Evangelism = Glamour

[Warning: this e-mail contains nothing serious about the ministry, only dealing with the lighter side of traveling. If you are pressed for time, you might just want to delete this and move on.]

Ah! The glamour of evangelism. Pulling a trailer. Driving a big truck. The smell of diesel. The romance of disappearing into the sunset after a week of preaching. Dumping sewage at 11:00 at night. Wait a minute! That isn’t part of the glamour that people think about.

Actually, it was while I was out of the country that I got an e-mail from my wife telling me that the trailer, in addition to having an ultra-full black water tank, also had a serious leak near the bedroom slide-out. The carpet was as wet as the Okefenokee Swamp and beginning to develop kindred odors. There was even some question at one point if the carpet might have come loose from its moorings and was beginning to float. The exhaust fan had been out of order for some time, causing the relative humidity of the trailer to steadily increase, much to the delight of the resident mildew population, which had long been in an ongoing struggle to stay hidden from our sight and still reproduce like rabbits. Finally, to close out the water problems, the black water was both audible and visible in the bottom of the commode, the great bubble that defied gravity barely settling below the black pipe when it burst with a gurgling sound. It was all part of the unseen glamour of evangelism that today is going to be published for the masses to consider.

My wife, seven and a half months with child and playing the role of single parent of three while I had skipped the country, had issued a family ultimatum that unless absolutely necessary, all of nature’s calls were to answered in the church facilities. The threat of a Great Dismal Swamp from the bathroom adjoining the existing Okefenokee in the bedroom seemed imminently ominous indeed.

Before the deluge could burst forth upon the family, however, help arrived for the hapless woman and her children. Around 9:00 Saturday evening, the door to the trailer opened without anyone knocking and the head of the household walked. He was greeted with children who immediately began dancing jigs (what does their mother teach them?) and jumping and shouting for joy.

Supper came and went, as did the ritual of unpacking the bags, their clothes and personal items crossing the Okefenokee to the closet and the empty bags being stowed in the dry storage bay. By this time, the hour was nearing 11:00. The task of preventing the Great Dismal Swamp, it was decided, must not wait until morning. It would be completed in the darkness of night.

It seemed such a simple task, however. Across the church parking lot, there was a sewer cleanout that offered a final resting place for the dismal contents in the full tank. There was nothing to it. Hook up the truck, pull the trailer across the well-lit parking lot, extend the hose from the trailer to the cleanout and pull the valve to release the undesirable contents. Because of the lateness of the hour, all three children went to bed and just took a ride while the trailer was moving back and forth across the parking lot.

Neatly and smartly, the truck pulled the trailer from its parking place to other side of the parking lot. With the skill that comes from repetition, the hose was put into place, its ends securely fastened both to ground pipe and trailer. In order to prevent the ground connection from blowing out of the pipe by reason of the pressure, a 4X4 post about 30 inches long was placed upon the hose terminus. The whole setup was foolproof. It would be only a matter of minutes and the trailer could be parked in its old position and the family in its entirety could retire for the night. Open the compartment. Pull the lever. Listen to the rush of the liquid as it exits the trailer never to be dealt with again.

Disaster required only seconds to strike. The black water was at full force now, accelerating at the rate of 32 feet per second into the ground. Suddenly, there was a horrible sound, similar to the sound of the water in a glass that is completely full and about to overflow. Before anyone could fully appreciate this similarity, water, black water, began coming out of the pipe at high pressure. The 4X4 post acted as a pressure valve, turning the black water hose and its contents into a sort of macabre high-pressure irrigation apparatus, liberally fertilizing the church grass with its nutritious contents. Before too much more damage could be done, the valve would have to be closed, but then what to do about the black water tank still remained a problem.

Some in the church had believed that this particular pipe was, indeed, a sewer cleanout. The member of the pastoral staff called upon to advise in this time of crisis, however, denied that it was. Rather it was some kind of landscaping drain, designed to take the gentle rainfall that ran off the paved parking lot and drain it out of sight into an underground drainage field. Forty gallons of speeding black water running through a 4-inch pipe were simply too much to handle at one time.

The flow was stopped now, but what to do about the remains of the spill presented a problem. In a short matter of hours, people would pull into this very parking lot literally dressed in their Sunday finest and least prepared for the olfactory greeting they might receive. The black water had to be diluted somehow so that it could harmlessly seep into the ground undetected. A few scoops of impotent odor neutralizer (no wonder they were giving it away) might help the drainpipe and what was outside the pipe would have to seriously watered down. By 11:30, this job was history and the trailer parked neatly back in its former place by 11:40. Finally, the whole family was in bed. Even evangelist families can only take so much glamour in one day.