The next morning Nanci and Amber left Tyler early enough that they could arrive at the Conestoga church in plenty of time for the Sunday morning service. In her brief time in Walke County – this would be only her third service at the two churches – Nanci had come to realize that the time before and after the service was just as important to the parishioners as the service itself. That was truer at Conestoga than it was at Tyler. It was about the only time and place that neighbors could get to gather together to just stand around and talk.

Even before she’d come to Walke County, Bishop Ennis had told her that she thought it would be better if the Tyler and Conestoga churches were to combine, since it would make things more efficient and avoid some travel and duplication of effort. Right from the beginning, Nanci thought the bishop was barking up the wrong tree on that one, as the church was the last remaining gathering point for a community of people in this area, and they would be much the worse off with its loss. She’d already made up her mind she wasn’t going to push the Conestoga Methodist parishioners on the idea, which they had ignored for at least fifteen years that Nanci knew of and probably much longer than that.

But Nanci had a couple other points she wanted to make to the congregation, and not from the pulpit, so the best time to make them was standing around outside before the service got under way.

Not surprisingly, Art and Shirley Gamble along with Trent, Cathy, and Keith Westbrook were among those outside when the two of them pulled into the churchyard. Nanci got out of the Camry carrying her Bible and some notes for the sermon, while Amber got out, carrying a Bible herself, along with the bulletins for the week.

“Well, good morning, Reverend, Amber,” Art smiled. “I see you’ve been busy around here.”

“Oh, a little bit,” Nanci replied a little smugly. “Amber and I came out yesterday and worked on the paint a little.”

“It looks like you worked on the paint a lot,” Art shook his head. “Still a lot to do, though.”

“It’s a start,” Nanci shrugged. “I mostly wanted to see how hard it was going to be. Amber and I got a first coat of new paint on, but I can see it’s going to need at least one more. If the weather is all right, we’re planning on doing some more next Saturday.” Nanci resolved to not say anything more, and just let Art and the others take the ball from there.

“You can’t always tell about the weather,” Art remarked. “But if it’s not too bad, I think I could come over and help out a bit.”

“Yeah, I might be able to also,” Trent agreed, “though I have to admit to a problem imagining Darius Anders up on a ladder scraping paint off of this place. To me it shows that you’re cut from a different bolt of cloth. So how are you today, Reverend?”

“Not bad. The Lord has provided us a beautiful day, so we need to enjoy it.”

“Uh, Reverend,” Art said. “There’s something we need to talk about.”

Here it comes, Nanci thought. Trent has probably gotten to Art about Amber staying with me, and now I’m going to hear about it. Having Trent gripe about it is one thing, but Art is definitely another. I might as well get it out of the way, she thought; there’s no point in letting it fester. “Sure,” she said. “Amber, maybe you ought to get started passing out the bulletins. Keith, would you like to help her?”

Nanci could see Keith glance at his father, who gave a slight nod in response. “Sure thing,” he said after a moment. Amber handed him part of the stack of bulletins, and they moved away from the small group of adults. Since there weren’t many others around, they talked in low tones as they moved away, and Nanci imagined that Keith was bringing Amber up to speed on what had happened.

As the two young people moved away, Art said softly, “Reverend, you might as well know that I’ve gotten a few phone calls in the last couple of days.”

“It’s not surprising,” she replied, waiting for him to lower the boom.

“It seems that Reverend Saunders heard about the service you gave for Elmer back on Thursday,” Art went on. “I’m sure you know he wasn’t very happy about it.”

Well, this was a surprise, Nanci thought. It wasn’t what she had been expecting at all. “I knew that he’d turned down doing the service for Elmer, which I thought was not the right thing for him to do. But I certainly didn’t mind doing it, and I thought it came off pretty well.”

“I did too,” Art nodded. “In fact, considering what happened with Elmer, I thought it was very well done. But there were people from the Lexington church at Elmer’s service, and what happened got back to Reverend Saunders. I don’t want to go into all the ins and outs of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some people here today who normally go to Lexington.”

“That’s interesting,” Nanci replied. “Very many?”

“I don’t know yet, and we probably won’t know until we see who shows up. But I expect there will be a few. The word I’m hearing, and I don’t know how much truth there is to it, is that Saunders is planning on giving a real hellfire-and-brimstone sermon criticizing you every step of the way for going against what he wanted.”

“There’s nothing I can to do stop it,” Nanci shrugged. “If that’s what he needs to say, then he should say it. I happen to think he’s wrong and that it’s God who decides.”

“I thought you might say something like that,” Art grinned. “What I really wanted to say is that you probably shouldn’t feed the fire by saying anything critical of him.”

“I hadn’t heard about it, but I had no intention of saying anything at all,” Nanci said. “It takes two people to make a fight, and I don’t plan on being one of them. The Bible has some words about turning the other cheek, after all. I have something else in mind, and I see no need to change it.”

“That’s probably wise of you,” Trent put in. “I don’t know how much you might know about it, but I heard there are people down at the Lexington church who aren’t totally happy with him, and I expect some of them will be the ones we’ll see here today. A couple of the people at the service Thursday told me that they were real impressed with how you lifted up the man we knew, rather than ranted on and on about how he died.”

“I feel that to do anything else at a funeral would be inappropriate,” Nanci said flatly. “Other people can have other feelings about it, but that’s their problem, not mine.”

It was close to half an hour before the service started, and Nanci spent much of that time standing around talking to people. A few of them she had never met before, and some she remembered meeting at Elmer’s funeral service on Thursday. Not surprisingly, two of the people she hadn’t seen at Conestoga Methodist before were Gerald and Leah Pepper, and she had some warm words for them, though they didn’t extend as far as Nanci inviting them to dinner again next week. It might happen later, but depending on how a couple of other things worked out it might not, too.

Eventually the piano started to play and people began to file into the church. Nanci, of course, was the last to enter, and she was amused to see Amber and Keith sitting next to each other, next to his parents, of course. Apparently the church was now something of a neutral ground for them.

She did notice that there was a good turnout this morning – while nowhere near full, there were more people in the rows of chairs than she had seen before. Apparently what Art and Trent had told her before the service was true: there were some visitors from Lexington present this morning, and there was at least the hope that they would become regulars.

The opening hymn was The Old Rugged Cross, a familiar one. After the invocation, Nanci had a couple of minor announcements, and then asked, “Is there anything else?”

Art stood up from his seat in the second pew. “I’m sure you’ve seen the work that Reverend Chladek and Amber Wallace did yesterday on the paint out front,” he said. “It’s something we’ve put off for too long. The reverend said they’re going to be out here to do some more of it next Saturday morning, weather permitting, and I think that those of us who are able ought to come out and give them a hand.”

“Amber and I will be glad to have you,” Nanci added. “There’s the old saying, ‘Many hands make light work.’ If there are no more announcements, that’s a good thought to start the Prelude hymn, number 530, Are Ye Able.”

They went through the hymn and the responsive reading to follow before Nanci got down to the meat of what she intended to say, a message for a lot of people if they were willing to hear it.

“Our scripture this morning is from the tenth chapter of Luke, verses thirty through thirty-seven,” she said, and began to read from her open Bible. “‘Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half-dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came to where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’ Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”

Nanci closed the Bible and looked out at the congregation. “In the time of Jesus,” she said, “the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notorious for its danger and difficulty, and was known as the ‘Way of Blood’ because of the blood which was often shed there by robbers.

“You know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over at that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking, and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt in order to lure them over to him for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was probably, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”

Nanci paused long enough to take a deep breath before she continued, now in a milder, less formal tone. “My friends, I want to tell you a story,” she said. “There was once a young teenage girl who lived in the outskirts of Chicago. In many ways she was a self-centered girl, as many teenagers are. She did not think of God, or her family, or her future. She was most interested in having fun, enjoying herself, and having good times with her friends. Although she was much too young to drink legally, she did it a lot because it felt good. She was enjoying sex at a very young age, because it was fun and enjoyable. She also enjoyed drugs, because they made her feel good, too, but she was largely successful at hiding all of that from her parents.

“She was able to keep up this life through high school, and purposely went to college far away from home so her parents wouldn’t be able to keep a close eye on her. Studying was not why she went to college, for her main interests were boys, parties, sex, and drugs. She made it to classes on occasion, but they bored her, and she didn’t learn much of anything in them. She was in trouble almost from the beginning, and didn’t make it through the second semester of her freshman year before she was forced to leave, and her life slipped downhill from there.

“Needless to say she was not exactly welcomed back home, so at the first opportunity she took up with a boy she’d met at college. He drank a lot, and when he drank he would sometimes beat her up, and then she would drink or use drugs to ease the pain. When the boyfriend was arrested for beating her once too often, she took up with another guy who was more into drugs, more than he could afford. Little by little she eased into trading her body for drugs or money, which was usually used to buy more drugs. Before long, what self-respect she had was gone, with only the drugs to ease the pain.

“As you’re sitting here in this little church on the plains of Colorado, it may be hard for you to believe that things could get much lower for her, but they did. By this time, she was less a person than she was a thing, a slave to drugs, a slave to the men who took advantage of her. When she was not being forced to use her body to get drugs, she was beaten, not because she had done anything wrong, but simply because the man doing the beating thought it a fun thing to do. When she could think about it, which was rarely, she knew she didn’t like what her life had become, but she couldn’t see any way out of her predicament and wasn’t sure she cared. For her, life had become what a philosopher once referred to as ‘nasty, brutish, and short.’

“This beaten husk of what had once been a carefree young girl wasn’t the only girl her so-called boyfriend kept around. There was another girl by the name of Allie, who was even younger. Allie retained at least a little of her self-respect, but like this girl I’m talking about, could see no way out. One night Allie managed to get her hands on the supply of drugs, and she took everything at once to escape from a life that had become an unending hell.”

Nanci took another deep breath and went on, “The girl I’m talking about found Allie’s body lying on her dirty bed with a huge smile on her face, there because Allie knew she was escaping from a life of pain and tears. Right at that moment, what little of this girl’s self-respect remained thought that what Allie did had been a pretty good idea, and she went looking for a knife or something so she could slit her wrists and join her.

“At that point I have to assume that God intervened by offering her a way out. While the girl we are talking about had a car, her boyfriend had taken the keys away from her to control her. While she was looking for a knife, she found the keys instead, so she ran to the car and drove away.

“But where could she run to? For us here in church, it would be easy to say that she could run to God, but she had no idea that there was even a God to run to since she had ignored what people had tried to tell her about Him. The best her drug-addled mind could come up with was to go back to her family and hope they would take her in. A problem was that her family had broken up, and the only family member she even had a location for – a sister – was over a thousand miles away, and there was no guarantee she was still at the same place. But in the hope that, somehow, someone there could tell her more or maybe provide her relief, she started driving. She had very little money and was very hungry, but she hoped that the gas in the car and the money would get her where she needed to go, so she chose gas instead of food.

“She barely made it to the parking lot of the place where her sister worked. She was broke by then, but as she got out of the car she found a dime on the ground in the parking lot. It was all the money she had in the world, all the money she had to build a new life if her sister was there and rejected her.”

With that, Nanci reached inside her open collar and pulled out the necklace she was wearing. “Ladies, and gentlemen,” she said as she displayed the token on the necklace. “It was this dime.”

There was dead silence in the little church; through the open windows, the call of a hawk, and the bellowing of a steer could be heard in the distance. “Yes, I was that foolish, stupid, destroyed young girl,” she went on as she let the necklace dangle on her chest. “I wear this necklace with that dime on it as a memorial of what may have been the lowest point in my life. Like the man on the road to Jericho, I was beaten and half-dead. But some Good Samaritans found me, and my sister was one of them.

“It was not just a case of binding my wounds or pouring oil and wine on them. What they did pour on me was love and compassion that I did not deserve because of the way I had treated them in the past. They gave me strength, they gave me hope, and, in the days to come, several of them talked to me about Jesus and how my sins would be forgiven, and in time they led me to the loving arms of our Savior.

“In the days that followed, those Good Samaritans taught me things I was hungry to hear. I realized from the beginning that I was a sinner, but I was to learn in my heart that we are all sinners in the eyes of God. But I also learned in my heart that our sins can be forgiven through our belief that Jesus died on the cross for our sins that we might be saved. You have probably heard it thousands of times, and I know that I had heard it hundreds of times before, but I had never believed it in my heart until then.

“Finally, one day deep in the heart of the Grand Canyon, I asked my sister-in-law whether she thought I ought to become a Christian. She told me that ‘whether’ is a question I had to ask myself, and it’s one I had to answer for myself, because it was my faith that had to make the decision. I understand now she was asking whether I not only thought about forgiveness in the eyes of God, but also whether I actually believed in it. When I thought about it and prayed about it, I realized I had no choice but to believe in it if I wanted to turn away from sin, and so I accepted Jesus into my heart and into my life.

“Though it was totally my decision, my family and my friends supported me every inch of the way. But they didn’t just turn me loose once I had made it. They formed a wall around me and helped me grow as a Christian. They helped me and supported me while I spent years considering whether I should enter the ministry, and they continued to support me after I made the decision. They were the Good Samaritans who made it possible for me to stand before you here today.

“Through the Grace of God, a family who had every right to have given up on me, and some other Good Samaritans, not on the road to Jericho but in the Grand Canyon, I was able to turn my life around and stand before you today. Yes, I was a sinner, and I committed many sins. I was not an innocent person who had been beaten by robbers, but instead one who had been laid low by the sins I committed, especially the sins I committed against myself.

“Thus, I can’t just walk past an innocent person who needs help and say, ‘Let someone else do it. It’s not my problem,’ because as a Christian, a person in need is my problem if there is anything I can do that might help. I can do no less to honor those who lent me their helping hands in my time of need. I like to think I’m just doing what Jesus said in his, ‘Go forth and do likewise.’”

There, it had been said. Nanci had not wanted to bring up her past, at least not this early in her being a pastor here, although she suspected she would have to reveal it sooner or later. It was not easy for her to admit her past, and she had only rarely done it over the years. But she had wanted to make the point of the Parable of the Good Samaritan for Amber’s sake; there was a good reason why she had reached out to the girl, and that reason was her own history. As she told the congregation, she could do no less.

“Our closing hymn is Rescue the Perishing, number 591 in your hymnals,” she said after a moment of silence to let people contemplate the point she had tried to make. She had chosen that hymn quite deliberately because it seemed to support the parable some, and it also supported her story. She heard the piano start playing, then started singing with the rest of the congregation, “Rescue the perishing, Care for the dying, Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave; Weep o’er the erring one, Lift up the fallen, Tell them of Jesus the mighty to save.”

As the hymn went on, Nanci looked out over the congregation, wondering how well they’d actually taken her sermon, but there was no telling. She noticed Amber and Keith standing side by side, actually singing, not just mumbling the words like a lot of the congregation usually did, not just here but in most Methodist Churches she had been in. She hoped that Trent and Cathy had picked up the message she’d been trying to send, since it had been mostly aimed at them.

When the last verse started, Nanci picked up her Bible and her notes and walked down to the door at the back of the church, hoping that her gamble had worked. She would soon know just how well it had been received.

On the whole, she was surprised to find that it had been received well. Several people congratulated her on her courage to change her life and the example she had set by doing it. She was especially pleased to get a warm reception from the people who were new to the church, having come from Lexington, although nothing was said about Reverend Saunders. “I sure like the gentle way you made your point by using yourself as an example,” one of them said.

A little to her surprise, Trent was especially warm. “I understand what you were saying,” he said. “And I can see how you have a point. I can see how you prove that people can change.”

“I’m proof that it can be done,” she replied.

With the new people and the extra time Nanci spent to talk to everyone, it took longer than normal to finish up. They weren’t real tight for time when she and Amber got into the Camry and started back to Tyler, but they didn’t have it to waste, either. Nanci was looking forward to the drive as a chance to relax and compose herself; the sermon and the reaction to it had been harder on her than she had been expecting. At least there wouldn’t be quite the tension when she gave the same sermon in Tyler in an hour or so.

Amber was quiet for the first few miles, until they were back out to the highway. “This is the car, right?”

“It is,” Nanci admitted. “I sometimes think of it as the lifeboat that carried me out of Chicago.”

“I can see why you don’t want to give it up. Nanci, was it that bad?”

“No, it was considerably worse. What I said back there wasn’t even the light version of what happened. I didn’t even start to talk about the really bad stuff – I don’t even like to think about it. I told you the other day I don’t like to talk about it much, and now you can see why.”

“Nanci, I understand why you said what you did in your sermon. It was to take some of the heat off of me, wasn’t it?”

“It was, a little,” she admitted. “But it was also somewhat self-serving, to take heat off of me for being a Good Samaritan who reached out to someone in need, too.”

Amber let out a sigh. “I’m starting to understand this stuff a little. I know there’s a lot more to learn, but I’m enjoying learning it. I don’t know if I can consider myself to be a Christian yet, but I’m thinking about it and I want to do the right thing.”

“I’ll tell you what Tanisha said to me, and that is that it’s a decision your faith has to make for you. I’m just trying to help you build that faith.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.