by Randy Reynolds
Attendance boomed and collection plates overflowed at my daddy's church in the sleepy South Georgia town of Bainbridge in the latter half of the 1950's because change was in the air and church people were terrified. They wanted God to help them make sense of it all, to tell them why everything had to change, and so—speaking through my Daddy--He did.
A fiery young orator with the dubious distinction of resembling Elvis Presley, Daddy preached that "Godless communism, rock'n'roll and the civil rights movement" were all part of the same phenomenon, vaguely predicted in Revelations. He preached that we would experience ever more terrifying changes until the very end, at which time Jesus would return to pick up the good people (meaning those who got "saved" at our church.) Everyone else would be out of luck. Left behind.
The good news, according to Daddy, was that almost all the prophecies had been fulfilled, so the end was very near; we were already in the last days; maybe even the final minutes. At this point the pianist would sob while playing a haunting melody and Daddy would shout, "God is in this room!"
The fear would be palpable as Daddy convinced his congregation to open their hearts to God and their wallets to the ushers who, not withstanding the imminent end of time, never failed to pass the collection plates.
Sputnik, the U-2 incident, Soviet threats, Brown v. Board of Education and girls throwing their panties at Elvis were all supposed to mark the last days. My daddy and the evangelists he invited to our church proved in sermon after sermon that these were signs of the rapture.
On a summer Sunday night in the 1950's, thunder shook our little church and lightning caused a power outage. The evangelist said we could be witnessing the return of Jesus to pick up the saved and if we wanted to be among that number we'd better get to the altar right now, which caused a stampede in the aisles. Afterward, when the terror was over and the lights were back on and I still wasn't sure if the apocalypse had happened or not, I was called upon to stand and state that I was "saved" (at least until my next sin, after which I would have to repent again or be condemned to hell.)
By the early 60’s my dad was pastoring a church in Louisiana called Shepherd’s Fold, where the sweet, gentle lady who taught the Junior Boys Sunday School class convinced us that she knew the exact year the world would end. And when that year arrived, I developed the nervous habit of snorting air—sucking three or four breaths loudly through my nose before exhaling, a sound that drove away all my friends. I couldn’t blame them for avoiding me, but the snorting was beyond my control. It was the only way I could breathe that year.
For an entire year of recesses, I spent my time alone on the playground or in the gym reading library books and snorting for air, waiting for the world to end.
“Why don’t you go play with the other boys?” asked a kindly teacher.
“I like to read,” I said.
Instead of paying attention in class, I trembled and snorted and read library books hidden inside my textbook covers. (The 136 books I read that year, according to a list I kept, may have been a better learning experience than the missed schoolwork.)
When the year ended but the world didn’t, I had a lot of catching up to do. A lot of catching up.
