The Visitation (28 page)

“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. . . .

T
HERE 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 like 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.

She was with someone.

His name was Loren Bullard—a junior, a superjock, at least a foot taller than me and that much wider around the chest. A starter on the basketball and football teams. A weightlifter. He played classical piano with scale runs, rapid arpeggios and vast chord extensions. He drove a great car. And he was a nice guy, really. He was bold and confident, devoted to the Lord, and wanted to be a missionary.

I stood there a moment, watching them go down the brick walkway across the campus, talking and laughing, just the two of them. They were a charming couple. Marian had made a good choice, I had to admit.

Which didn’t say much for me. My credentials—shipyard-working, bar-playing banjo picker—looked pretty dim next to the glimmer of Loren Bullard’s.

Well, sometime I would say hi to her, just to say hi. Perhaps she would remember me.

A WEEK OR SO LATER
, my roommate, Ben, and I were trying to play a few tunes in the Hub—that was what we called S. J. Marquardt Hall, the place where we bought snacks, got our mail, and socialized. Ben had learned to play guitar from a Peter, Paul, and Mary songbook and had no idea how to play a bluegrass rhythm. I wanted to play Foggy Mountain Breakdown, but for that song to work, the guitar has to be going
boom-chunk boom-chunk
. All I could get out of Ben was
sling-ading-adinga
and it sounded awful. I set the banjo aside, took the guitar again, showed him again, talked it through again. “Okay, bass string first, then brush
down, then alternate bass string, then brush down—”

And then she came in. Not since the hospital had I seen her so close. She had her hair in a ponytail this time, and wore a colorful blouse with a denim skirt, kind of like a cowgirl. Our eyes met and, having no words come to mind, I smiled.

She stopped and looked at me, and I could see recognition working its way into her expression. “Have we met before?”

“Sharon Iverson,” I said softly, knowing the delicacy of the subject matter. “Christian Chapel. The hospital.”

She put her hand over her mouth and replied with wide eyes, “You look so different!”

“Well, so do you.” And I meant every word.

She shook my hand. “What was your name?”

“Travis Jordan. This is Ben Springfield.”

We exchanged introductions and majors: Ben and I were both Bible majors. I was heading for pastoral ministry, Ben felt called to missions. Marian was undecided as yet, but leaning toward a business major.

She noticed Ben’s guitar still in my hands. “That’s right! You said you were a musician! I
love
the guitar!”

Ben grinned at me.

“We were just, uh, playing some bluegrass,” I said.

Her eyes brightened. “Bluegrass!”

And then
he
came in. The whole room seemed to sink under the weight of his glory, and he drew attention like a black hole sucking up all the light.

Marian jumped up and hurried toward him. “You’re late!”

“Sorry,” was all he said, moving toward the piano in the corner of the room.

Marian and the other two King’s Carillons followed after him like baby quail after their mother, and gathered around the piano to work out a new song.

Loren Bullard took one look at the sheet music they placed before him and began to pound a veritable symphony out of that old upright—scales, arpeggios, minor sixths, thirteenths, dominant sevenths. The tall girl, Julie, started singing her lead part, then Marian and Chris joined in, and it sounded
better
than good. Conversation in the room stopped. Kids out at the mailboxes came into
the room to see what record was playing.

I turned to Ben. He was watching and listening, his face—and his mind, I suppose—a blank.

I handed him his guitar and reminded him, “Boom-chunk, boom-chunk.”

WINTER QUARTER,
Marian Chiardelli and I finally landed in a class together, Old Testament Survey, and occasionally sat near enough to each other to exchange greetings and how-are-yous. The prof put us on a committee to create a huge banner of an Old Testament time line. She liked my cartoon renderings of Moses and Abraham, and I liked her lettering.