Suddenly during the invitation portion of the early church service Sunday I had a flashback of my childhood at the First Baptist Church in Haileyville, Oklahoma. My older brother, Randy and I, sat through a decade of services directed by the Reverend Jim Boyd who enjoyed a long tenure as pastor of that church.  Boyd was a big ruddy Irishman with a shock of red hair and long freckled bony fingers.  His blue eyes were the color of a cold clear winter sky.  During most of his sermons, when speaking about some of the more serious sins, like cursing, smoking and a variety of impure thoughts—lusting in your heart and such, he seemed to be making eye contact with me and Randy and pointing his long, freckled, bony index finger in our direction.

Boyd had an interesting twist on the invitation portion of the service. His practice was to continue singing hymn after hymn until somebody, anybody, came forward to either receive Christ as their personal savior, join the church, or rededicate their life to Jesus. The old church building had no air-conditioning. Hand fans with pictures of biblical scenes printed on them were supplied by the local funeral home.  It was sweltering in that old building in the middle of summer and I can still remember sweating profusely during the seemingly endless sermons and the long punishing invitations that followed.

Randy and I both loved my mother’s cooking.  Every Sunday it was going to be either roast beef or fried chicken, usually fried chicken and it was without fail a culinary masterpiece.

Today as the invitation portion of the servcie began I was taken back to that old church house and I found my brother sitting there with me, twenty minutes or so into a midsummer Jim Boyd invitation.  It was clear that he intended to keep everybody in God’s house until somebody made the trip down that isle.  It would be the day that everything changed.

Randy and I schemed a lot.  We were a brilliant duo of thinkers and to this day we marvel at some of the brilliant ideas we had as devious little men.  Starving for that fried chicken and willing to do most anything to get it, my outlaw brother and I decided it couldn’t hurt to rededicate our lives to Jesus and in addition to this great benefit we would be perhaps fifteen minutes closer to that fried chicken.  In the next second we found ourselves strutting down the isle approaching the open arms and long bony fingers of Reverend Boyd.

What a couple of geniuses we thought we were that Sunday back in the fifties.  Over the next few years we must have rededicated our lives to Christ  twenty-five or thirty times, all the while rejoicing over our new found quicker route to the dinner table.

I have many fond memories of growing up in that church.  I still wonder at times if old Brother Boyd was onto us, but he never seemed any less excited to see one or both of us coming down that isle, sometimes we took turns.

That old church is gone now.  A few years ago before my dad passed away I drove by the old vacant lot where the church once stood.  Though there is nothing left there  but brush and tall weeds I can still feel our spirit there and the spirit of God there in that little Oklahoma town—in another lifetime, long ago.