Free The Visitation by Frank Peretti

town to revive us at the Baptist church with a week of special meetings. At least he would have had a better picture of what was eating at me.
    I wanted to help Bob Fisher out so I got on board and announced the revival meetings in my morning service. For three of the meetings, I brought some of my choir over. Bob and I even sang a duet one night while I played my guitar.
    And every night we listened to Brother Fudd preach his long, rambling string of jeremiads, railing against any and every sin, real or imagined, and continually reminding us how backslidden, selfish, and cold of heart we all were. He came from the “to wake ’em up, beat ’em up” school of preaching, the kind that gave rise to a popular description of the Bible belt: “Punch a hole in the sand and guilt pours out.” I often looked around the room to view the weathered faces of those being revived and wondered how much of this stuff these people really needed.
    Bob and I saw these same faces in church most every Sunday. They were the regular people, the habitual church attenders who viewed the fact that there was something to show up for as reason enough to show up. God bless them, they were many a pastor’s last gasping reason to continue having a midweek Bible study or a Sunday evening service, and now they were, at least in my mind, Bob’s primary justification for scheduling Brother Fudd.
    They came every night, and every night Brother Fudd beat them up. He accused and scolded them, then shoved their tattered souls up against the sublime memories of the past for comparison: the great revivals that happened in another place, another time; the things that God used to do; the way it was when they first found the Lord. Wherever they once were, they had strayed. Shame on them. Shame on them!
    And the altar call was always the same, a piano-accompanied petition: Come back to where you were. Do the old things again. Turn back and pick up whatever it was you dropped.
    Recycle the old-time religion.
    Come back to the Lord. Get right with God.
    As the memories came back, I quickened my step, hurrying down the quiet house-lined street. I was dreading the possibility that Bob Fisher might drive by, offer me a lift, and invite me to the Fudd revival meetings again.
    He was my friend. He meant well. But when he approached me after the ministerial with his invitation—“Hey Travis, come to the meetings. It’ll be good for what ails you”—I could hear the message coming between the lines: You need to come back to square one and do it all over again, just do it harder. You need to come back to the Lord.
    Come back to the Lord.
    Come back to the Lord.
    Just what did that mean, really? I chuckled. I could vow never to eat devil’s food cake again, or deviled eggs, as Brother Fudd instructed us two years ago. I could think of all kinds of things to do to please God.
    I whispered as I walked, “Lord, we are okay with each other, aren’t we?”
    There was no booming voice from heaven, nor was there any quickening in my soul. There was only the same silence I’d endured for months.
    I kept walking, anger fueling my steps. Spiritual Band-Aids from friends, silence from heaven, and the same, unshakable sense of being on the outside of it all. The story of my life.

4
    O N THURSDAY , Nancy Barrons sold a bumper crop of Harvesters , her biggest print run since the brush fire of ’95, and the town became officially informed regarding the “Antioch Phenomenon.” The story about Arnold Kowalski worked well because Nancy had a real Arnold to interview and photograph, as well as a doctor from Davenport to render his opinion about the arthritis mysteriously disappearing. I thought the accounts of the angelic sightings had a strange, groping tone, trying to be a story about something that might become news if it ever happened. No matter. News that might become news was still news enough. The photocopier at Prairie Real Estate got a lot of use that day, and single