Yesterday I had lunch with a young woman who's been coming to our church pretty regularly. Her name is Jennifer, and she's opened her first chiropractic office here in town and is struggling to make a go of it. I thought it'd be fun to have lunch and get to know her a bit better.
We met at the Sportsmen's Bar and Grill, which is the kind of place that would delight my father, who is always looking for "native places" to eat and partake of the culture of a particular town. We try to keep him from gawking, or asking stupid questions! The Sportsmen's is a popular local bar, with the bar up front, and the big room in the back for people who just want to eat and not imbibe. In fact, if you don't want to walk through the bar, there is a separate door around the side of the building where you can walk in, seat yourself, and forget you're eating at a bar-- if that sort of thing bothers you.
Anway, I met Jennifer there for lunch. The Burger Basket special there is under $5, and you can get a chef salad for just over $5, that will fill you up the rest of the day and not even make you feel like you sacrificed much in avoiding trans-fat. In other words, it's a good place for a preacher and a just-starting-out chiropractor to have lunch. It doesn't dent the budget too badly.
As Jennifer and I got to talking over Diet Cokes, she mentioned that her grandmother died. I offered my polite condolences. She was 93, she said, and was in a nursing home. It was a shame, she mentioned, that her grandmother couldn't be buried out of her church, as it had closed many years ago. The cemetary, though, was still there, and if the present temperatures rose as forecasted, getting out to the cemetary on dirt roads could prove to be more than interesting. She had lived out in the middle of nowhere. Casually I asked, "where is nowhere?"
"A little area called New Virginia," she said, shrugging.
I nearly choked on my julienne ham.
When I recovered, I said, "I was the pastor who was there when the church closed! Who's your grandmother?"
She laughed as she told me Charlotte Peterson.
Dear God.
The year I graduated from seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, I was appointed to a three-point charge in South Central Nebraska. Guide Rock, Cowles, and New Virginia. The New Virginia Church was a little white church literally out in the middle of nowhere. Seven miles out a dirt road. There were only ten members left there, but they all came once a month sometime after noon. When I was finished with worship at the Guide Rock UMC, I headed out into the wilderness to New Virginia for a potluck dinner that was set out on a board across the back seats of the little church. The women brought in jugs of water, as there was no plumbing in the church-- something I assumed quickly when I saw the two outhouses out back, one for men, one for women. The day Larry and I drove out there to check out the church before I started there, it was a typical windy Nebraska summer day. There was nothing out there to stop the wind, the church was on a slight hill of wide-open prairie. I remember you could hardly open the car door without it blowing back closed.
The first day I preached at New Virginia, it had rained two inches the night before. I was driving my F150 rear-wheel drive pick up truck at the time, and for 7 miles I clutched the steering wheel, trying to keep the truck on the muddy, soupy dirt road. My stepson Michael, who was then 13, was with me, enjoying my intense effort not to say any cuss words out loud. When I finally pulled up to the church, the 5 men of the church stood on the front porch of the little white clapboard church. Wayne, the youngest of them at 69, chuckled.
"Normally," he said, "when it rains 2 inches we cancel church because of the mud. But we all wanted to see this New Jersey preacher drive her pick up truck out our road!" They all laughed. I smiled a tense smile.
Michael spoke up. "Oh, she's willing to drive in any kind of conditions!" he volunteered.
The covered dishes were all laid out on the back row of chairs. Some of the women complained that it had started to all get cold while they were waiting for me. I was still too shaken to feel bad. We all got something to eat and balanced our paper plates on our knees, and tried to hold a plastic cup of water with one hand and eat with the other, while trying not to spill the abundant contents of our plates. After lunch, they all packed up the dirty dishes to take home to wash, and separated into their usual spots. Five men on one side of the church and five women on the other. As was predicted, about three of them were snoring loudly before the service was over.
They'd been talking for several months about closing the church, as they were down to ten members, and their strongest financial supporter, Charlotte Petersen, would be moving to town to be closer to her children. She hated to tear herself away from her beloved farm and little church, but it was the practical thing to do. I preached at New Virginia and ate their food just 6 times before we closed the church. The day we held the last service, we invited everyone who ever cared about the little church to come. We filled it to overflowing. We told stories, we wrote down the history, we sang hymns and honored the life of that little church who boasted being the church of the writer Willa Cather. We even had a baptism of one of the grandchildren of one of the members. We took a group picture of the last 10 members, along with me and the District Superintendent, Sam Rathod. It was a party that day, and there was more food than could be held on just 8 chairs in the back.
4 years later, I went to be the associate pastor in Aurora, Nebraska, and when I went to the senior citizen's lunch, there was Charlotte Petersen. I reminded her who I was, and her face lit up just remembering her precious little church where she left her heart, and she was glad for the connection. She had come to Aurora to live near some of her family. I hadn't known where she had moved to when she left New Virginia. And here she was.
It's been 8 years since I left Aurora and Nebraska. I went to the nursing home at Aurora a year ago after we moved back to Nebraska, when Larry told me that he met Charlotte there. She no longer remembered me, because she was starting to fail. She didn't remember a lot of things anymore, but when I mentioned New Virginia, her face brightened up as if she'd seen Jesus himself. She remembered her home church and her farm. That's one thing that even old age wouldn't let her forget. The little white church on the windy prairie, where you better hold on tight to your hat, and where you just stay home if it rained more than 2 inches if you were smart and not some dumb preacher from New Jersey.
"I knew Charlotte," I told her granddaughter Jennifer. We shared stories of the little place in the middle of nowhere called New Virgina, where there is now only a cemetary, and last I saw, the little white church was boarded up and padlocked and surrounded by tall grasses. For a moment I could smell the aroma of church potluck dishes mixed with the sweet musty smell of old wood. I could feel the wind on my face, trying to knock me over, and... people. People who loved their land, their church, their home, and who hated to say goodbye. Dear Charlotte gets to go back to the prairie, the place she loved the most, and a part of her will always be where the wind whips across the prairie, and the church bell can be heard for miles down the old dirt road.
See you later, Charlotte.
