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CBN.com – We should have seen it coming. More and more people swarmed over us. No one knew Johnny from Charlie or Annie from Margaret. Each person did his own thing; in fact one guy wrote a dirty note that became a kind of theme song for a while:
L-O-V-E I-N-N
You can do your thing at
Love Inn!
It was chaos. No one was working. No one took directions. Many Sunday mornings after an evening of music I'd come out to the barn to find 30 bodies sprawled all over the place.
Around noon they'd start to wander into the kitchen: "Hey, what's to eat?"
We tried to solve the problem by leaving the kitchen to visitors themselves. But that didnt work either. They wasted food, left bread out, never put the lid on the peanut butter jar, never washed up. If they wanted to put something in the trash, they made a basketball shot at it.
With the lack of organization and the thin pickings for money, we considered several times just closing our doors. One day in early September 1970, I finished recording the Scott Ross Show and went to the barn around 2:00 p.m. I opened the door and literally stumbled across the body of a teenager wrapped in a serape, asleep on the floor. The boy woke up angry. "What's the idea, man? I'm trying to sleep!" He rolled over with his back to me.
Well, I mulled that over all day. Not that there was anything unusual about the scene. That was the trouble. I felt like heaving the kid out, and yet was there anything really wrong, morally, spiritually wrong, with sleeping at two in the afternoon? Whenever I was tempted to make rules for the barn: everybody up at such and such an hour, meals at such and such a time, I'd remember the rule-dominated religion of my childhood where there were so many restricioins and regulations that the joy and excitement of Christ got lost.
But that same evening I suddenly knew I'd had enough. Nedra and I had finished supper and put little Nedra down hours ago. I was trying to work on a talk, but I kept staring off into nothing.
"What's the matter, honey?" Nedra asked. I told her about the guy in the serape.
"Do you know what I'm going to do?" I said. "I'm going out to the barn right now and I'm going to stay there until I hear from God about this whole mess."
"I'll be praying too, Scott," said Nedra.
So I drove out to Love Inn. It was after midnight, and only a few people were still taking around the remains of a fire. I went upstairs to my office, especially glad now that there was a door to close. I got out Dad's chain-reference Bible and began to delve into the whole subject of order and discipline on the one hand, freedom on the other. The more I followed the various headings, the more I saw that even Jesus Himself had not been free to come and go as He chose; He was constantly under the authority of His Father. Nor were His followers free: Jesus was not only their Saviour, but their Master. Always, it seemed, there was a chain of command. But not at Love Inn.
"Why are you ducking authority, son?" that inner voice asked.
"First you didn't want to be under authority, now you don't to exercise authority."
"That can't be You, Lord? You know how I've longed for freedom. I don't want to be a wet nurse to a lot of alienated kids."
The voice was silent.
"And, besides, I've had no experience in leading. That was true enough. And I have too many weaknesses in my own life to start telling others how to live."
"Now were getting to the heart of it, arent we? You're afraid of hypocrisy."
Little did I dream of the dramas which would grow out of that thought. At the time though, I slid right over it. "What's wrong with each person getting his directions straight from You?"
Nothing at all.
I felt relief. So I was off the hook!
"But you still don't act in isolation. You get what you believe are My orders, then you check them out with the church. Always and forever, Scott, the key to life in the Spirit is not independence. It is membership in My Body on earth."
The voice was silent a while, then went on.
"It's true I didn't come to lay a lot of rules on people, but I did set forth principles. See what you can do to bring some pattern to your life together."
Which is how Patterns came into being. That same night sitting in my office at Love Inn, I jotted down a set of principles that might help us bring a semblance of order out of our confusion. Surely it was a Biblical principle, I wrote down, to seek the Lord early? And shouldn't we seek Him together? Shouldn't we bring structure to our dealing with strangers, by being sure each visitor was met and talked to? Shouldn't we interview newcomers to find out what their needs were even just what their names were? Why should one guy hang around for a couple of days, another for a couple of months? Maybe we could develop a Five Day Program to spell out what Love Inn meant. And work, certainly work, had a sound scriptural basis.
I read over my notes, discovering how tentative and apologetic they sounded. I went over the pages again and this time stated the principles more crisply. Schedule. Discipline. Work. Order. These were the words that kept coming up as I struggled on through the night.
I was appalled at myself. I couldn't believe that I "Mr. Rebellion" himself was really writing this.
Next day at the barn I showed the draft of Patterns to the first guy I met. He read it and whistled.
"This is going to make waves."
"Any changes?"
"Yes. You're not being Biblical about the wine." I had written no wine at Love Inn, but he was right. Besides that would be a rule, not a principle. So I struck it out and stated instead that excess in anything was not honoring God's intent for our lives. A little later that day, I called a meeting in the book room.
Knowing from my own struggles how nerve-touching the whole subject of discipline and order was, I opened with a long heartfelt prayer. Then I read Patterns aloud.
There was a numbed silence, then an explosion of protests. All the objections I myself had raised were voiced aloud:
"What are you trying to do, set yourself up as some kind of spiritual know-it-all?"
"Youll drive everyone away from the place."
"I'll seek the Lord when I feel like it and that may not be in the morning."
"No one's going to tell me what job to do when I'm working for free!"
When a little of the hysteria had died down, a wise and loving black woman spoke up. "Scott," Lucille said softly, "you are quenching the Spirit."
I felt all of the conviction drain out of me. This, of course, was the great danger. I had no answer. The room fell silent, but it was one of those silences that is really an uproar.
So we broke up. Nothing more was said about Patterns for the time being, but already that night there were fewer people at the barn for supper. I felt a great heaviness as I started for home.
Within a week, 20 people who had been camping out in the barn had moved on. Some were simply freeloaders and I wasn't sorry to see them go. Others however struck me as the very alternate-society types we had been trying to reach. I saw their forlorn silhouettes walking slowly down the highway, bedrolls on their backs.
Patterns scared away some newcomers too. Others that did stay were of a slightly different type, a little older, a little more serious about wanting to see change in their lives. In the end there was a shaking down at Love Inn. I had intended to hold a second meeting where we would discuss the different items in Patterns, and then either accept or reject it, but it proved unnecessary. By the end of one week there were only a dozen permanents left at Love Inn, and we all agreed that Jesus' own example was far from the go-your-own-way mode that had been our's up until now.
Patterns had become part of Love Inn.
One day, shortly after this trauma, I was walking over to the barn with Peg when I saw a striking figure wandering around the grounds, following Jim Harrington. The guy was all beard. When he got closer I could see dark deep-set yes, piercing and strong.
"Who's the guy with the big black beard?" I asked Peg.
"His name is Joe Laiacona," Peg said.
Joseph of Egypt would be more like it.
When I had a chance I introduced myself to this patriarch. Joe told me he came from Albany. He was a Roman Catholic who until recently had been studying for the priesthood. He read Patterns and shook his head. "It reminded him," he said, "of the strict rules at his seminary rules he'd worried even there about being able to keep."
I was surprised, then, when Joe asked if he could stick around. Joe Laiacona was one of the very first people to go through the new Five Day Program of introduction to Love Inn.
At the end of that time he announced that he wanted to stay. "Furthermore," he said, "I'll volunteer to take over the kitchen. I was assistant chef at a summer camp once and I enjoyed it."
Here was welcome news indeed. The kitchen continued to be a disaster area. Not during the week so much, any more, but the weekends continued to attract large crowds. "You can't cook for 150 people using these family-sized pots," said Joe, tossing our kitchenware into a cardboard box. "And you can't buy on a nickel and dime basis. You have to plan ahead. Buy in bulk."
"Where's the money to come from, Joe?" asked bookkeeper Peg.
"Prayer."
In the dubious silence, he went on to tell us that he had just ordered $500 worth of food to be delivered the following Wednesday.
"Well, God will have to provide," said Peg checking the account book. "We've got $80 to our name."
"Good," Joe said. "Write me a check for that much. That's our down payment. We'll pray for the rest to be here by Wednesday."
But that weekend Joe took off to visit his girlfriend, Ann Costello. "Now don't let me down," he said cheerily. "I want to see the larder full when I get back. And I want to see the whole shipment paid for."
We did pray, hard. Wednesday came. At noon the truck arrived from the wholesaler.
"Where do you want me to put this stuff?" the driver asked, jerking his head at the restaurant-sized cans of ketchup and mustard, the hundred pound sacks of sugar and flour, the cases of frozen food. We showed him the kitchen, rounded up a few strong backs to help him unload, then checked with Peg. "Had any money come in the mail? None. Was there any in the Love Buckets in the barn? Only $20. Great. We were $400 short and by now most of the food was stashed away in the freezer and kitchen shelves."
A car drove into the driveway. Out stepped Mia Hansen, the very first person to be converted as a result of the Tell It Like It Is radio show more than a year earlier. Mia was married now and didn't get out to the barn much. But in her hand was a check.
"This just came from my mother," she said. "I want Love Inn to have it."
The check was for $400.
When we told Joe about the way the Lord had me the grocery bill he was pleased but not especially surprised. "It's the Lord's way of saying were on the right track," he said. "Now, for Thanksgiving weekend we'd better plan on a crowd Friday as well as Saturday . . ."
Joe was clearly a natural leader, but he was far from being a natural cook. Heavy starches, greases, fats... It must have been a concentration camp where he was assistant chef. "Well, Joe," said Nedra, pushing aside mounds of nearly raw dough to reveal a teaspoon full of apple in Joes apple tart, "now we know why you weren't promoted to chef."
"Never mind," said Joe. "My cooking is good for your faith. Haven't you read," he added, pouring out a cup of tar-colored coffee, "that if ye drink any deadly thing it will not hurt you."
In the end the Lord moved Joe out of the kitchen. He was constantly being called away to counsel with a new arrival, or to discuss with Peg how much new paint we could afford to order. Bit by bit the food responsibility fell back on the shoulders of the women at Love Inn. We've been praising the Lord ever since for our deliverance.
This excerpt from Scott Free is reprinted with permission from the author. Any use of this material without written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.
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