A Lesson in Hope by Philip Gulley

Author:Philip Gulley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2015-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

29

Sam was out the door right behind Barbara the next morning and over to the office to work on his sermon before the phone started ringing. Two hours into the morning, he heard a hammering sound and looked out the window to see Hank Withers and Wayne Newby, the latter balancing on crutches, driving wooden stakes into the meetinghouse lawn. What was this about?

He pulled on his jacket and went outside.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Mornin’, Sam,” Hank said. “Just wanted to get a better idea of how big the addition was going to be, so we’re staking it out.”

His gut tightened as he imagined Wanda Fink’s reaction when she drove up to the meetinghouse and saw survey stakes pounded into the lawn.

Hank paced off thirty steps, counting aloud.

“Now the kitchen will be in that corner over there,” he said, gesturing across the space. He paused, studying the meetinghouse. “But you know, the more I think about it, maybe what we ought to do is turn our old worship space into a fellowship hall, since we already have plumbing there, and build a new worship room. That’ll save us the cost of plumbing the new addition. Then we just expand and update our existing kitchen. What do you think, Sam?”

Sam thought Wanda Fink was going to scratch out their eyes when she got wind of this.

“That’s a fine idea,” Wayne Newby said. “That’ll give us more worship space. There were twenty-four of us at worship last Sunday. That’s up from twelve when Sam first started. At this rate we’re going to need more room for worship.”

Sam felt a delicious tickle of pride. He ran the figures in his head. From twelve to twenty-four, doubling the church in five months. Not bad. Not bad at all. It was mostly due to the Woodrums, who knew a zillion people and felt free to invite them to meeting for worship, something the average Quaker would no more do than walk naked down Main Street, which was why the average Quaker meeting was dying on the vine, though Sam didn’t point that out.

“Did you get permission to drive these stakes in?” Sam asked. “It might upset some folks, since we’ve not yet made the decision to build.”

“Just doing what you told me to do, Sam,” Hank said. “Remember? You suggested that me and Wilson and Wayne and Dan make a presentation about the project so people could see what we were talking about. I thought it would help if folks could actually see the size of the space we’re talking about.”

“I would prefer you not tell others I asked you to do this,” Sam said. “I don’t need the trouble.”

This was the way it usually worked in the church—someone did something that made someone else mad and the pastor got blamed. Over the course of his ministerial career Sam had been blamed for the elections of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the price of gasoline, the spread of communism, the destruction of the World

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