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The Calling
- The University Press of Kentucky
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492 LISTEN HERE THE CALLING from Old & New Testaments (1995) But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt ... -Matthew 6:20 Retired missionaries taught us Arts & Crafts each July at Bible Camp: how to glue the kidney, navy, and pinto beans into mosaics, and how to tool the stenciled butterfly on copper sheets they'd cut for us. At night, after hymns, they'd cut the lights and show us slides: wide-spread trees, studded with corsage; saved women tucking T-shirts into wrap-around batiks; a thatched church whitewashed in the equator's light. Above the hum of the projector I could hear the insects flick their heads against the window screens, aiming for the brightness of that Mrica. IfJesus knocks on your heart, be ready to say, "Send me, 0 Lord, send me, "a teacher told us confidentially, doling out her baggies of dried corn. I bent my head, concentrating hard on my tweezers as I glued each colored kernel into a rooster for Mother's kitchen wall. But Jesus noticed me and started to knock. Already saved, I looked for signs to show me what else He would require. At rest hour, I closed my eyes and flipped my Bible open, slid my finger, ouija-like, down the page, and there was His command: Go and do ye likewiseLet the earth and all it contains hearEvery tree that does not beargoodfruit is cut down and thrown into the fire-. Thursday night, at revival service, I held out through Trust and Obey, Standing on the Promises, Nothing But the Blood, but crumpled on Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling, promising God, cross my heart, I'd witness to Rhodesia. LYNN POWELL 493 Down the makeshift aisle I walked with the other weeping girls and stood before the little bit of congregation left singing in their metal chairs. The bathhouse that night was silent, young Baptists moving from shower to sink with the stricken look of nuns. Inside a stall, I stripped, slipped my clothes outside the curtain, and turned for the faucetbut there, splayed on the shower's wall, was a luna moth, the eyes of its wings fixed on me. lt shimmered against the cement block: sherbet-green, plumed, a flamboyant verse lodged in a page of drab ink. I waved my hands to scare it out, but, blinkless, it stayed latched on. lt let me move so close my breath stroked the fur on its animal back. One by one the showers cranked dry. The bathhouse door slammed a final time. I pulled my clothes back over my sweat, drew the curtain shut, and walked into a dark pricked by the lightning bugs' inscrutable morse. ...