Transcendent Kingdom(39)

The sanctuary was quiet. People started looking at their watches, packing up their Bibles, counting down the number of hours they had left until Monday came and work beckoned.

I didn’t move at all. Something came over me. Something came over me, filled me and took hold. I had heard that altar call hundreds of times and felt absolutely nothing. I had prayed my prayers, written my journal entries, and heard only the faintest whisper of Christ. And that whisper was one I distrusted, because maybe it was the whisper of my mother or of my own desperate need to be good, to please. I hadn’t expected to hear the loud knocking on my heart’s door, but that night I heard it. I heard it. These days, because I have been trained to ask questions, I find myself questioning that moment. I ask myself, “What came over you?” I say, “Be specific.”

I had never felt anything like it before, and I have never felt anything like it since. Sometimes I tell myself that I made it all up, the feeling of my heart full to bursting, the desire to know God and be known by him, but that is not true either. What I felt that night was real. It was as real as anything a person can feel, and insofar as we know anything at all, I knew what I needed to do.

I was in the fourth grade. I raised my hand as I had been taught to do in school. Pastor John, who had been closing his Bible, saw me in that tiny crowd, in that center pew.

    “Praise God,” he said. “Praise God. Gifty, come on down to the altar.”

I walked that long, lonely walk of trembling. I knelt down before my pastor as he placed a hand on my forehead and I felt the pressure of his hand like a beam of light from God himself. It was almost unbearable. And the smattering of congregants in the sanctuary of the First Assemblies of God stretched out their hands toward me and prayed, some under their breaths, some shouting, some in tongues. And I repeated Pastor John’s prayer, asking Jesus to come into my heart, and when I stood up to leave the sanctuary, I knew, without even the slightest of doubts, that God was already there.





30





Being saved was incredible. Every day I would head to school, and look at my classmates with delicious pity, worrying over their poor, poor souls. My salvation was a secret, a wonderful secret, burning hot in my heart, and what a shame it was that they didn’t have it too. Even Mrs. Bell, my teacher, was the recipient of one of my benevolent smiles, my lunchtime prayers.

But this was Alabama, and who was I kidding? My secret wasn’t mine at all. As soon as I told Misty Moore that I was saved, she told me that she’d been saved two years before, and I felt embarrassed by what little joy I’d carried for a week. Consciously, I knew it wasn’t a contest, but subconsciously, I thought I had won, and to hear that Misty Moore, a girl who had once lifted up her shirt at recess so that Daniel Gentry could see the rumor of her breasts, had been sanctified before me, a girl with no rumors to speak of, stung. The shine wore off, but I did my best to hold on to the feeling of all those hands stretched out toward me, the sanctuary buzzing with prayers.

My mother was back at work, and Nana was always asleep on the couch. There was no one to share my good news with. I started volunteering at my church in an attempt to make use of my salvation. There wasn’t much that needed to be done at the First Assemblies. Occasionally, I would pick up the hymnals that had been left in the pews and put them back in their places. About once every two months my church would take a van down to the soup kitchen to help serve, but more often than not, I would be the only person to show up. P.T., who drove the van for those trips, would take one look at me, standing in my raggedy jeans and T-shirt, and sigh. “Just you today, huh?” he’d ask, and I’d wonder who else he’d been expecting.

    The First Assemblies of God also had a fireworks stand, just off the highway at the Tennessee border, called Bama Boom!. I still don’t understand why we had it. Maybe we got it under the guise of ministry. Maybe it was about earning a little extra money. I suspect now that Pastor John just had a fireworks kink and used our church to live it out. I was technically too young to volunteer at the stand, but it wasn’t as though people came around to check ID, so once in a while I would put my name on the sign-up sheet and head to the border with P.T. and the older youth group kids, who were much more interested in hanging out at the stand selling rocket blasters than they were in ladling soup for the homeless.

I could tell that P.T. and the youth didn’t really want me around, but I was used to keeping quiet and out of the way. They put me at the register because I was the only one who could ring people up without having to use the head-sized calculator we kept under the counter. I would sit at the counter working my way through my huge stack of books while P.T. set off fireworks outside. We weren’t supposed to use the merchandise without paying, so every time P.T. skulked off with a box of Roman candles, I would clear my throat loudly and make sure that he knew that I knew.

Ryan Green was one of the youth volunteers. He was Nana’s age, and he’d been over at our house for a couple of Nana’s parties. I knew him well enough to dislike him, but if I’d known him better, known that he was the biggest dealer at the high school, I probably would have hated him. He was loud, mean, dumb. I never signed up to volunteer if I saw his name on the sheet, but he was P.T.’s protégé, and, as such, he got to come sometimes even when the list was full.

    “Hey, Gifty, when’s your brother gonna get back on the court? We’re getting our asses whooped without him.”