Last Summer Boys

by Bill Rivers

Sunday morning our family piles into the Ford and Dad drives us into town for church. New Shiloh Lutheran sits at the town’s edge, white wooden boards blazing in morning sun under a steeple that tilts like a scarecrow’s hat toward the ocean of corn that surrounds it. Wind moves among the stalks as we pull up, making waves that lap the walls of the church like water against the hull of a ship. And it reminds me how Pastor Fenton said one time the church was a ship: seas could swell and rise against it, but it could never sink, and neither would you so long as you kept inside it. We pass under the steeple’s shadow, through the double doors, and into a creaky wooden pew. All around us, people fan themselves with paper song sheets so that the whole church seems full of giant white butterflies furiously flapping their wings. Pastor Fenton reads a bit from the Bible and I try hard to listen close, but my button-down shirt clings to me like a second skin. Ma’s eyes flash John Thomas, stop your fidgeting or else, and that settles me long enough to catch some of Pastor Fenton’s sermon on redemption. With a voice that’s surprisingly powerful for how small a man he is, he tells us nobody is beyond God’s love, no matter what they’ve done, and thinking otherwise is a dangerous kind of pride.