Dad's Brush With The Bible

When I was about sixteen or so, I found my Dad sitting in a chair by the window that was my Mom's usual place. That in itself was odd. That he was reading the Bible was doubly odd. My father was a deacon at the First Christian Church. Every couple of Sundays he'd do the interest generating dances of communion and offering that I believe are peculiar to that denomination. Maybe peculiar to that particular congregation. 

I don't know for a fact but I suspect he was raised in a good ol' Baptist church down in Texas. He didn't talk about it much. But until I was about sixteen I had to go to church of a Sunday. I liked the communion and offering dances, even when I was older. The deacons would go down the pews, one would drop off the wafers or grape juice—no alcohol here, no sir!--or offering plate then move to the next pew as the deacon on the other end moved back one so the could both get the tray and move on. The operation fascinated me. It was the most interesting thing about Christianity.

Sometime after that I became a rather rabid born-again Christian to the point that I went to college as a pre-seminary student. But, that's a different story. My father was a good man, considerate of others, a fine provider, supportive, generous, a good cook, entertaining with a good sense of humor, loving. All those things a father is supposed to be, mostly. In his way he believed what he'd been taught about God and Jesus and the Bible. He wasn't particularly rabid in either his beliefs or demonstrations thereof. Like the man himself, they just were, not to be argued over or given undue consideration, just allowed to exist.

So when I found him sitting in the wrong chair, reading a book I'd not seen him open in a long time, no, come to think on it had never seen him open, well it was obvious something was very wrong. He didn't actually come out and say he was going to die. That really wasn't his way. He just said, “I'm very sick, Johnny.” I was concerned as you might expect and asked him what was wrong. He told me he had shingles.

I looked it up. Much more difficult in those days when we were waiting for Al Gore to invent the internet and wreck the planet with global warming. You had to actually go somewhere, find a book and look up the information you wanted. Well, no you didn't. The more enlightened of us had found the research desk at the library wherein one could call and ask most any question which would quickly be researched by the staff and duly reported. Think of it as a sort of analog, biological internet. Needless to say I found shingles to be a nasty response by the chicken pox virus to being ignored in a body for forty or fifty years. It was not, back then, fatal. Still isn't. Painful as hell though.

But none of that would console my father. He hurt bad and that meant he was going to die and if he was going to die, he was gonna research the trip as best he could. So he sat there in the wrong chair reading the Bible. I never did find out which passages he read. Knowing him, he just flipped open to a page and started reading. I never did figure out if he found any solace in there. For him, often, just the act of confronting your problem would be enough to get him though it. That seemed to be the case with shingles. He looked at the situation, decided he was dying, researched the situation and it was solved.

Now, some would say this was a classic case of divine intervention. I think not. God did not infect my father with chicken pox so fifty years later he would read random passages in the Bible in response to a very painful disease. God also did not cure him miraculously of his 'fatal' disease. After recovering the whole thing was relegated, as all events major and minor are in our family, to a 'story.'

My Dad's brush with death and subsequent brush with the Bible would some years later help me to leave the Christian Church. You see, God neither made my father sick, nor made him well. Oh, you can argue that God created the chicken pox virus in a moment of boredom or perhaps to vex randomly his other creations, but that's not really very likely is it? It could be said God arranged for my father to read that book and gain insight, understanding to bolster his faith. But none of that happened. After it was all said and done my father wasn't changed in the least save for some scars and a new story to tell. What does all this mean and why should I tell it? Beats me. I do try to tell all the family stories though. 

(c) 2017 John P. White