Read Online God of the Rodeo by Daniel Bergner - Free Book Online

li ri ri koondo koondo koondolo.” The voice pleaded, dwindled, whimpered and all but sniveled, before it went on begging for something it could name only in these nonwords. “O li ri ri ri ri.” The syllables became moreand more broken. They became only exhalations struggling to form consonants, like the sound of someone struggling to explain himself after he’s burst into sobbing. But the effort was minor, surrendering. It ended not in any explanation but in exhausted gratitude: “O thank you, thank you, Jesus, thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.”
    Terry kept his head bowed and kept quiet. He studied the crease in his jeans. He didn’t feel qualified to be a part of this. He knew the Spirit was supposed to lead him to the right words, the right sounds, and he didn’t feel any Spirit entering into him.
    “Some of you,” Sister Jackie emerged into preaching, “are in some dead situations. Dead, dead, dead. And it’s worse than that. You’re in a cave. And that’s not all. There’s a stone at the front of that cave, a rock, a boulder you can’t move, and it’s laying there on your heart and blocking the exit from that pit, and it’s crushing you, it won’t let you breathe, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re dead, you’re not living, you’re
entombed!
And all you have to do,” her voice thinned, as though she were a kindergarten teacher directing children in their first collage, “is say, ‘I believe.’ That’s all. ‘I believe.’ That’s the only price for getting that rock rolled away. That’s the only price you have to pay for Jesus’ love. ‘I believe.’ How many of you are in that tomb? How many of you are without Jesus? How many of you will let Jesus take your pain? How many of you will speak that faith, ‘Jesus died for me’? It’s so simple. ‘Jesus died for me.’ We’re
all
sinners. How many of you will accept the free gift of his love? How many of you will take what’s offered to everyone and barred to nobody. Nobody. It’s so
cheap
. You don’t even need to make four cents an hour! You just pay with your anguish. Should I make it sound a little bit harder? Should I raise the price and cut back supply? Get everyone rushing up here then. How many of you are ready? How many of you are ready to come up here tonight and be saved?”
    Five men went. They lined before her. The praise team stood at their backs, hands spread in the air a few inches from their shoulder blades, to catch them in case their knees buckled. “For the wages of sin is death,” she recited, and asked the congregation to repeat. “But God showed his love for us while we were yet sinners.
    “Do you hear that?” she broke off to ask. “We
all
fell when the Spirit left Adam in that garden. We
all
sank into our tombs…”
    Terry was not among the five. He felt he was not qualified.
    Next, she wandered down the center aisle. The electric organ stabbed out instrumental hymns, making the room itself bend with longing. “Someone,” she said, “is having circulation trouble tonight. I don’t know what kind of trouble, but it’s somewhere, I can feel it, where the circulation flows. Someone—”
    A hand went up. She heard the details, laid her palm on the inmate’s kidney. “I speak the mind of Christ. I call out infirmity in Jesus’ name. God wants to strengthen you, yes, that’s it, that’s it, yes….”
    Someone else suffered with “reoccurring thoughts, so many reoccurring thoughts you can’t even depressurate things”; she asked who that person was, curved her fingers over his forehead. “In the name of Jesus I stay your thoughts!” And someone ailed with one leg longer than the other and with pain in his ribs, someone who did not want to make himself known. Her gold chiffon shoulders drifted through the room. She crossed the border again away from English, then returned. “Someone, O Lord.”
    It was not that Terry didn’t recognize his own injury