Read Online Home to Harmony by Philip Gulley - Free Book Online Page A

pants. Miriam Hodge wrote in the notes, We discussed a matter of a confidential nature.
    Then we discussed several other matters, none of which had any bearing on the kingdom of God. This is what happens when you have elders who fancy themselves great philosophers. They can wax eloquent about eternal truths as long as it doesn’t get personal. Everyone is an expert. Everyone has a firm opinion about what we ought to do and no one gives an inch. If we accidentally appoint a saint to the elder’s committee, by midyear we have broken them of all Christlike tendencies.
    We nearly ruined Miriam Hodge. We appointed her to serve as the head elder after Dale Hinshaw nominated himself to the committee. We put her in charge to offset the “Dale Hinshaw Effect.” The Dale Hinshaw Effect is simply this: If there is a bad idea to be thought, Dale Hinshaw will think it.
    Before Miriam took charge, a typical elders’ meeting would go like this: At ten after seven the elders drive up to the meetinghouse parking lot, ten minutes late. The first one to arrive makes the coffee. They stand in the kitchen until the coffee is brewed, then set up a table in the basement and talk about basketball and the state of our country, which according to them is bad and getting worse. This takes one hour. Then they discuss matters of a confidential nature, then go home flush with accomplishment. If someone thinks of it, they close with prayer.
    Miriam Hodge arrived fifteen minutes early for our first meeting. She made the coffee. She stood at the door and greeted her fellow elders, and handed them an agenda. The others were mystified. An agenda? What was this? What’s going on here? First item: prayer. Miriam worked her way around the table, inviting each elder to identify a spiritual need in his life, then encouraging the rest of us to pray for that person.
    All the other elders are men. Men not accustomed tospiritual introspection. There was lots of “Umm, I’ll have to give that some thought. I was thinking we were going to talk about painting the meetinghouse.”
    Paint they can talk about. It’s personal confession that throws them for a loop.
    That was when Dale Hinshaw, in a valiant effort to keep the focus off his own spirituality, began talking about his nephew’s vasectomy and thin eyelids.
    But Miriam held to the agenda and moved to the next item, my vacation. Dale Hinshaw began recalling vacations he’d taken. He told about when he was little and his father would drive them to the lake. He recalled reading the old Burma-Shave shaving cream signs posted along the road. There, that was something they could talk about—Burma-Shave signs. That was safe ground. Asa Peacock and Dale began recalling their favorites:
    The whale put Jonah down the hatch
    but coughed him up because he scratched.
    Burma-Shave
    The monkey took one look at Jim
    and threw the peanuts back at him.
    Burma-Shave
    It would be more fun to go by air
    but we can’t put these signs up there.
    Burma-Shave
    Dale Hinshaw especially liked this one:
    In this world of toil and sin
    your head goes bald but not your chin.
    Burma-Shave
    It took thirty minutes for Miriam to get them back to the next agenda item, church growth. Our numbers were down, and had been for thirty years. Miriam had drawn up a graph tracing our attendance. If it had been snow, we could have sledded down it.
    Dale Hinshaw thought maybe it was time to hold another revival. Maybe have two revivals a year. He talked about a church in Florida that had a revival every week. Maybe we could do that. Harvey Muldock suggested putting a lottery ticket in each bulletin. Miriam suggested we become sensitive to the Spirit’s leading and begin inviting people to worship with us. They decided to go with the lottery idea.
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    N ext Monday, the phone rang. It was Miriam.
    â€œWe’ve got problems,” she said. “I’ll be by to pick you up.” I sat on the