The Visitation (18 page)

“So you’ve heard from Kyle already.”

“He’s a very unhappy camper.”

“Well, not to be critical, but he has a small mind. If anyone wants to consider me their Jesus, I allow them that. Kyle should do the same.”

I had to laugh. “He’s not wired up that way.”

“So I gather. But how about you, Travis? I think you’re ready to widen your world.”

“I’m not about to believe a lie if I can help it.”

He paused, I suppose to frame his question. “Why did you go to Minneapolis? Try to remember, Travis.”

Brandon Nichols might not be Jesus, but he was supernatural. He knew all the right buttons to push, all the perfect thorn-in-the-side memories to dredge up. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Fantasy, Travis. Like anyone else, you wanted a kinder reality, and I don’t blame you.”

“It didn’t work.”

“Well, that was then. The rules are about to change. My followers will be looking for a kinder reality, and they just might get it.”

“Your followers?”

“Just don’t blame them, Travis. You were there yourself, once. Oh, and Travis?”

“What?”

“Don’t be like Kyle.”

When the line went dead I stood there, unable to move, unable to think. Why
did
I go to Minneapolis, so many years ago?

My mind dredged up the only answer I had:
Because God called me.

Or had he?

N
OT LONG AFTER
I turned eighteen, God assigned me the holy work of discipling Amber Carr, the quiet girl from drama class who turned out every Wednesday for the Kenyon– Bannister meetings. She didn’t smoke, and she seemed to maintain a quiet dignity while so many of the other kids were Spirit-filled Christians but still basically nuts. She came to me with her questions, I drew from the deep well of my experience for answers, and we hit it off. She came over to my house and we talked about the Lord. I went over to her house and we talked about the Lord. When we weren’t talking about the Lord, we went to the movies or to an occasional concert. The rest of the time we just enjoyed how the Lord had brought us together.

It was a great time of year to help a pretty girl grow in the Lord. Spring was rolling around, the weather, though usually wet, was finally warming up, and there were plenty of days nice enough to get outside and walk on the beach. I found that the more time I spent with her, the greater the intensity of my calling, until it seemed God wanted me close to her, sharing my wisdom at every conceivable opportunity.

I remember the night I first kissed her. I did it in the name of Jesus and strictly for his glory. From that point, we continued to glorify the Lord in like manner whenever we got the chance, so often that my memory of it includes no specifics, only one murky continuum.

Oh, but the ecstasy of it, the lofty, dizzying heights of joy! The glory of the Kenyon–Bannister days had no glory like this glory. This was a calling from the throne of God strong enough to make me drive for miles when I had a car and walk for hours when I didn’t, just to be with her. Nothing else was as important as getting to wherever she was to nurture her, protect her, instruct her, and participate in God’s unfolding plan—which now included, I was certain, both of us, together, following his call.

The Lord began to confirm this to us separately. Amber had a dream about us and then, that very morning, the old song by Herman’s Hermits came on the radio. It told her that, even though the young man she loved didn’t know much about anything, if she loved him anyway, God would use us to make a wonderful world. God spoke to me in signs and prophecies, which I recorded in a journal. One day, while walking and praying, I saw a car go by with a license number the same as Amber’s birthday, and then I got a prophecy:
This is my choice for you, the path I have chosen. Walk ye in it.
By the time we graduated, we knew we would be married as soon as the Lord made a way.

There were, however, some logistical details to work out. Amber was planning to start classes at the University of Washington in the fall, while I had virtually no plans except to minister the gospel, whatever that was supposed to mean. As the summer rolled by, she worked as a motel housekeeper to raise money for college. I spent most of my time playing my banjo. Her family threw their doubts right in her face. My family tried lovingly to express theirs. I prayed for them all. None of them—not even my dad, a man of God—realized what a powerful God we served, and how God could intervene miraculously for those who were totally sold out to him.

The clock kept ticking. Fall came around. In a few weeks, Amber would actually start classes at the university and live with her grandmother in the north part of Seattle. I had no job, no car, no savings, no plans, and no miracle. Of course, it was not unlike God to test our faith, to make us wait until the last possible moment before he opened our Red Sea and saw us through safely.

The Red Sea didn’t open. Amber started her classes and started learning things I didn’t know. After a summer of waiting on God and claiming the miraculous, she was going somewhere, while I wasn’t. She even started to sound smarter than me.

Finally, bowing to pressure I was getting from all directions, I acknowledged that having a job while waiting on the Lord wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Thus began a darker time than I had ever known in my life.

COMPTON METAL FABRICATORS
was a cavernous building on the ship canal in Seattle, a drafty, metal shell with glassless windows and gaping doors that let the cold wind through. Compton built crab boats, big metal hulls that filled the building, brown with rust, dirty all over, cold and dark inside. And the
noise!
Metal-bending machinery, air-powered grinders, rattling guns, hammers. The place smelled of sparks from grinders, arc welders, and cutting torches.

I got there at seven in the morning for my first day, a pristine and godly young man among rough-hewn, crusty shipbuilders who seemed obsessed with the obscene and knew only one adjective they applied to everything. Bill, the supervisor, a burly, hard-hatted guy with a lisp you didn’t dare make fun of, handed me an air-powered grinder and set me to work grinding off the metal beads left behind by the welders. The thing weighed about ten pounds when I started in the morning. By ten o’clock it weighed twenty, and by noon it weighed forty. I climbed all over that rusty hull, up and down ladders and catwalks, inside and out, lugging that machine and pulling the air hose after me. My mission was simple: see the bead, grind the bead.

At four o’clock, nine hours and seventy years later, the big horn sounded and the place finally got quiet. I walked out to the parking lot with all the other guys in their dirty blue coveralls, got in Mom and Dad’s Oldsmobile Cutlass and headed for home.

And the morning and the evening were the first day.

And the second day was like unto the first.

And the third day was like unto the first and second.

By the fourth day, I had become a man of prayer more than I had ever been before. Surely this was all a mistake. There must have been a clerical error in heaven. An angel had put God’s plan for someone else in
my
file folder. I began crying out to God from below, above, and inside that boat, trying to bring the error to God’s attention. I never heard back.

After about a week on the job, Bill asked me if I ever got claustrophobia. When I said no, he sent me down inside the double hull of the boat to rattle off the charred scabs of metal left by the welders and sweep out the watertight compartments. It was like working inside a metal coffin with just enough room to twist my body around and look for scabs with a work light.

Buried alive in the hull of that crab boat, I prayed. I needed to hear from God. I needed a sign, a prophecy, a word of knowledge, anything. God was in control and had a plan, I was sure of it. I wouldn’t be there for long. God would get me out. I would marry Amber and we would go somewhere clean, quiet, and glorious, not dirty, noisy, and humiliating, and there we would serve the Lord happily ever after.

Every Sunday night, with Monday morning to look forward to, I prayed.

Every morning when the alarm clock rang, I prayed.

While perched on the high catwalks along the hull with my grinder, while crawling inside the hull with a work light and rattling gun, while sweeping out below deck while falling sparks from a torch burned holes in my shirt, I prayed.

I prayed for God to change things, to make a way for me to minister for him, to get me out of there. I was ready to hear him speak. I was ready for any thought, any impression, any hint of anything else
anywhere
else.

Finally, it happened. After two dirty, exhausting, deafening weeks at Compton, an answer began to dawn like a faint glimmer of light from heaven. I was at home with my folks, dead tired and about to go to bed when a Billy Graham crusade came on the television. Mom, Dad, my older brother Steve, and I all watched it, one wondrous and powerful hour of songs and gospel preaching. The bigness of it, the unique, unpretentious pageantry, and the crowds of people streaming forward at Reverend Graham’s invitation struck a chord in my heart. I wanted to be a part of it. I didn’t belong in a dirty shipyard among all those crusty, cussing shipbuilders. I belonged there, at that crusade, helping to spread the gospel.

I took the dream to bed with me and woke up with it in the morning. I thought about it all the way to work and sang “Just As I Am” as I picked up my grinder at the tool crib. I thought about preaching, teaching, prophesying, even playing my banjo for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. I could act in a Billy Graham movie. I could sing a song at a Billy Graham crusade. I could write songs, books, and Bible lessons. I could counsel.

The more I thought about it, the more excited I got and the more I prayed. This had to be it. God’s calling. Of course! This short time in the shipyard was to humble and prepare me, that was all. It wasn’t meant to last. My deliverance, the next step in God’s masterful plan, was on the way.

The very next weekend, I visited Amber and told her I was hearing from God and carrying a burden to join up with Billy Graham. I told her how there could even be a connection between my playing bluegrass music and working for Billy Graham: both had the initials B.G. It had to be a sign.

She had never heard of Billy Graham so I had to explain it to her, telling her all about the crusades and the Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis and all the things I thought I could do there. After she heard it all, she smiled and told me about a vision she’d received from the Lord, a railroad boxcar with a big letter “I” on it. At the time she had no idea what it meant, but now we could interpret that vision in a better light: Perhaps this suggested my mode of travel to Minneapolis. We decided to write down anything the Lord might give us. Things were cooking and we had to keep a record of it. Someday it would make a great book.

Monday morning, seven o’clock, the big horn sounded. Armed with a broom and rattling gun, I headed for the hull. Bill sent me down into the double hull compartments again, this time to sweep, and to mark any cavities in the metal with white crayon so the welders could come through later and fill them in. Another helper had been there before me and had decided to favor future generations with some lurid artwork. I rubbed it out, and as I stood there, crayon in hand, God began to speak some new ideas to me.

This was a time of preparation. I wrote a P on the wall to represent that.

But soon there would come the call. I wrote a C on the wall.

I would go first, leading the way, blazing the trail. I wrote an L. And then, having begun a wonderful ministry with Billy Graham, I would return—I wrote an R—and bring Amber with me. I wrote an A.

So there it was on the dark, rusty wall of a crab boat under construction:
PCLRA
. Where once a dirty picture had been, I had written an encoded prophecy in the same awesome vein as Daniel’s
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin
. The handwriting on the wall. It was God’s plan for my life.

I called Amber that night and told her all about it. She was thrilled because she’d received another vision from God that day, this time of a huge banjo bridging Seattle and Minneapolis. The meaning was obvious and we were giddy with joy.

Now it was only a question of timing. Right now I was being prepared, but when would the call come? Perhaps we should set out a fleece as Gideon did in the Book of Judges, a way for God to indicate his will in a tangible way.

Well, the drumhead on my banjo needed replacing, but the size was nonstandard and the guy at the music store said he’d have to special order one. There it was, our fleece. Amber’s vision of the huge banjo verified that. “Lord,” I prayed, “when you want me to go to Minneapolis, have that drumhead come in.”

I waited, and prayed, and worked at the shipyard another week.

And then the music store called. The banjo head I’d ordered had arrived.

The sign from God!

The next day, I went to Bill the supervisor and said, “I have to quit. God has called me to go to Minneapolis and work for Billy Graham.”

He didn’t seem very impressed. He just got me my paycheck and went back to work. I figured he’d never heard of Billy Graham either. I got out of that big, drafty building and walked into the sunshine. Even the weather was saying
Yes! This is God’s will for you!

The time had come to break the wondrous news to my folks. They were godly, Spirit-filled people. I knew they would be thrilled. As we sat at dinner that night, I made the announcement. “God has called me to work for Billy Graham. I’m going to Minneapolis.”

They just sat there, looking back at me, chewing, not saying a thing.

Finally Mom asked, “What about your job?”

“I quit.”

Dad asked, “Do they know you’re coming? Have you written to them or called them?”

“No. I’m trusting God. It’s all in his hands.”

I told them how my last paycheck from the shipyard should be enough for a train ticket over there.