It is a peculiar feeling when you stumble upon an image from the past. Every once in awhile, I'll put something in a Google search box, and a memory will surface as I scan the results.
Tonight, I found a picture of my dad's first church. I was probably about three when we moved to Hoover, Iowa. The church is different from the way I remember it. Today, the entrance is located at the rear of the church. When I was a little girl, this was the back of the church. Mentally remove the entryway and imagine a little door in its place. That was the back door. The door to the sunday school rooms in the rear (where an older boy in the congregation once took me when everyone else was eating in the preacher's house - and forced me to do things I couldn't imagine doing - and then made me promise not to tell - the one memory I'd love to forget permanently).
If you walked around the church on the right side, you would pass a cemetery - oh so many snakes in that cemetery.
Mom would chase them down with the push mower and shred them into stringy red and green pieces that wiggled in the grass before going still.
If you kept on walking with the cemetery on the right and the church on the left, you'd come to the front of the church - or at least what used to be the front, in the late 1960s.
It smelled like old wood when you stepped inside, and little field mice would sometimes get caught in the false ceiling and run through the light fixtures above us. I liked it when they ran through the lit-up rectangles overhead - it brought a whole new kind of entertainment to the long, boring prayer services.
In the summer, overweight elderly ladies with big updo hairstyles would lay claim to personal handheld fans which they picked up from a little table just inside the front door. I remember thinking that the handles looked like a doctor's tongue depressor. Old-timey pictures of Jesus-and-sheep decorated the front side. I couldn't read the words yet, but I loved the pictures that told a story all by themselves. So much better than Sally, Dick and Jane books.
Mom played the piano, so my sister and I had to sit in the front row on the piano-side of the church. Close enough that Mom could poke us if we were too squirmy. Sometimes, I would get to sing in front of everyone - even with the microphone. I remember the smiling faces. I don't remember being scared at all. I thought I was like those people on TV who would hold a microphone and sing on the stage of some enormous church - out in television world.
I sang Elvis Presley's song Somebody Bigger Than You and I.
And there was the song I've Been to Calvary. That was probably my favorite. I could imagine the song in my mind as I sang. Up Calvary Mountain, there my savior to see. . . I've been to Calvary, I can say I've seen the Lord.
But, I hadn't been to Calvary. Not really. Only in my mind. I'd been there in my imagination. In the same way I put myself in the pictures on those old fashioned fans. As though the scene had come to life for me - like the mice that ran in the light fixtures or the snakes that lived and moved in the cemetery just beyond the windows.
That little country church, that's where I first learned to love Jesus. Where He became real to me. And I realized that He knew me, too.
But I hadn't really been to Calvary. I hadn't stood at the cross. Not yet. I hadn't held Him in my hand. I hadn't taken Him inside me, not really. I was only four or five. I would have to wait nearly thirty-five more years to truly know what it is like to travel up Calvary Mountain, there my savior to see.
I would have to travel a very long way to get to Calvary. To have it made present for me. To truly have Jesus come to me. A very long journey, just to get home. I still have tears when I encounter Him in the Mass. And I suppose there are some who look at the tears and don't understand. They don't realize that finally - finally - it isn't just a song or an image in my mind. For I have taken the journey of journeys for me . . . up Calvary Mountain, there my savior to see. I've been to Calvary, I can say I've seen the Lord.
. . . what a thrill of love divine, just to know that the Savior is mine.
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