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CBN.com – Over the next several weeks I developed a strange routine. I would get home from the radio station at about two o'clock in the morning, fall into bed for a few hours sleep, be up for breakfast, play with Nedra Kristina, and then . . . head out to the barn and start heaving old mattresses out into the yard.
The only thing I didn't know was what I was doing it for. Sometimes I talked about my puzzlement on the air. Now I want to ask you what is there about that drafty old barn that makes me take the long drive out to Peg Hardesty's every day?
When I got to the cow stalls I had to forget about breakfast. As I shoveled deeper into the rotting manure heaps, the acrid fumes made my nose sting, my eyes weep. Peg came out one morning to find me retching, around behind the tractor shed.
"You know, Scott," she said gently, "Jesus was born in a stable."
I picked up the shovel and went back to work.
At first I asked Peg's permission for anything I wanted to do. But after a while she said, "Now Scott, you do what you want with this barn. You don't have to keep coming to me."
I doubt that she would have been quite so relaxed if she had foreseen the influx of people who began to appear. After I talked about the barn on the air, phone calls would come in from local students: "Could we come out and give you a hand?"
Pretty soon students from Ithaca and Cornell, even as far away as Syracuse, began showing up. As each new car or motorcycle crunched down her gravel driveway, I'd see Pegs round face appear in her kitchen window. They came in their Levi's and Nehru shirts and granny glasses, and they came to work. Down came the Coca-Cola signs, the license plates, the cobwebs. Out went the rotten boards and the mail order catalogues.
The great part was these were the very people I wanted most to talk to. I remembered the old shyness I had felt down in Bookmasters in New York, when I tried to talk about Jesus to people like these. Now it came naturally, in terms of the work we were doing. For instance one day a guy came to me carrying a rusty car wheel.
"What should I do with this, Scott?"
I looked at it: the wheel was bent and warped and would never hold a tire. I told him to throw it out, and while I was at it told him about the useless stuff God was helping me chuck out of my life as well.
Sometimes the encounters weren't so pleasant. One time as I came into the barn a Cornell student saw me, quickly took something out of his mouth and flipped it out the door. He grabbed a broom and began sweeping like crazy, but heavy on the air was the sour-sweet smell of marijuana.
I didn't say anything at the time. But the rest of the morning I found myself brooding over it. I couldn't very well take a holier-than-thou attitude, the way I'd used drugs. Still, a bust was the last thing we needed. So in the end I talked to the guy.
"Look", I said, "what you do about grass is up to you. But you can't smoke it here. It's illegal you could get the whole lot of us arrested."
I expected an argument. To my surprise the guy almost seemed to welcome my stand.
"Okay, man. That's cool. It's your roof."
I was so relieved at the way he took it that it wasn't till later, driving home, that I realized what he'd said. My roof? That was a laugh. The barn wasn't my place. It was just... well, I didn't know what it was, except I sure didn't want to be saddled with it.
That was the way things happened at the barn. They were done before you knew what was going on. One morning in May I was outside nailing down some loose boards so they wouldn't flap every time the wind blew, when this hitchhiker comes walking along Route 13 with a pack on his back.
"Hi."
"Hi."
Soon we were talking. His name was Philip. Where was he from? Chicago. What was he into? Nothing. He was just back from Vietnam. What were we into? Jesus. Yeah? That's far out. Pretty soon Philip was nailing boards alongside me.
The thing is that at the end of the day Philip unrolled his sleeping bag and sacked out in the hayloft. I didn't know about it 'till I got there the next day, and of course it was okay. It was just, you know, I didn't want to end up with a hotel.
We didn't even have a name for the barn. I still talked about it occasionally on the evening show: "Well, I went out to that old barn at Peg Hardesty's on Route 13 today. Listeners sent in suggestions for names, but nothing seemed right."
Then one day Nedra, Nedra Kristina and I were all out there. In spite of the fact that the weather had been warm for weeks, Nedra Kristina's bronchitis was no better. Some nights she and Nedra got no sleep at all, and then were too tired next day to do anything but drag around the apartment. But that day they were out there, and so was Bob Whyley, and Philip the Vietnam veteran who was still sleeping in the loft, and maybe a dozen college kids including a girl named Mia Hansen who had made a commitment to Jesus as the result of the radio show. A bunch of us were standing out by the highway admiring the now battened-down walls.
"You know," said Nedra, "this place really and truly needs a name."
"If it's Jesus place," said Bob, "maybe we ought to ask Him for a name. New Christians always kept the rest of us on our toes."
So right there beside the road, we bowed our heads. "Lord," I said, "help us to welcome anybody who comes to this barn. Just let it be one great love-in for Jesus."
Philip pounded me on the back. "Thats it!"
"That's what?"
"Love Inn! he said. A love-in for Jesus. Don't you get it? This is Love Inn!"
We all went wild. We shouted and cheered 'till we created a little traffic jam from drivers slowing down to stare. Mia Hansen ran for a paint can. L-O-V-E- I-N-N, she printed across the huge sliding doors. A great love-in, that was what our funky old barn was. A place where Jesus love was to be found.
I'd read a lot in the Bible about names -- how giving a name changes things, but I'd never watched it happen until now. Originally the scuttlebutt in Ithaca was that a bunch of hippies had taken over the barn for drug and sex orgies. But after Mia painted the name on the doors, a reporter from the local newspaper came out, took photographs, and wrote a story on us. She did a good job explaining what we were trying to do. Word got around: there was a love fest going on at Peg Hardesty's, all right, but it was some kind of religious love.
Our own thinking was strangely clarified too. One warm June day I was alone in an old storeroom that had once been piled floor to ceiling with junk. The stuff was mostly gone now piled outside waiting to be carted away. The room was nearly empty and then I stared. Against the blank wall I saw a row of bookcases filled with books. In another wall was a window, where certainly there hadnt been one a minute before, a window with a kind of colored glass effect. Here was a sofa, over there some chairs. There was even a carpet on the floor, and I saw to my surprise that it was made of bits of different colors, like Joseph's coat.
As I stared, it was an empty storeroom again. But I knew without a doubt that I had seen the library and bookstore that would one day occupy this space. It was the experience on the bus all over again as though giving the barn a name had opened the way for God to show me more of His plan for it.
I stepped out of the storeroom and walked slowly through the milking barn. The animals had been outside since early spring; floor and walls were scrubbed and disinfected. But where in actuality were concrete cow stanchions, I saw tables and benches. One end of this section was a large well-equipped kitchen. Above my head the barn beams had been stripped of whitewash and glowed a deep natural brown. Against the rear wall and now I really blinked was a huge fireplace with a blazing fire in it.
I climbed the ladder to the haymow. Only it wasn't a ladder any more, but a broad solid staircase: I saw how it utilized a minimum of space. And the haymow was now a stage. The silo was a prayer room. Beneath that, the pony stalls had been turned into sleeping rooms. . .
"Wait a minute!" I said out loud. "People will be sleeping here permanently? My work was in radio. I was a disc jockey; I wasn't going to turn nursemaid to a bunch of strung-out kids."
And at that moment the unrolling vision ceased.
Nedra was fascinated when I told her what I'd seen. She insisted on hearing every detail. "If it really was a look into the future, Scott. It's clear that the Lord only showed you as much as you were ready for. The minute you got frightened, He stopped."
Maybe. Maybe it wasn't a true vision at all. Maybe it was just in my head.
But a few days later I told Peg about it, including the part abut the dormitory in the pony stalls. We were sitting in her kitchen drinking iced tea. Even as I spoke a girl wandered out of the barn dropping a gum wrapper on the ground behind her. Peg bit her lip. I knew how she felt. It was one thing to rap with people over the telephone, another to have to live with them.
"It scares me too, Peg. But . . . if the vision had come from God? If youre willing to trust this thing for while, Peg, I certainly am."
"I'm willing, Scott."
A couple of days later Peg said she wanted to make a legal gift to us of the barn and the land immediately around it. We formed a non-profit corporation for the purpose, Jesus People, Inc. And with the signing of these papers we stepped over a threshold.
One part of the vision I had no trouble at all with. The old haymow was to be a theater -- a place where people could come to perform and listen to the best in contemporary Christian music. After all, that was the scene God had originally shown me, nearly three years ago.
There was only one problem. Right in the center of what would be the seating areas was the huge post that held up the roof. Leave it there and you couldn't see the stage, take it away and the roof would fall down. "Lord," I said as I stood there in the big twilit loft, "if this really is Your idea, You'll have to show me what to do about that post."
Instantly into my head came these instructions.
That post is supporting a crossbeam. Get two smaller posts, six by six inches thick, and place them at either end of the crossbeam. Run braces like Vs from the crossbeam to the roof. Then cut out the center post.
I stood staring up at the beam and the roof far over my head. I knew nothing whatsoever about construction, yet these directions had come with such authority.
The only thing to now as to check them out with an expert. Through Peg I got in touch with the best local carpenter, who one day drove out to the barn to stand with his hands in his overall pockets, looking up at the crossbeam and the center post while I explained what I was proposing.
"Do you think it would work?" I asked anxiously.
The carpenter pressed his lips together and walked from one side of the loft to the other, squinting up at the roof. Obviously he was not going to part with a word that was not absolutely necessary. Finally, he gave one short nod.
"Yup," he said.
Still, it was a tense moment for me when, the six by sixes and counter-braces in place, we started sawing that tremendous center post through, top and bottom. At last, holding my breath, I picked up a sledgehammer and hit the bottom of the post until it crashed to the floor. Pigeons clattered into the air and dust rose in clouds, but the roof never shivered.
"Scott," said Peg one day in July as she showed me how to stake the beans in the garden we had put in behind her house, "Where's Debbie going to sleep?"
I glanced down to the far end of the garden where Debbie Richardson was running about, generally getting in the way of the lettuce weeders. She'd arrived that morning from Roanoke, Virginia, and hadn't sat down or stopped talking since.
"Because she won't be going back to a college dorm tonight like the summer school girls," Peg pointed out. "And she can't very well sleep in the barn."
Debbie Richardson was an eighteen-year-old time bomb who'd attended a talk I'd given recently down in Roanoke. As I spoke, she'd known that she was to come to Love Inn. And here she was: all energy and skinny arms and legs. Peg was looking at me, waiting for an answer.
"Ah . . maybe she could stay with you, Peg?"
And that, I should have known, was a recipe for disaster.
Something else had happened in Roanoke, something I'd shared so far with no one but Nedra. I'd gone down there worried, as I was increasingly, by problems at the radio station. Every week now we were getting complaints from older listeners about the type of music I was playing on the evening show. Some of the calls and letters came to me, but Andy Andersen as station manager got most of them recently he'd begun hinting that I should change the programs approach. Without ever intending to, I'd suddenly found myself describing all this to the audience in Roanoke.
"The trouble is," I said, "Tell It Like It Is goes out over Christian stations, and Christian audiences have come to expect only certain kinds of programs. One day I'm going to do a show that's aimed at regular commercial radio the big rock stations. The music will be good enough to compete with the best, but the lyrics and the talk segment will be Christian. Then you'll really be out in the market place."
If the Roanoke audience had been surprised at this outburst, I'd been flabbergasted. I hadnt known I was thinking along these lines at all. And yet there was the idea, full blown and complete in my head. Was this Pat Robertson's prophecy, even thought the language was so ordinary? Ever since the Roanoke trip I'd been puzzling over it.
Meanwhile, with the hayloft-stage completed and the staircase in, we began holding musical weekends which soon started attracting people from a hundred miles away and more. I''d pre-record the show, Nedra would line up a sitter, and we'd drive out to the barn together. Many an evening I would look around the loft and see the very scene God had showed me on an Eighth Avenue bus. The room packed with young people, swaying, shouting, clapping their approval, while from the stage came the incredible sounds of a new kind of worship not just Jesus rock, but something freer, fresher, totally reverent and totally today.
Among the young musicians who began to congregate at Love Inn as word got out, a few stayed on after the weekends, moving into the spare rooms at Peg's, becoming a regular part of Love Inn. Some of them were also mature Christians, so that Nedra, Peg, and I got some help with the kids who stayed on after the converts, and some always did often for days to learn more about Jesus.
Other parts of the barn-to-be that I had seen that June day were becoming a reality too. Some of the transformation we helped along ourselves, like renting sand-blasting equipment to get the whitewashed ceiling downstairs back to its natural wood.
Other developments were hard to explain. One day we had a visitor to the barn who told me he had a carpet store in Ithaca. He asked if we could use a load of discontinued rug samples. I went out to his truck to see what he was talking about. There, neatly stacked, were hundreds of squares of broadloom, the kind rug salesman take with them on calls to customers.
"Pretty," I said. "But how would we ever use such small pieces?"
"Here, I'll show you," he said.
He carried an armload of the rug squares into the old storeroom which already had a few books in it, the start of our library. The guy dropped the samples on the floor, then knelt down and arranged them in an interesting pattern. "All you do," he said, "is glue these to a plywood base, and presto, you have a rug."
I didn't answer but not because I didn't go for the idea. For at my feet lay the many-colored Joseph's Coat of a rug I had seen back in June in this very room.
And meanwhile, in the farmhouse, the relationship between Peg and Debbie was building to a blow-up. Almost every time I drove out to the barn Debbie would meet me in the driveway with some new tale of woe. Peg was a slave-driver, she said, who cared more about her stupid old house than letting Debbie pray or read the Bible or talk with the kids over at the barn. Peg, when I asked her about it, said she didn't feel that picking ones clothes off the floor and cleaning up after ones own meals constituted forced servitude.
Most of the time my sympathies were with Debbie because I could see that she was trying, really trying. Like the time she decided in a burst of good will to scrub the bathroom walls. That day, both of them met me in tears.
"My brand new tile!" wailed Peg. "I saved six years to put new tile in there!"
It seemed that the new tile was plastic and Debbie, instead of asking, had used cleansing powder on it and scratched it. I put my arm around Debbie and blew up at Peg. Wasn't Debbie's gesture of love more important than the precious bathroom tile? I mean, God was interested in people, not things.
One addition to the Love Inn cast Peg welcomed with open arms. One Saturday when I drove out there things seemed -- I don't know -- better organized than usual. A group was laying pipes for the kitchen we needed now in the barn; another group was spreading gravel in the new parking area.
I parked next to a blue pickup and walked into Peg's kitchen.
"Hi, Scott," Peg said. "Remember how weve been needing a supervisor? Well, hes out in the barn right now."
"Yeah? Who's that?"
"His name's Ken," she said. "Ken Spafard."
"The night before," she told me, "she'd heard Niki barking and looked out to see this blue truck pull into the drive. A man and a young boy got out and came to the door. The man introduced himself and his son Eddie, and asked if they could camp out and help us a bit. He said he was in the construction line."
"If you want to know the truth," Peg said, "it's good to see a face around here that's older than twenty-two."
I went to the barn. There was Ken Spafard showing two young men how to hold a saw. I took his roughened hand and introduced myself to him and his boy Eddie.
"Do you need anything built?" Ken Spafard asked.
"We sure do. We need some eating tables."
So Ken went to work turning the old cow stalls into a dining area. As he sawed and hammered he told us that his wife Jean had cancer. Young Eddie was at the ten-year-old noisy stage; on weekends Ken had to find ways to keep him out of the house so Jean could rest. That night the two slept in the back of Ken's truck. When they left Sunday afternoon they promised to return.
At first Ken and Eddie came out to Love Inn only for an occasional weekend. But after Jean died, Ken and Eddie moved in, setting themselves up in a little shed out back of the barn. When Ken wasnt working on a job of his own, he was showing us how to shellac the now bare-wood ceiling beams or helping us build a stable out back of Pegs where we could put the animals next winter.
It was fun watching Ken change. He came from a church that reminded me of the dour, sad faced church I'd attended as a child in Glasgow. Now, working everyday around young people, many of them brand new Spirit-baptized Christians, he began to absorb a little of the joy that permeated the place. Even as he struggled with grief for his wife, I could see a new aliveness appear in his eyes. At first I thought I must be imagining it, but as time went on there could be no doubt: Ken was letting his sideburns grow.
A long weepy phone call from Debbie had interrupted my morning Bible reading. Peg was still picking on her; Peg was the meanest person she'd ever known. I got her calmed down with a promise to speak to Peg when I got there later in the morning and turned back to my reading in the sixth chapter of Ephesians.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord; for this is right.
These words which I had read with no special attention a few moments earlier, now seemed to burn and glitter on the page. Was Peg in some sense Debbie's parent in this situation? Were we much as I tried to avoid the thought were we becoming something more than just a random grouping of individuals, each going his own way? Were we, whether we wanted to or not, entering into some kind of deep, lasting relationship with one another?
I looked again at the Bible in my lap. Obey was such a harsh old-fashioned word, out of place in today's world. Why then did this verse shine like gold upon the page, as though the key to an impossible situation had been placed suddenly in my hands.
Out at the farmhouse I could tell that Peg too had been in tears this morning.
"Is it Debbie, Peg?" I asked.
Peg was silent.
"Where is she?"
"She's out riding the pony."
"But I thought you asked her yesterday to help you do the account books this morning."
"Well, she didn't do it. Scott, she's out riding."
Just at that moment through the kitchen window I saw Debbie going into the new stable with the pony. I waited but she did not come out. So I walked up to the stable, and there was Debbie leaning over the gate to the pony stall, feeding him lumps of sugar.
At that instant a strange thing happened. I felt as if I had to speak to Debbie, letting the Lord use my lips. "I have a message for you, Deb," I told her, and then remembering the Porstmouth prophecies, told her she would have to weigh for herself whether or not it came from the Lord:
"Debbie, you came here because you love Me and seek to know Me better. But you cannot know Me in a vacuum, Debbie. You meet Me in the people and situations I place in your path. And right now, Debbie, that is Peg. I want you to respect and obey her while I reach you about respect and obedience."
I felt as horror-struck as Debbie looked. Respect? Obedience? Had those words actually come from my mouth?
Abruptly Debbie got up and raced from the stable. Well that's that, I said to myself. She's gone to pack and head for home.
But when, a quarter of an hour later, I followed her down to the house, I walked in on an amazing scene. Debbie was folded in Pegs arms, sobbing her heart out on Pegs shoulder, and Peg was murmuring the soothing phrases any mother uses to a hurt and tired child. . .
It was the beginning of a new relationship, one in which Debbie tried more and more successfully -- to let her headstrong, impulsive nature by guided by Pegs wiser, more discipline one. The amazing thing to me was that it seemed to work. Debbie, the freest, brightest spirit I'd ever known, lost none of her spark, none of her vitality, but gained something of Pegs deep-running peace. It stunned and fascinated me.
For reasons I did not understand, it also scared me to death.
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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