The Frank Peretti Collection

by Frank E. Peretti

  Well, so much for that. What she wanted to see me about I had no idea, but I now had an official, three o’clock appointment with Pastor Elliott. I arrived promptly, parked in front of the Methodist church, and went through the big double doors. A lady in jeans was mopping the floor in the foyer and told me yes, the pastor was in her office, located at the front of the sanctuary, through a door just to the right of the chancel.

  I’d forgotten how classy this old church was, and enjoyed my short walk down the center aisle. This was a building in the old tradition, dark stone on the outside, fancy woodwork and plaster on the inside, with a high, vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows. The pews were stout and hand-carved, the deep red cushions a later improvement. The original floorboards under the carpet had been squeaking in the same places for decades, and overhead were the black iron chandeliers that came by ship and rail from England in 1924—Gabe told me all about it.

  The door to the pastor’s office was open and I could see Reverend Morgan Elliott seated at her desk in a dark suit, white blouse, and dark blue scarf. Her long, curly hair was pinned back today and she was working intently, her round glasses perched on the end of her nose. Feeling some anxiety, I knocked gently on the doorjamb.

  She looked up and smiled, and then she stood, extending her hand.

  “Hi. Please come in.”

  I shook her hand and took the chair facing her desk. I had no idea how I should conduct myself: As a friend? A neighbor? A fellow professional? Maybe a condemned heretic. I’d just have to wait and see.

  “So how in the world are you?” she asked, setting aside her work and then resting her chin on her fingers.

  “Doing all right.” It was a comfortable, generic kind of answer.

  “How about yourself?”

  She didn’t answer quickly, and her answer wasn’t comfortable for either of us. “I have some things I need to talk with you about.”

  Uh-oh. I once had a vice principal who said exactly those words in exactly that tone of voice. Not knowing whether to expect a chat or a lecture, I ventured, “This is kind of unusual, you and I having a meeting.”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “I’m taking a chance that I’ve read you correctly. If I had this meeting with anyone else, I’d get a party line, predictable answer or no answer at all. But you seem to be in a different place right now.”

  “A different place?”

  She cocked her head to one side and gave an apologetic smile.

  “You faced down Armond Harrison in front of the whole ministerial. You organized a picket protest outside the theater when they showed an X-rated movie. You led a March for Jesus down the highway through town. You were pastoring Antioch Pentecostal Mission long before Gabe and I got here, and we always knew what to expect from you.”

  I caught her point. “Things have changed a little.”

  “I’m guessing you’re on the outside. Things have to look different from out there. Do they?”

  I stared at her, off-balance.

  “Do they?” she asked again.

  I knew the answer, but I was dumbfounded to hear Morgan Elliott asking the question. “Yes. They do. Things look a lot different. Not always in focus, but definitely different.”

  “Then maybe we can compare notes. Things are starting to look different to me too, and I’m not sure what to do about it.”

  She looked at the ceiling and squinted as if seeing something in the distance. “I have this picture in my mind. I’m eighteen, getting ready to leave home, and I’m standing out in the yard in front of my parents’ house in San Jose. I’ve got clothes in a big duffel bag and a guitar in one of those cheap cardboard cases, and I’m leaving, heading out on my own. But I’m looking back toward the front door, and my folks and my brother and sister are standing there, calling to me, beckoning, telling me to come back inside.

  ‘You don’t belong out there, come back inside, you need to stay here.’” She stopped abruptly and asked, “Does any of this sound familiar?”

  Maybe. “Is there more?”

  She looked away, replaying the scene in her mind. “Part of me wants to go back. I mean, it was home. It was secure. I liked living with my folks. It’s not like I was rebellious.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But somehow, I . . .” Abruptly, she reached for a yellow legal pad on her desk. “Maybe we can talk about that later.” She nervously consulted a list she’d scribbled on the yellow pad. “I’ve been wracking my brain all morning—well, for several days, actually— and I’ve narrowed down the topics to three: My church and I aren’t getting along; Brandon Nichols isn’t Jesus . . .” That was two. I sat there waiting. She sighed, looked at the wall, built up her nerve, and gave me the third: “Michael the Prophet is my son.”

  I didn’t react. I couldn’t. I had to hear her say that again. “Excuse me?”

  She looked directly at me. She even leaned into it. “Michael the Prophet—you know, that crazy guy with the shawl and the staff and the cut-off jeans—”

  “And the phony British accent.”

  “That’s the one. Michael is my son. Michael Elliott.”

  Slowly, jarringly, the memory dawned. “I remember you and Gabe talking about Michael. But I never met him.”

  “He didn’t come to Antioch with us. He’d left home by then, and had started his, his wanderings. We got lots of letters and calls, but he never came home again. He had to be . . . out there. He took in about a year of college, then traveled to India to discover himself and got dysentery. On the way back, he had himself baptized in the Jordan River. He’s, well, he’s searching.”

  “And now he’s found Brandon Nichols.”

  She gave a slow, painful nod. “He thinks Brandon Nichols is Jesus. He told me that to my face.”

  I didn’t mean to smile. “And you have a problem with that?”

  She huffed in frustration. “Isn’t that the limit? I guess I’m upset because he’s my son.”

  Now that was fascinating. “Huh.”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  I hesitated to say it.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, we have heard it said that love means you don’t question or challenge another person’s beliefs. But now we have a case in which, because you truly love someone, you don’t want them to be deceived.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So it matters to you what they believe.”

  “And therefore I’m upset that Brandon Nichols is deceiving my son.”

  “How intolerant of you.”

  She nodded. “How very intolerant.” She rested back in her chair, strong emotions just under the surface. “But I know—I know—that Brandon Nichols isn’t Jesus, and if he isn’t Jesus, then someone else must be, and I’m very sorry we never told Michael.

  Pardon me for baring my soul, but I’m haunted by the thought that he believes in Brandon Nichols because there was nothing for him to believe in at home.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “Brandon Nichols isn’t Jesus, and someone else is.”

  She said with a flourish, “Thank you for saying so.”

  We were eye to eye across that desk. “So things are looking different now?”

  She drew a deep breath and stared into the past. “I was comfortable. I had my ministry, my little bag of pet beliefs and nonbeliefs, my own congregation of followers. But now I can’t sit still. I can’t rest. I’m like my son.” She met my eyes again. “I want to know something for sure. Very radical idea, I know. And they—some of the people in my congregation; the old guard, the pillars, the heavy givers—don’t want me to look. They’re afraid of my asking.

  They like the old Morgan, the cheerful little lady who smiled and made them feel good and never ventured further than these four walls.” She added with a bitter note, “The one who preached so much but said so little. They like Brandon Nichols. They don’t see anything wrong with him—just like Michael!” She halted. Her eyes glistened with tears.

  �
��So you’re standing out in the yard again, and Mom and Dad are calling to you to come back.”

  “And I can’t!” she said angrily, her voice cracking. She reached for a facial tissue and removed her glasses to dab her eyes. “Excuse me.”

  I rested back in my chair, stunned that I would have something in common with Morgan Elliott, of all people. “So you’re on the outside too.”

  That touched just the right nerve deep inside her. The tears overflowed, and she chuckled with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She grabbed another tissue and blew her nose. “I’m forty-two, an ordained minister with a congregation—” She stopped, pulled in a deep breath, and spoke in a steadier voice. “And I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself! I can’t go back! I can’t be what I was before, and the people are getting worried and I don’t know what to tell them.”

  “And Brandon Nichols brought all this on?”

  She shook her head. “I was working on it before this. He just pushed it ahead several spaces, that’s all.”

  “He pressed the issue.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well,” I said with a hint of sarcasm, “I know your problem.

  You just need to have a Quiet Time every day; you know, read your Bible and pray.”

  “I do!”

  I scowled. “That’s funny. It always works for everyone else.”

  She caught my drift. “So they tell me. Except I’m taking the Bible too literally.”

  “I’ve been told I’m backslidden.”

  “I’ve been told I’m starting to sound like a fundamentalist.”

  “I need to come back to the Lord.”

  “I need to quit sweating the details and just love everyone.”

  I started laughing. She started laughing. It was like having an inside joke between us, and I could hardly believe it. In that little cubicle in that staid old church in the center of that troubled town, two people who hadn’t laughed in quite a while found something they could chuckle about together.

  “So what can we do about Brandon Nichols?” she asked.

  By now I couldn’t help thinking that God had something brewing. “I guess we’ll know when the time comes.”

  She smiled. “God is here with us, isn’t he? Even on the outside.”

  We prayed, the Reverend Elliot and I. I think it worked. As I left the church, I asked the Lord just what he was doing, and as usual, he left me to figure it out.

  At any rate, I was very glad she called. Glad I came. As she had said, God was with us, even on the outside.

  I hadn’t always felt that way. . . .

  Fourteen

  THERE ARE SMELLS you never forget. Every once in a while I’ll sniff just the right combination of beer and cigarette smoke and immediately recall my short and failing career as a bluegrass musician. I was nineteen going on twenty, and still in a state of mind where what I wanted had to be what the Lord wanted. Consequently, it had to be God’s will for me to be playing in dark taverns with black light posters on the walls and aging waitresses dressed in sequined, low-cut blouses. There had to be some kind of godly mission in playing my banjo until two in the morning while I absorbed cigarette smoke into my clothes.

  Once an uncle asked me what I was doing, and I told him about my band. He asked me, “How many of them have you won to the Lord?”

  I answered honestly, “As many as wanted to be,” which was another way of saying, “None.”

  Our group, the Mountain Victrola, was about as stable as it was godly. The guitar player always had some weird chemical in his brain and a recent message from somewhere unseen. The bass player had a standing offer from another band that made better money, and he owned our PA system. The mandolin player owned the station wagon we used to haul ourselves around, but he was catching flak from his “old lady” and figured he’d have to quit.

  The dobro player was constantly depressed and kept talking about joining up with his brother in a fruit and produce business. We weren’t very good and we weren’t improving, and most of all, we were poor. Fifty bucks a night—for the whole band of five—was not what one would call a starlit stairway.

  There’s a psalm that tells us not to be like a wild donkey that needs to be bridled, and a proverb that says a wicked man will have his fill of his own ways. Mix those two ideas together and you have a good description of my spiritual state the last night I played with that band. We were taking a break, sitting in a booth in the Cedar Tavern in Seattle. It was after midnight, we still had two more forty-minute sets of music to play, and there were about five people there to listen to us. The place was dark and smoky.

  The jukebox was thumping. I could see my underwear glowing through my clothes under the black lights. My friends were smoking, griping about the money, and talking about what they could be doing instead of this. I was sipping from a Coke and pondering the same question.

  Folks have asked me how and when God called me into the ministry, and I’ve never had a definite answer. The way God designed me, I would have ended up in the ministry eventually. I could have wandered around for a few more years pursuing all sorts of dreams and ambitions—music, acting, banjo making, ditch digging—but one overriding fact determined my destiny: I loved the Lord deeply and wanted to serve him. Given that, my being in the ministry was a foregone conclusion and only a matter of time.

  All I had to do was make up my mind, choose the right road, and stay on it. That night at the Cedar Tavern, I did.

  West Bethel College seemed the natural choice. It was strictly a “Bible Institute” when Dad went there, and there was only one, not an East in Wheaton, Illinois and a West near Portland, Oregon.

  It’s where he met Mom, and I still have Dad’s big exhaustive concordance with Mom’s personal note in the front: “To Wayne Travis Jordan upon graduation, May 28, 1948, Bethel Bible Institute.”

  Three of my dad’s brothers graduated from there, and a majority of my cousins. By the time my older brother, Steve, graduated from there in 1971, so many other Jordans had gone there over the years that the professors kept getting Steve’s name mixed up with theirs.

  In the fall of 1973, the profs had to learn the name of still another Jordan. I cut my hair, shaved my beard, bought a new Bible, and signed up. At twenty-one I was a little older than most of my classmates, but at least I’d worked some of the wild donkey out of my system. While my classmates were squirting shaving cream down each other’s pants and putting detergent in the main entry fountain, I just wanted to study.

  And pray. I’d been wandering long enough and I loved being home again, immersed in the Pentecostal culture I’d known since childhood. We called each other “brother” and “sister,” said Praise God and Hallelujah whether things were going well or poorly, raised our hands toward heaven when we worshiped, and spoke in tongues when we prayed. God was free to move among us, and he did. I felt safe here. The presence of God in the chapel services was warm and familiar, and my faith became something I could feel again, something deeply human.

  It was a protected environment. Pentecostal students from all over the country, and some from overseas, left their parents at home and came here to be parented by the college their parents paid for. We had a dress code and a hair code, strict rules governing dating, and required church attendance—you had to file a report every Monday morning. Going to a movie could get you expelled, and as for alcohol and tobacco, you didn’t even want to have the smell on you. We didn’t dance, gamble, swear, stay out late, or make out, and if anyone did, angels told the dean about it every time.

  I didn’t mind the rules. I didn’t agree with all of them, but I didn’t mind them. Shorter hair was easier to manage, I was a guy so it was okay to wear pants, and I liked the church I was attending without fail every Sunday.

  As for romantic inclinations, the dean, the dorm parents, and the school administrators didn’t have to worry about me. I still regarded my love life as something li
ke electroshock therapy for smokers:

  Associate enough pain with it and you can kick the habit.

  Then, much to my surprise, I saw an old acquaintance again.

  Halfway through the fall quarter, a girls’ trio calling themselves The King’s Carillons—back in Bible school, every music group was a King’s this or a Master’s that, besides all the different Maranathas going around—sang their debut number in morning chapel, and they had my undivided attention. For one thing, their style was really pushing the edge. One of the girls was actually patting out the rhythm on her leg, and I think I saw a few heads in the crowd bobbing with the beat. I was certain this song did not come out of our black, shaped-note hymnals.

  But what threw me was the alto standing in the middle. It was Marian Chiardelli, the girl in the blue dress I encountered clear back at Christian Chapel! I wondered why I hadn’t noticed her around campus before this, but taking a good look at her now, I could see she’d changed since our long talk in the hospital waiting room. Her hair was a little longer and had a gentle wave to it, and the silver barrette was gone. Her eyes seemed bigger, and today they were sparkling as the sunlight came through the chapel windows. Her figure was adequately shrouded in a purple dress that met college specs, but it did not escape my notice as being somewhat improved.

  Marian Chiardelli! I couldn’t believe it. I knew this girl . . . sort of. I mean, we had met once. I wondered if she would remember me.

  C. R. Barnsworth, the college president, preached that morning. I don’t remember much of that sermon—just him trying to get us all charged up and repeating the phrase, “fresh oil, fresh oil, fresh oil.” I was too busy maintaining situational awareness as to Marian’s location in the chapel—front row, right side, fourth from the right—and trying to figure out how I might intercept her on the way out, just to say hi.

  C. R. finished, we stood to sing our closing song, Rick Parks, the student body president, said the closing prayer, and we were out of there.

  I’d been sitting halfway back on the left side, in the middle of the pew. She left the chapel through the right front door. I maneuvered, dodged, and weaved through the body traffic, got to that door, and pushed my way outside.