“Eternal life is possible if you accept the Lord as your personal savior. You must ask Jesus to come into your heart and give your life to Him. That is the only way.” His promise of salvation boomed as soft keyboard chords grew louder with each word. Amens rose from the back of the tent and increased in volume.
“Can everyone please rise?” Grateful to get back on my feet, I sprang up and seized the opportunity to stretch.
“There may be some of you under the sound of my voice who have not yet accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart and start living a life that will get you through the narrow gate. The doors of the church are open.”
A rustle from the nearby aisles meant that unsaved people were coming down to the front. One person got up, then another. Soon, footsteps filled the aisles surrounding us. A whoop rose from the congregation as forty or fifty people lined up in front of the stage. “Praise the Lord, saints. Praise the Lord!”
And we, the saints, shouted, hallelujahed, and played the tambourine, thanking God for deliverance. Papa stepped away from the microphone and walked down to the ground where the people were. The keyboard played the soft melody of “Come to Jesus” as Papa moved down the line and clasped his arm around each person’s shoulders.
“People of God,” he addressed the congregation when he had gone down the line of new believers. “Welcome these beautiful people into the kingdom.”
After the sermon ended, we waited for the event that most of the people had come for: the healing. Even though the sermon had been better than I imagined it could be, my expanding chest got tight beneath my dress when Papa made the announcement.
While they came, about eighty of them, Papa wiped the sweat that had beaded on his brow. There were the typical people who came for healing—older people meandering to the front, young families whose ailments were invisible to the naked eye. My gaze drifted to a woman who slowly led a little boy down the aisle runner. Silver rings like thick bangles kept his forearms in place while his small hands gripped the handles of his crutches. His legs, even thinner than his arms, had rigid plastic braces on them, and his knees were bent as he slid his legs, one in front of the other, toward the raised altar.
Hannah’s right eye fixed on him, slowly followed by her roving left eye that had been blind since birth. Her rocking stilled, and throaty grunting sounds came from the recesses of her body. I placed my arm around her shoulders where her bones jutted out from underneath her shirt’s thin jersey material. Then Papa saw them. He dried his hands against his pants, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. I sucked in a breath.
Papa sprinkled holy oil in his hands and made the sign of the cross on each forehead that he passed. These were the healings that we couldn’t see. Since we’d be in another city in a week, there was no way we’d be able to know if the old woman was cured of her hypertension or if the mechanic’s tumor shrank. But if this boy could walk, everything that had happened last year would vanish like vapor.
Finally, at the end of the line of people, he came to the small boy. He slipped his hand underneath the boy’s armpit and guided him toward the stairs. The boy’s mother stayed on the ground as his crutches hit the wood of the makeshift steps—her hands worried the fabric of her long skirt as her son and Papa slowly ascended to the altar, right beneath the cross.
“Son, are you ready to walk?” Papa asked.
It was a rhetorical question, but the little boy nodded anyway.
“Congregation, are we ready for a miracle?”
A hum rose from the crowd. First soft, then louder before it floated into the tent’s peaked roof. As Papa got down on one knee in his fancy suit pants, I imagined the prickly feel of the turf beneath the thin fabric as though I had slipped on his skin for a moment. He was now inches away from the boy’s face—aware that any errant motion would compromise this healing that he needed. That we needed. His heart, like mine, must have been beating faster than the snare drum keeping time in the corner of the room.
He said something to the little boy that no one could hear. The boy laughed, and Papa tousled his close-cropped Afro. In his right fist, Papa still had the small bottle of holy oil, and he splashed some into his hand, more than he used for regular healings. He tilted the boy’s head back, and the boy stumbled on his crutches. Papa applied the holy oil in a slow sign of the cross in the middle of the boy’s forehead: in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
“Amen,” I whispered.
Papa placed his entire palm, fingertips stretched and quivering, on the boy’s head. Papa often talked about how his whole body would quake with the power of the Holy Spirit when Jesus worked through him. He said that the feeling was like getting electrocuted. The boy trembled like Papa’s hand, his thin arms moving around in the crutches like hula
