Chapter 1: The Room at the End of the Hall
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and most Saturdays, I park my old Buick in the far corner of the Ketterly General lot, where nobody fights you for a space, and I take the long way around to the fourth floor.
I have pastored Shiloh Road Community Church for twenty-six years. It’s a small white building with a leaky bell tower and a congregation of about ninety souls, most of whom have known me longer than they’ve known their own grandchildren. But the part of my work I’ve come to think of as the truest happens on that fourth floor, in rooms where the blinds stay half-closed and the machines hum all night.
I don’t preach up there. I learned a long time ago that dy!ng people don’t want sermons. They want somebody to sit down. They want somebody to ask about the dog they had in 1968, or the husband who wore the same cardigan for thirty years, or the cake their mother made every Easter. They want to be a person one more time instead of a chart.
