire signaling safe. “It’s gone. I’m clean! They can’t figure it out. But I know.”

  We couldn’t believe it. We looked at each other.

  He almost touched noses with me. “Jesus healed me. He answered your prayer, and he answered mine.” He backed off and addressed all of us. “So you boys might want to knock off for a while. Emily’s got some coffee on and we can microwave some cinnamon rolls. We’re gonna give our lives to Jesus. You just tell us what to do.”

  When the apostle Paul told the Philippian jailer “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved, you and your whole household,” his words could have applied perfectly to Joe and his family. On Wednesday, Joe and Emily knelt in their living room with me, Pete, Johnny, and Tinker, and received Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. On Friday, Joe and Emily’s daughter, Claudia, and her husband, Nate, knelt in the same living room and turned their lives over to Jesus.

  On Sunday, Joe and Emily sat in the same green, plastic chairs, and Claudia and Nate sat right next to them. Their son, Larry, and his wife, Shirley, had come from Oregon to fill out the row, and they dedicated their lives to Christ that morning.

  Joe was not a shy man, and if you bought a horse from him or sold him feed or asked him directions or called to sell him a magazine subscription or just pumped some gas for his truck, you heard about Jesus and what Jesus had done for him. He wasn’t one to debate or hard sell, but it was hard to argue with his testimony. Norm Barrett, the diesel mechanic, along with his wife and three kids, came to the Lord because of Joe Kelmer. Bud Lundgren, our permanent guitar player, got saved while he and Joe were out bass fishing, and Bud’s wife, Julie, our perma
nent saxophone player, got saved while shopping with Emily. The Barretts and the Lundgrens shared Jesus with other friends, some of them got saved and shared with their friends, and for a while we had ourselves a nice little revival rippling through town.

  And it all started with Joe Kelmer.

  BRUCE HIDDLE. He was a good-looking guy in his thirties, an electrical engineer for Washington Water Power. He had a sweet wife named Annie and two cute kids, Jamie and Josh. In May of 1990 he displayed a quiet peace and faith in the Lord that became an example to the rest of us.

  Bruce and his family were returning from a visit with Annie’s folks in Electric City, driving a long, monotonous two-lane late at night. Bruce was at the wheel, Annie was on the passenger side, the kids were secured in child seats in the back.

  The last thing Bruce remembers was the oncoming headlights of a large vehicle, most likely a truck. There was nothing amiss. The truck was in its own lane. They passed each other, going opposite directions.

  And then Bruce woke up in a daze, in the dark, his body numb, slumped against his shoulder restraint. The kids in the back seat were screaming. Blood was streaming from his forehead and dripping off his chin. Beads of shattered windshield lay like gravel on the seats, in his lap, on top of the dashboard. The car was leaning precariously, apparently in a gully beside the highway. He reached for Annie, but felt rough wood. A twelve-inch log had come through the windshield and now lay where Annie’s head and shoulders should have been. He twisted around, trying to see the kids. They were spattered with blood, flesh, and Annie’s blonde hair.

  A logging truck had lost part of its load just as the two vehicles passed. A log, perfectly timed and aimed, went through the windshield of Bruce’s car, missing Bruce and killing his wife. The truck driver pulled over and became incoherent when he saw what his lost load had done. Another motorist saw the wreck and went in search of a telephone.

  I was working as dispatcher for the volunteer fire department that night and took the emergency call. I sent out the dispatch, telling the volunteers there’d been a fatality accident, but I had no idea the accident involved a family from my church. When the aid crew arrived and radioed back, I got the news. By that time, Bruce and the kids had been trapped in their car for over an hour. Numb with shock, I remained at my post, coordinating communications and crews until Pete Sisson burst into the station and bumped me from my chair. “I’ll handle it. Get going.”