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Show Go Love/184 the steaming black lot And oh if this place could talk, this First Baptist Church of Lonoke, Arkansas, what stories it could tell It would no doubt recount how, when in its infancy back when the century past was itself still a baby, the mayor and town council gathered here to castrate Carl Jenkins-how dare he move his black-ass family into these city limits, like his shit didn't stink. Hadn't Brother Dellwood's own granddaddy been there at the altar breathing a prayer, the curved-bladed knife slick in its leather scabbard? Surely, if the place could speak, it would recall the lone devotionals between pastor and school girl, the doe-eyed ones who looked at their feet for the rest of their days Lord Jesus, should this building put tongue to its history, wouldn't it pay a word or two to the choir loft where so many Directors have led yOung men through the hardships of fully opening up to the holy spirit; where they opened up their mouths to the glorious flow of praise and rapture? All those marryings and buryings, would not this fine old sanctuary have cause to thank its Royal Ambassador Sunday School Teachers for their missionary work, for implanting the word in heathen ears, how they'd reached out to brother and sister churches throughout the three-B triangle of Butlerville, Beebe and Bayou Meto. Had not they multiplied God's kingdom on earth? All the great sinners and great sins perpetrated and forgiven on bended knees down at the heavy oak pulpit, would they not merit consideration, sins of such weight they remain hard to speak, even for a church gifted with the tongues of angels? Hadn't the guilt-ridden souls reaped what they'd sewed? All the baggage of the here and now, how flesh smacks its lips, how it convicts What was this life anyway but a shade compared to the hereafter? Better to just get done with i t - Paradise is waiting. Where the sick will be well and the one-legged walk and the stutterer speak and the drunkard be sober and the adulterer be pure and all will be made holy by the savior who |