Michael Lister - Power in the Blood

“Strange?” I asked.

“You’re taking me to a funeral on a date.”

I gave her a small shrug, conceding the point.

“My mom teaches school, and Kim is going to attend TCC in the fall. My mom’s brother is the president of the bank in Pottersville.”

“Have you ever been married?” I asked.

“I’m not ready to discuss that yet.”

“Okay. I understand.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“Kids?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“Anything else I should know?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ve always been a sucker for compassionate men who look like Catholic priests and take me to funerals for our first date.”

“That’s good to know,” I said.

The funeral home was actually a small double-wide trailer. It was only slightly larger than my trailer, but it was way too big for the number of people who showed up for Ike Johnson’s funeral. In addition to Laura and myself, there were four other people there-two elderly black ladies, his grandma and aunt, and two young people, his sister and his friend. The funeral home was named Jack’s. It didn’t even say Jack’s Funeral Home on the sign-just Jack’s. There were an uneven number of wooden pews on the right and left sides of the chapel. They needed another couple of coats of paint. The thin red carpet had stains and smelled like old socks.

I had wrestled with what to say all week. I felt it must be something about God’s love and his ability to redeem the worst of situations and people.

I said, “God’s mercies, the Bible says, are new every morning. That means that every single morning, God’s infinite mercies are fresh and unused and waiting for us. They were waiting for Ike this morning no less than for you and me. You may say that Ike didn’t live the way he should have and so surely God’s mercies were not available for him. But I say that it is when we don’t do what we should that we need mercy most, and it is also when mercy is most available to us.

“Grace is not what we deserve, but what we need. Justice gives us what we deserve, but grace gives us what we need. If God doesn’t love Ike as much as he does you and me, then God’s love is conditional and the Bible is wrong. But if the Bible is true, if Jesus was right, then God is love, filled with compassion even for those who make themselves his enemies. God is love.

“All I ask of you today is to believe and trust in the absolute love of God. A God, who like the father in Jesus’ story of the prodigal son, welcomes us home even after we rejected him and run away to a foreign land to get as far away from him as we could. This past Tuesday, Ike closed his eyes in this world and opened them in the next. He opened them on the familiar and loving eyes of God, who, as a father, loves Ike and loves you and me, his children. Johnathan Edwards, the famous Puritan preacher, was wrong. We’re not sinners in the hands of an angry God. We’re sinners in the hands of a merciful God. Dare to believe in love, in God. For God is love.”

Throughout the entire message no one made eye contact with me except for Laura. That’s not a complaint-even from ten feet away her eyes were incredible. She looked at me the way some people do when they hear you speak for God. It was a very dangerous thing, and I could tell that she was seeing far more than was there. Or perhaps more likely, she wasn’t putting what she saw into the full context of my broken-down life. I closed with the hope for atonement that extends past the borders of this world and the few nice things that some of the inmates had said about Ike. The latter I stretched so far they almost broke.

After the funeral, the family thanked me and tried to pay me. As Laura and I were preparing to leave, the young man they had said was a friend of Ike’s asked if he could talk to me, which was funny because until that moment he hadn’t acknowledged my presence at all.

“Preacher, I loved Ike,” he said, still looking down at the floor. “I even went to see him a couple of times in prison. But then something happened to him. Drugs, I think, but something else too. He got in over his head. I think they killed him. I wanted you to know.”

“Who do you think killed him?” I asked.

“Whoever he was involved with,” he said.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Don Hall.”

“Is there a number I can reach you at if I find something out or need to ask you some questions?”

He shook his head and walked away. After taking about five steps, he stopped, nearly turned around, but then continued walking. Laura was waiting for me in the back near the door.

“Do you believe all that?” Laura asked when we were back in the car.

“Believe all what?” I asked.

“All those things that you said in your sermon, which, by the way, was excellent.”

“Yes, I do.”

“How can you believe such hopeful things when the world is such a hopeless place?”

“How can I not? Besides, the world is filled with hope as well. Grace shows up all the time; we just usually miss it when it does.”

“What grace?”

“Dancing with you last night, that was a grace. And your peach perfume, that was a grace, too. A good night’s rest is a grace, a rainy night, the weekend, the love of a parent, the loyalty of a friend. God speaks through all of these things and more. In fact, she speaks through the bad things as well-it’s just usually things we don’t want to hear.”

“But how can you know all of this has meaning?” she asked. Her voice said she wanted to believe.

“I admit that it’s wishful thinking,” I said. “But certainly it is not blind faith-there is evidence. However, the fact that I find meaning in them says something, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it does,” she said. She shook her head slowly. “I’ve never met anyone quite like you.” She reached over to the armrest where my right arm was and took my hand. “You did a good thing back there. You’re a good man.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how badly she was mistaken.

For the rest of the afternoon, we clung to each other, savoring every moment. I could tell that the crisis dynamic of the funeral had had a profound effect on us. We were grasping for life, hoping to find something within each other. We were moving too fast, and I knew it, but I lacked the will to do anything about it.

Under cover of a small oak grove, I parked on an old twin-path logging road in my dad’s Explorer. Dan Fogelberg sounded rich and full on compact disc played on the vehicle’s expensive stereo system. One of the few things I was left with after the divorce was a rather nice collection of CDs. Susan was never into music much, which was a downer while we were married but turned out to be most beneficial when we divorced. The only other thing that I escaped life with Susan with was my stereo system, which, combined with my CD collection, was worth more than the trailer in which I kept them.

I had taken Laura home after our day in Tallahassee, and now I was parked on the old logging road because it gave me a good view of the prison without being observed by Tower One. If I had been observed, the roving patrol would have driven out to investigate. If an officer had driven out, I would have been in trouble in more ways than one. There was, I discovered, a firearm in the vehicle, a fact I had just uncovered after searching underneath the seat for a flashlight. Firearms on state prison property were against the law. In addition to the Smith .38, Dad also had an expensive pair of binoculars. For the latter I was grateful. Without them, I would have seen nothing. As it turned out, because of them, I saw everything.

I sat there in the dark listening to Dan and thinking. My window was open slightly, and the woods all around me were alive. The bitter sweet smells of oak, pine, gopher apple, and honeysuckle wafted into the vehicle. I could hear a cricket symphony, the occasional bark of a dog, and the hum of mosquitoes. The last made me roll the window back up. I had done very few stakeouts in my time, but on each of them, amidst all the waiting and watching, I found myself doing a lot of thinking. I thought about my life up until this point-all the wasted time and money and all the pain, felt and inflicted. Of all the evil in all the world, addiction topped any list I would make.