I drove out of Birmingham a little ways to meet my friend. I watched the interstate give way to pine trees. Pine trees gave way to farmland. Farmland gave way to cattle pastures.
Somewhere deep in the sticks, my GPS went to be with the Lord.
It was Sunday morning. I found the little building just where my friend said it would be. He was standing in the parking lot waiting for me, leaning against his car, reading a newspaper.
Families were crawling out of mud-covered vehicles. Little girls wore dresses. Young men wore sport coats.
“Thought you’d never get here,” my friend said.
“I lost phone reception,” I said. “My GPS quit working.”
“Welcome phone purgatory,” he said with a smile. “Why do you think I’m reading a paper?”
We walked inside together. It was an old building. There was no microphone, only wooden ceilings, wooden floors, wooden walls, and wooden pews. America was founded in wooden rooms like this.
I have been to Philadelphia and toured the ancient wooden rooms that hosted
talks between men who were traitors to the Crown. The talks that began a nation, indivisible, with liberty and free online shipping for all. Those rooms looked like this one.
I sat in a pew. I placed my hands in my lap.
Most people in the chapel were white-haired. We sang songs from old hymnals. My friend, his daughter, and I shared a hymnal which was bound with duct tape. There were crayon drawings in the front pages from some hapless hand that doodled in this hymnal long before Calvin Coolidge was born.
After the singing, a 12-year-old girl played the violin for the “message in song.” She played “Shall We Gather at the River?”and did a nice job. Although, the girl’s mother leaned and whispered to me that when her daughter practices each evening the neighbors usually call the authorities to report a dying feline…