Mark Richard - House of Prayer No. 2 - A Writer's Journey Home

Pastor Ricks’s sermon is about Jacob’s spiritual beginnings, and how the world will try to erase your spiritual beginnings, and how sometimes it is necessary to go back to where one’s spiritual journey began.

Pastor works the theme until he is certain the saints are understanding. When Pastor Ricks dwells on the message, massaging it just so, he says, Let my coals burn in the fire a little longer, somebody tell me one thing , and somebody usually says, Tell it, Pastor Ricks .

At the gathering of the offerings, a small wooden table is brought out, and pew by pew you file up with your money, and you see that most of the bills are dollar bills with an occasional five or twenty, and there is also plenty of change. Your mother says on the ride home how refreshed she feels, but that day your cold bones felt the time tick past. You remark to her from your small heart that you think you’ll start tithing again so at least House of Prayer No. 2 can buy a decent space heater.

WHILE YOU ARE HOME, Pastor Ricks tells you about some land he’s got his eye on that he’s heard is selling for cheap, a possible tract to buy for a new church someday. He’s been out looking for land like this for a while, and the bargains he sees listed are bargains for a reason. Some of the acreage is wetlands and some is in the floodplain. Your town has just had a five-hundred-year flood, water rising in the middle of town at six inches an hour when a hurricane stalled over the swamps to the north and west and the rivers full of rain and snakes spilled their banks so that downtown was under twelve feet of water.

You ride around with Pastor Ricks looking at land and see a sign for some riverfront acreage that is freshly bulldozed from the buildings the flood had ruined. You can probably get that land cheap; the owner is a man who is rich and has been known as benevolent in land giving in the past. It turns out that you can get the land cheap, though when you gently hint through back channels wouldn’t it make a nice donation since a church will be built there, the price remains the same. City hall says you can build there, but you’d have to build a structure on pilings with a floodgate beneath. There’s some property across the street from the church, but its backside runs down to the river as well.

You don’t really see the need for a big new church. Some of the Sundays you’ve been at House of Prayer No. 2 there have only been a handful of people. A new church is a good idea for the future, a dream, a vision. When you get back to California, you begin to send your little trickle of ten-percent tithes to the place, hoping it will go toward getting the toilet fixed or that new space heater.

ONE NIGHT PASTOR RICKS GIVES TWO MEN a ride out in the county, and one of them tells him of a church being built by convicts, so Pastor Ricks goes out there the next day, and, sure enough, inmates from a local prison in orange jumpsuits are building a church. Pastor Ricks finds out it’s a new program for trustees with building skills—brick masons, carpenters, electricians, construction workers—to work off some time in exchange for their labor. All you have to provide are the building materials.

God honors faith, and even though he has no land on which to build or money for materials, Pastor Ricks puts his name on the prison’s building list and hires an architect to draw up plans for a new church.

None of this makes sense to you when you talk to Pastor Ricks about it long-distance. When you call him and ask him how he’s doing, he always says, We’re still believing in God and continue to look to the Lord for greater things , except there’s a new excitement in his voice when he says it now. You’re a little worried. Pastor Ricks is an honest, godly man, and you personally know some of the men who own some of the land he’s been looking at, and these men are worldly businessmen who would not flinch at selling a pastor a piece of swampland for the price of prime. But Pastor Ricks’s faith is far greater than your own. When he sees marshy vegetation on one tract of land, he calls the Army Corps of Engineers, who come and take a soil sample and say he’s right, this land is prone to flooding according to the geologic record.

You check in with Pastor Ricks every few days. He’s had a setback: the county zoning won’t let him build a church as large as he wants to build on any of the land he has found. That is when you suggest he build a church on the property his church already owns. It might be smaller than the church he had planned, but he might be able to adjust the blueprints to fit the church on the existing lot.

IT IS ABOUT THIS TIME that you are finishing writing a movie script about some Army veterans returning home from the war in Iraq. On the day you sell the script, you are pleasantly surprised at the selling price and neglect to thank God for your good fortune, and when you do get around to thanking God, you immediately remember your pledge to tithe ten percent of your earnings to House of Prayer No. 2, and the small heart in you cringes, wondering if that is ten percent of gross or ten percent of net.

You put off calling Pastor Ricks to tell him about selling the script, even though it would please him that prayers for your success are being answered. When you call him, he says they are still believing in God, looking for great things from the Lord, standing on the Word of God, but he’s a little worried that the time is drawing near when the convicts will show up to begin work on the church. He is concerned that he doesn’t have the money yet for the building materials, and that is when you tell him to start getting prices on pallets of brick and loads of lumber, you sold your script.

Pastor Ricks needs a building contractor, and he sees one at a gas station. The contractor’s father lives across the street from the church, and his mother is friends with your mother. Pastor Ricks asks if the contractor would be interested in overseeing a church project, and he is; the contractor has moved back from Maryland where he had been building expensive homes and has had some difficulties. He has come home to be close to his father, who is dying.

You fly home, and you and Pastor Ricks buy A-frame supports for the roof and loads of shingles, and you start stockpiling tools the convicts will need. You are spending a lot of money, and the whole idea sounds crazy as you watch trucks off-load the materials that are now stacked higher than the little church they are set beside, so you don’t tell anyone.

The contractor has looked at the blueprints, and he gives you and Pastor Ricks a figure on the blueprints, and it’s a lot more than you can spend, but Pastor Ricks is not worried, he knows the saints in the church will donate, and all you think about is the tabletop of singles and fives and handfuls of pocket change.

THERE IS A GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY behind the church one Sunday afternoon after service, and everyone gets a chance at the sledgehammer, and the first things knocked down are the old outhouses.

The bus from the prison pulls up one morning, and the convicts get out in their orange and khaki jumpsuits and begin the rest of the demolition. You have forgotten to get a Dumpster, so you rent one that the convicts immediately fill up, and then you have to go rent another. The Dumpster company only accepts cash, and you give it to them. More tools are needed, and you go and buy them: hand picks, gloves, shovels, a wheelbarrow. The prison program director says the work goes better when you feed the convicts something other than the white bread sandwiches and bottles of water they bring with them from the prison. They appreciate snacks too. So you go out to Walmart and buy cases of soft drinks and juices, and cartons and crates of snacks, and store them in the Sunday school house next to the church. You buy coolers and ice, and set up a fund to replenish the supply, and also calculate how much it costs to feed the busload of men daily hamburgers and pizza, and you set up a fund for that as well. When you get back to California, your lawyer tells you the studio is deferring half of your script payment against box office to finance the film, meaning you will never see that money after all.