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

Every couple of days Pastor Ricks calls you with an update. There are unforeseen costs and problems. The brick masons are so good they’re about to run out of bricks, and you miscalculated how much brick you’ll need, and you’re writing a large check to a brick company.

You fly back home to Virginia, and you and Pastor Ricks go look at doors. You did not realize how much doors cost. There are the large ornamental doors for the front of the church, then there are the vestibule doors and the door to the new pastor’s study, plus the side doors and the back door and all the emergency-exit hardware that has to be installed to bring the project up to code.

THE CONTRACTOR LOOKS WORRIED, and you think it’s about the project, and part of it is, and part of it is his dying father, and part of it is the situation he’s gotten himself into that requires him to spend a week in jail. This puts the new church at risk with the prison program. If there are no materials or oversight for the convicts, the prison pulls them off the project and sends them to another project somewhere, and you lose your spot on the list, and your project can become an interrupted construction site forever or at least a very long time.

You fly back to California and begin to deal with a studio and a studio’s notes on your script, which is set in Texas, and the first note you get from the woman at the studio is that she doesn’t believe that men in Texas still wear cowboy hats, and from that point on, the notes get worse. You think of the shortest sentence in the Bible— Jesus wept .

Pastor Ricks is beginning to hate to call you, you can tell. Here are some things that are costing more than planned—the wiring, the heating, the air-conditioning, the oak trim, the carpeting, the lighting, and the new pews. Everyone is reaching deeper, Pastor Ricks and his wife, you and all the saints. You are becoming downspirited, and Pastor Ricks reminds you that anytime you sow godliness, you will receive opposition from the Devil because the godliness you are sowing will liberate someone from bondage; once you break through the opposition, the blessings will flow, and in faith you must never give up, because to give up means you will never succeed.

SMALL MIRACLES BEGIN TO HAPPEN. Pastor Ricks watches the transformation in some of the convicts. He says some of the hard-core inmates soften and tell him they appreciate being treated as well as they are being treated on the job site, even if it is just a Walmart soda and a Little Debbie oatmeal cake. Pastor Ricks says during the day the inmates come around to the side of the building where he and the contractor are figuring the costs of the next day and ask Pastor if he will pray for their family members on the outside. For some, the closer they get to release, the more they worry about being accepted back into their families, they worry about what they will find when they get out, they worry about how they will react to what they find when they get out.

Toward the end of the project the police come around and arrest the contractor. He is charged with misappropriating materials from the state for his own personal gain. What comes out in court is that the contractor said he had been promised a bonus at work, and when his boss reneged on the bonus, the contractor ordered some paving material, paved some people’s driveways, and kept what he charged them to do it up to the amount he says he was promised in his bonus.

This is not good. The church is only a few weeks away from completion, and without a contractor you have to hire someone and pay him real money, not the small amount you are paying the contractor.

This is something you do: You try to find the contractor’s lawyer, and you make sure that he has retained a good one. Then you try to find out which judge the contractor will be appearing before. The judge is one of the sons of the Commonwealth’s Attorney who grew up three doors down the street from you. Without calling him directly, you send word to him through back channels, begging for mercy.

At the time of the contractor’s trial, Pastor Ricks delivers almost the entire House of Prayer No. 2 congregation before the judge as character witnesses. The judge remarks to you privately through back channels that he has never had the opportunity to hear so many character witnesses. He also sends word as to the minimum sentence the contractor must receive, and the contractor receives the minimum sentence, though he is immediately sent to a correctional facility and will miss the dedication of the new church.

You write to the contractor in jail and ask if he wants you to try to figure out a way to get him released for a few hours on dedication day, and he sends word through Pastor Ricks that he would have to attend the service in handcuffs and under guard, and he’d rather not have his wife and daughters see him like that.

THERE IS AN OLDER INMATE from the prison who has built homes for celebrities and politicians in Northern Virginia, and one day he tells Pastor Ricks, Preacher, I’m going to build you a steeple . And he does, and it is beautiful—louvered, a hand-stamped copper roof, and a beautiful cross on top. He tells Pastor Ricks that he built it so that at some point a bell can be installed inside. Pastor Ricks says the man choked up when he said that of all the multimillion-dollar homes he has built over the years, nothing compares to the pride he has in that steeple. Pastor Ricks says it is the same with some of the other men who worked on the church, taking pride, making sure the details are just right, bringing their families by to see their work after they have been released from prison.

Pastor Ricks’s wife gets a good deal on pews. She’s found a church that is installing the more modern stadium-style seats, and she gets a good price on their old oak pews. The oak pews perfectly match the oak trim inside the church, the blue cushions perfectly match the blue carpet she also found a good deal on, furthering in her mind that the handiwork of God is to be seen throughout the church and its construction.

IT WILL BE A PACKED HOUSE the day of the dedication. You and your sons and your mother and your sister and your niece will be there. There will be many songs and there will be two sermons and Pastor Ricks will sing “Never Would Have Made It,” and you will not have realized until now what a voice of quiet power he has. There will be testimonies and there will be congregants slain in the Spirit, receiving God’s anointing sleep that He might heal them, change them, reach within them, so that they will awaken in a better place; Adam in the garden yawning out of his rib-robbing divine slumber, opening his eyes to Eve; Mary the virgin rousing from her chaste bed conceived with the Christ; Jacob the wanderer, a rock for his dreaming pillow, his feet finally set on the pathway home.

The man sitting in the pew in front of you will begin to shiver and to shake, and he will fall out into the aisle, anesthetized by the Holy Ghost. A deacon will come over and cover him with a blanket. Your Cub Scout middle son will lean into you and ask if you need to give the man first aid. It’s just God at work, you tell him.

But for you, God’s grace comes in the last regular service the week prior to the dedication, when there is still some spackling and painting to be done, when there is a ladder leaning behind the sacristy and a light hangs by its wires from a hole in the ceiling above the pulpit. That previous Sunday, Pastor Ricks’s mother, Mother Ricks, a child of the Great Depression, is giving her testimony, walking and sometimes hopping in the aisle as the Spirit moves her. She says she is going to tell something she has told before, she is going to tell of a dream she had many years before, a vision, way back when. She says the elders of the church may remember the first time she spoke of it, and Pastor Ricks’s sisters nod their heads, they remember. She says she had a dream of a time when the church would need to be rebuilt, and in her dream, a white man comes into their church and helps make it happen, and she says when she saw you first walk into House of Prayer fifteen years ago, she said, Praise the Lord, it’s him , and with that, Mother Ricks lays her hand on your shoulder, and you, at last, are slain in the Spirit .