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CBN.com – Another winter was coming and what would happen then to all the things that were going on at the barn? The musical weekends, bigger than ever now that colleges were back in full swing. The daily crowd of kids who came out to work and to find Jesus. The six or seven people who were living now at Love Inn. Already on crisp fall days you could see your breath inside the place.
I asked around to find out what it would cost to put some kind of insulation on the walls, and even the cheapest was out of the question. Then one day Peg called me at our apartment to say that a friend of hers who ran a sawmill had made us an offer of some slab wood.
"What's slab wood?" I asked.
"When you saw up a log for lumber," Peg explained patiently, "the outside layers with the bark on them are called slab wood. The man said they don't have much value except as fuel."
"Well, we don't have our fireplace built yet, but I guess..."
"He did say people sometimes use it as building material."
Building material! Suddenly I could see it. If we used the barky slab wood as siding, nailing it around the outside of the barn, we would have an excellent insulation against the old and also create a kind of log cabin effect. I told Peg we'd accepts as much of the wood as we could get, and within a few days our hammers and saws were singing as we began the long process of giving our barn a second wall.
Building the fireplace was urgent now too. We got hold of some second-hand bricks and started laying it at the spot where I'd seen it in my vision. Only we couldn't seem to make much progress. Once it pulled away from the wall, once it fell down altogether. We were putting it up a third time when the laconic old codger who'd helped us about the center post in the loft paid us a visit. He looked at the hayloft theater and nodded his head in silent approval. When I took him on a tour of the rest of the barn he had only one thing to say. As we passed the brick fireplace he mumbled:
"Won't draw."
Next day we tore the whole thing down and stacked the brick outside. And now a recurrent theme began cropping up in my daily Bible reading. Building materials. Every passage I read, the Israelites were constructing something or other. And brick, every time, was the symbol of slavery. Stone, now that was something else! Throughout the Bible, rock and stone was the symbol for Jesus. The light, the warmth, the fellowship, all the good things we hoped to enjoy around our fireplace, should be founded on stone.
So throughout the fall, while the trees on the hills turned orange and scarlet, we roamed the fields around the farm gathering stone let behind by the glaciers that had formed the landscape itself. Now the actual construction went rapidly. Before long we were burning scraps form our work to keep us warm. The fireplace roared its approval.
I saw something else as I stood admiring the massive grey stone mantel and chimney. Brick is made by man, stone by God. As with the thick slab wood which shielded us from wind and cold more efficiently than any artificial insulation could have done, God seemed to be saying, I alone am building this place and I will provide everything you need.
He did it in the most startling ways. Like the time Peg pointed out how much money we could save on food if we had a freezer to take advantage of specials and seasonal prices.
"I don't mean just a little one, Scott. We need a big commercial freezer."
We were feeding dozens of people at the barn almost ever day now. Scores, on our musical weekends. Peg, Ken, Debbie, Nedra, and I and six or seven other Love Inn regulars were sitting around our storeroom-library for what we'd come to call a "family meeting."
"Let's pray about it," someone said.
"So I plunged in. "Lord, You hear Peg's request. We need a freezer. A large one. A commercial freezer so we can put up meat and vegetables and things in season." The telephone rang. "So I ask You, please, Lord..." The telephone continued to ring, "...to answer our request..." The telephone would not stop ringing. Impatiently I snatched up the receiver.
"Love Inn. Scott Ross speaking."
And then I almost dropped the pone.
"I'm sorry to bother you, " a lady was saying, "but my husband and I are closing the frozen food section in our store and we wonder if by any chance you people could use a large commercial freezer?"
Or the time we needed some cement. The make-shift little kitchen we'd been getting along on wasn't anything like big enough for the weekend turnouts. We needed the kitchen I'd seen in that glimpse of the finished barn - and that meant laying a concrete foundation. Well, we prayed for the cement to make it with, as we'd prayed for every need since the freezer experience, and began to work on the excavation.
A week later the foundation was dug and the forms in place. Still no cement. Around mid-morning the work was interrupted by a visitor. It was a lady who lived about a mile away and would occasionally bring us eggs or tomatoes, but who made no bones about being leery of all this prayer business. I wasn't there that day but I heard later how she approached the two young college men who were working on the forms.
"I'm just looking around," she said. She always started like that. "What's all this going to be?" She waved her hand at the excavation.
They told her. They also told her a bit shyly how we were counting on God to supply the cement.
"Don't you think that's being naive?" the woman said.
They didn't have a chance to answer. A sharp hissing sound from the highway made them lookup. There, looming over them on the rise into Peg's drive was ... a huge cement truck.
The driver climbed out. He lumbered down the driveway and stood in front of the young men chomping on a cigar.
"Could you use some cement?" he asked.
They looked at the woman and shrugged. "Lady," one of them said, "if you want to know the truth I'm not sure I believe this either."
The woman began to query the driver. Did he know the people at Love Inn? No. Did he know they were putting in a new kitchen? No. Was he giving away the cement? Yes, it was left over from a job and he'd been going to dump it. He didn't know why he had stopped here; as he was driving by he just had a hunch to pull over. "But look," he said, shifting his cigar form one side of his mouth to the other, "either you want it or you don't."
"Oh, we want it!" the young men said. And within minutes the truck had backed up to the forms, and was filling them with the fresh cement. As for the lady, they told me she got into her car and patched out as she took off down Route 13.
These things filled us with awe and joy, although oddly enough they seemed to disturb a lot of the radio audience when I told about them on the air. "When you snap your finger God comes running, doesn't He?" one man wrote.
Maybe he had a point? Were we really being thankful enough - humbled enough - by these homey miracles? Remembering Nedra's and my decision back in Hagerstown never to ask for something new until we had thanked God for what He had already done, I put up a bulletin board on the wall of the barn. We divided it into two columns. At the top of the first were the words Be thankful for all things. And beneath it were listed the things we had most recently to be grateful for:
The other column was headed Ask and it shall be given you. Beneath this we put down items we were currently praying for:
"The exact make and model of the car you want?" a student from Rensselaer Polytechnic asked on a visit to the barn. "Even complete with the color! Doesn't that sound a little like dictating to God?"
I thought back to the family meeting when that particular request had gone up on the board. It was obvious we needed wheels out at the barn. Nedra and I had the Karman Ghia, but that wasn't big enough to haul things in, and anyhow it wasn't there most of the time. When someone needed to get into town he generally had to hitchhike. "How about a second-hand Volkswagen bus?" somebody said. "They're pretty cheap to run."
"As long as it's not so old it has to be in the repair shop all the time," another added.
"I saw a red and white one in town yesterday," I threw in. "Gee, it was beautiful!"
And so we'd written not just our need, but our dream, up on the our prayer list. Was this attempting to give God orders, like the Rensselaer guy said?
And then I remembered something.
"You know," I told him, "when I was a little kid back in Glasgow, I used to dream of owning black, patent leather sandals. My father didn't have a lot of money, but the next time I needed shoes he bought those sandals. I loved them more than any shoes I ever had. But what I chiefly remember is Dad -- the pleasure it gave him to be able to provide not just what I needed, but my heart's desire."
The guy looked unconvinced. "Well, if God offers you a green and black Ford pick-up, I wouldn't throw it back in His face."
But while we waited for the outcome of this one, God continued to meet our physical needs in crazy abundance. I'll never forget one Saturday noon when there must have been over a hundred people standing in line for lunch. Nedra, Peg and Debbie had fixed two huge pots of stew, but it was obvious there wasn't going to be enough. The line of kids stretched from the kitchen pass-through out the door of the barn and clear around the side.
The first pot was scraped clean, the second one was getting low. Nedra, ladling out the food at the pass-through window, could see the bottom fast approaching, and still the hungry people kept coming.
And at that point a station wagon pulled into Peg's driveway and out stepped two middle-aged ladies, each one carrying a large flat pan. They came through the side door into the kitchen.
"I hope you don't mind," one of them said, "but last night while we were praying we had the strongest feeling that we ought to make a lot of lasagna and bring it over to Love Inn. So here it is."
Nedra put the last helping of stew on the plate before her. Her heart missed a beat, but her ladle never did, as she dug into the steaming trays of food.
And if His material provision was a source of wonder, His action in people's hearts and minds was even more so. Scarcely a day passed now without some story of changed lives. Like Todd and Miriam who roared into Ithaca on a Honda 750 en route to nowhere. They'd started out in Florida and covered a lot of territory, very sure of what they were leaving behind, less sure of where they were going and what they'd find if they got there.
They came out of a diner in Ithaca to discover that both their helmets had been stolen from their bike. By the time they'd located a motorcycle shop and bought new ones, it was late. The guy in the motorcycle place thought there was a barn up the road where people sometimes spent the night.
And so Todd and Miriam arrived at Love Inn. And the overnight stop-off turned into a twelve-month stay as both of them found the direction they had been seeking in their lives.
It was happening around us all the time. And so...why did I continue to see so little change in myself? Oh, on the surface I was a real redeemed character, Mr. Helpful himself. But inside, where only I and a few bruised friends and relations knew about them, were the same quick temper, the same paranoia, the same secret thought life I'd been plagued with so long.
I was beginning to see that there was a common denominator to all of these battle areas. My ego. I remember the tragic car accident that let me see how deep-rooted the problem was.
Late one afternoon after I'd gone up to the station, a car and a truck collided on Route 13 near Kirk Road. The driver of the car was killed and the passenger, a teenaged girl, was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Since it happened not far from the barn, severaa people from Love Inn helped out at the scene; afterward one of them called to tell me about it and ask me to pray for the girl.
I did, both then with staff at CBN, and later that evening over the air. In fact I made quite a personal crusade of it, getting a radio prayer-campaign started, driving to the hospital myself after the show to visit her. She was in a coma, scarcely alive to all appearances, but as I prayed and read the Bible in the corridor outside her room, I had that experience of words seeming to stand out from the page. It was in the last chapter of Mark, where the three women come to Jesus' tomb. He is risen, an angel tells them; he is not here.
It was a message straight to me from God! The girl too would rise from that hospital bed! All the next day I proclaimed her total healing, in spite of all medical signs to the contrary. Over the radio that night I announced that we were about to witness a miracle like those recorded int eh Bible. "I have the scripture for it," I told the audience, "and God cnnot go back on His word."
During the next record Andy Andersen came into the studio. "Didn't you hear, Scott? That young girl died half an hour ago."
Well, I went into a kind of prolonged spiritual pout. For weeks I refused to pray for healing at all. God had led me along and then He'd let me down.
One afternoon I was in Syracuse doing a remote broadcast for CBN at the New York State Fair. From a portable studio in a trailer truck I would wander through the crowd with a microphone on a long extension cord, doing on-the-spot interviews.
All at once I noticed a lady being pushed through the throng in a wheelchair. And at that moment into my mind sprang a scene, complete with dialogue and everything. In that scenario I approached the crippled lady with my microphone and asked her if she would like Jesus to heal her.
"Oh yes!"
I saw myself lay my hand on her head: "In the name of Jesus, stand up and walk!" I imagined her leaping from her chair, walking, skipping, dancing, while a wondering crowd gathered about us (and an awestruck radio audience listened at home). And then I saw the lady point to me and heard her say,
"He did it!"
He did it! The crowd took up the cry. Scott Ross did it! Scott Ross healed her!
The imaginary scene faded, but nt the horror that had seized me as I got a look at myself. I dashed back tot he broadcast truck and climbed into the back, shaking with that knowledge. When that young girl had died in Ithaca, what had upset me most - the tragedy? OR the fact that I'd looked foolish?
He is risen; he is not here. Perhaps I thought suddenly, God had been speaking to me in that verse. The girl had not been there, on that bed in the hospital room: the real person had risen and was in bliss with Jesus. But I hadn't been listening for God's word on the situation. Scott Ross had prayed for physical healing, and Scott Ross couldn't hear anthign else.
How could God use me for healing if I did not listen? How could He use me for anything, I wondered wretchedly as the electronic gadgetry around me clicked and hummed, if my own ego got involved in every situation? If I appropriated the wisdom and glory that belonged to Him?
Now that I'd identified the problem, I saw how ego was mixed up in everything. Recently I'd turned an old grain storage area at the barn into an office where I could answer mail from the radio show. Now I noticed how much coming and going there was around Love Inn. Sure to the original vision, the barn was never closed. People came and went at all hours of the day and night. Strangers walked in off the highway. But I had private correspondence, a record collection, books, in that office. No, I'd put in a door and have a solid lock put on it. I announced my decision at the family meeting next morning.
General indignation. This was an infraction of freedom! Everything at the barn should be available to everyone! It showed lack of trust in the Lord!
I felt the familiar anger rising inside me. "I've made my mind up," I snapped, "And that's the way it's going to be."
The book room emptied in a hurry, leaving behind an atmosphere of discord and antagonism. I got down on my knees on the many-colored rug as I had had to do so often lately. "Lord, there goes my mouth again. Won't I ever change? Won't I ever be any different?"
I prayed for an hour asking Him to show me who was right in this situation. But: "In My sight," I seemed to hear Him say, "it isn't a question of who's right and who's wrong." All of you be subject one to another. Those words that I'd kept trying to dodge around in the first letter of Peter wouldn't got out of my head. Christians, God seemed to be telling me, were to yield to each other in love, not be out winning battles.
I got up off my knees, rounded up everyone I could locate, and called another meeting in the book room. My face burning, I asked forgiveness for my high-handed approach. "This should be a group decision, not any one person's. Whatever we decide together, that's what we'll do."
And with those words a remarkable change took place. If rebellion was contagious, so was yieldedness. Suddenly the steam went out of the situation. Instead of pressing this point of view or that, we started seeking God's viewpoint. I said hardly a word as the others, one by one, brought up the values of privacy, the need to protect property. The decision of the meeting was to install the door and the lock. But if I felt a sense of triumph it had nothing to do with that; it was that we'd tasted the sweetness of a right relationship.
Learning to things as "we" instead of "I" - here and there, now and then, I was beginning to do it. But there was one subject I knew I could never lay before the group. Ho could I share with anyone else the struggles I was having with my thought life? In the days before I became a Christian my sex life was pretty free-wheeling. When Nedra and I walked to the front of the church in Hagerstown, I knew that, among other things, the actual sex adventuring had to stop, and it did. Only, there was an interior sex life - a fantasy life - that kept right on. It was, I said to myself, and innocent enough way to handle drives that the Lord had given me and I made no special attempt to stop it.
When Nedra and I were married I expected that the thoughts would go away. But they didn't. They were just another expression of me going my own way. And in the end this cost me a great deal at Love Inn.
The problem was this. The most frequent problem area for the young people who came to the barn was sex. From masturbation and sex before marriage, to homosexuality and a lot weirder perversions, they were generally hung up on sex in one way or another. When people talked with me about their problems they didn't want theories, they wanted help that worked. If I hadn't won the battle myself, what could I tell them? Whenever I talked to some guy about the beauty of sex the way God created it to be, I could see in his eyes that I wasn't getting through.
So the old unyielded self was creating difficulties. And the biggest one of all was at CBN.
Andy Andersen and I were at loggerheads. Andy felt we should be serving the local Christina community, the farmers and businessmen where the station's support came from. I wanted to reach the uncommitted college audience. His listeners complained about my programming and vice versa.
The two groups not only disagreed about music and style of speech but often about the content of what was said too. On Tell It Like It Is we talked about the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, about the gifts of the Spirit, about healing, guidance, miracles. One day I prayed for a sick pony a little girl wrote in about. The phone was ringing before the amen. Healing was okay for the Bible but not for now. Most especially, one should never pray for animals.
And then came the issue of the fund drive. Andy pointed out, and the ledger backed him up, that unless more money came in, the station would have to shut down. Someone had an idea. We would ask people to make donations of physical items, a television set, books, clothes. Then we would auction these off for cash over the air.
I didn't like the idea. I made myself a nuisance around the mountain transmitter, complaining to every ear. This was huckstering; we were depending on man's cleverness instead of God's supply. At last one night I voiced my criticism on the air.
"I'm sorry good people," I said into the mike, sitting in the studio high in the hills. "I just can't keep silent. This fund raising approach is wrong. We need money, sure, but we shouldn't raise it by barter. If this is the Lord's project, He will find the money..." On and on I went.
The next night Andy called me into his office and talked to me about anarchy, how impossible it was to run a radio station without a chain of command. If I didn't feel I could live with his decisions, perhaps I didn't belong at CBN-Northeast.
"I don't belong anywhere," I answered grandly, "where man's ways are put ahead of God's." And with that I quit, little aware that the Lord was going to use this experience to teach me a lesson I didn't want to learn.
I drove home bursting to explode to Nedra about all the things the statin was dong wrong. But she met me at the foor of the apartment with an anxious frown.
"Scott, it's two o'clock and Nedra Kristina still hasn't gotten to sleep. Every time she lies down that awful wheezing and gasping begins." We went upstairs and sat down on the side of Nedra Kristina's bed. She was wide awake, hair matted with perspiration, dark circles of exhaustion under her large brown eyes.
I lifted out two-year-old onto my lap. "Lord Jesus," I said, "we know this sickness isn't Your will." I remembered the prayer I had made in the hospital after she was born. "In Your name, Jesus, I take authority over whatever force of evil it is that is attacking our little girl."
Later in our own bedroom, I got to worrying about that. Here I was trying to take authority when I wouldn't submit to authority. Had I been wrong to walk out on Andy? As I tossed on my bed I seemed to hear the answer: "Your rebellion is blocking your prayers for your child. Remember that all authority is ordained by Me; when you rebel against it you are rebelling against Me. When you learn this lesson, Nedra Kristina will be healed."
Could I possibly be hearing right? I had always skipped over such ideas in the Bible. They had too much the ring of a feudal lord's propaganda for keeping his serfs in line. "Your station in life is ordained by God, you miserable slave, so you just stay in your place."
But all night log, as the background to my thoughts, came the sound of ourlittle girl's labored breathing.
I redoubled my efforts now to line up speaking dates; this would be our only source of income until I found another job. Then, one morning in the mail, I found an invoice for some books I had ordered. They'd been delivered to the station up on the hill. I'd have to drive up there and get them.
As I drove along, past our old trailer home, past fields of rocky pastureland, that familiar voice inside my head was back again.
"Why are you going up to CBN?"
"Why am I going? To pick up a carton of books."
"No," came the voice, "that's not the reason. You are going up there to tell Andy Andersen you were wrong. You are going back to apologize, and to submit yourself to him."
I pulled over to the side of the road and shut off the motor. The countryside was immensely quiet. "But Lord, I'm not wrong. He's wrong. I want to be in submission to You, not to men," I aid. "You were never in submission to men."
"Wasn't I?"
"No! Look how You overthrew the money changers in the Temple."
"Well, then...all those religious laws, about healing on the Sabbath and everything."
"Being in submission doesn't mean being silent about error. Submitted men are not yes-men."
"What does it mean then, being in submission?"
"It means recognizing your place in an order. You to authority, authority to God. Workers to employers. Children to parents. Wives to husbands, husbands to Christ, Christ to the Father. But at every point in every chain each person must speak the truth as he sees it. Your job is to speak the truth, authority's job is to decide what to do about it. They decided to put Me on a cross. Am I asking you to do anything as costly as that?"
I sat there for a long time, while a woodchuck appeared in the field and slowly nibbled his way to within a yard of the car. At last I switched on the motor, dreading what lay ahead. I took the rest of the hill in low gear, not even raising a cloud of dust.
To my huge relief, Andy was not at the station. Five other staffers were, though. "Hello, Scott. We never expected to see you back here."
We stood around in the kitchen of the old farmhouse. Someone handed me a cup of coffee; it rattled in its saucer.
"I've come back to tell you all I'm sorry," I said, swallowing back tears. "The Lord has been showing me..."
And just at that moment Andy's car pulled up to the back door. He walked into the kitchen and stiffened as he saw me. I suppose he thought I'd come back to campaign again for my ideas.
I walked over to him and for a moment we stood face to face. I could hear the news teletype ticking away in the next room.
"Andy," I said. I could not hold his eyes. "Andy, I was wrong. You're the manager of this station and I tried to usurp your role. I'm sorry."
Well it was a pretty emotional scene. I was weepng after all. Andy put his hadn on my shoulder and told me I could start back to work anytime.
So I did. But wow. Going up there to submit had been hard, and it kept on being hard. I think maybe in some part of me I'd expected that after I submitted, Andy would come around to my side - like at the barn when I submitted the question of the office door and got my own way. Not this time. Andy and I simply had two different approaches. We were trying to reach two separate audiences. Andy came straight to the point.
"Scott, don't play any more rock music."
I started to explode, then checked myself. "All right, Andy." I had spoken the truth as I saw it, now I submitted to the man in authority over me "as unto the Lord," as the Bible says. I didn't like the musical results, but I tried desperately not to show it. "You're going to obey Andy," I said to myself, "and you're going to be cheerful about it."
So for a month I sat up at the station spinning tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee music and avoiding controversial topics on the air. Almost at once I noticed changes, not so much at work as in other areas. As I began to get into the right relationship with Andy, I discovered that Nedra and I were bickering less. We'd been hearing all the talk about how the wife was supposed to submit to her husband. Now we saw that it was the husband, not the wife, who was the primary "submitted" one in the family. He was to be submitted to the Lord. The wife's role was to trust that attitude.
There were other encouragements. One night while I was on the air a telephone call came through.
"My name is Peggy Nichols. I live in Brockport, New York. My husband's in the auto body business."
"Oh?"
Then she started telling me about a badly smashed-up Volkswagen bus which had come into the shop. I held my breath. "The owner has decided not to keep it, but my husband thinks it can be fixed up almost like new. There's nothing wrong with the engine."
When it was ready, she said, they were going to donate it to Love Inn. And so a couple of weeks later Nedra and I drove to Brockport.
The Nichols were as excited as children. Mr. Nichols threw open the door to his garage shop and Nedra and I burst out laughing and crying all at once. For the bus was, of course, painted a bright shiny red, with white trim.
That afternoon back at the barn we checked off "one red and white VW bus in excellent condition" from our Prayer and Praise board.
But the most wonderful answer of all came so quietly we scarcely noticed it. Local doctors continued to be baffled by Nedra Kristina's stubborn bronchitis. At last they recommended a consultation with a specialist in Syracuse. And so, with considerable difficulty, an appointment was set up.
We never kept it.
On the day before we were schedule to go, Nedra said to me:
"Guess what, honey?"
"I give up what."
"We've been so busy trying to set up this date we haven't been using our eyes and ears. Nedra's been breathing fine lately! She hasn't had a sleepless night in...in..."
"A month?"
It was one month since I had submitted my opinion about the radio show to Andy Andersen.
"A month," said Nedra. "She hasn't had a sleepless night in a month."
It was Thanksgiving weekend, 1969. I had just come back from a speaking date and was crawling into bed at one o'clock in the morning when downstairs in the den the telephone rang. I ran down and picked up the receiver.
"Praise God, brother!" It was the husky, unmistakable voice of Harald Bredesen. "I'm at Pat Robertson's," he went on.
Then Pat's voice was on another extension. It seemed that as he and Harald had been praying that evening, God had begun speaking to them about a brand new type of radio show. And suddenly I found myself telling the two of them about the dream that had dropped full-blown into my head down in Roanoke.
"The key," I said, "is that the program wouldn't go out over Christian outlets. It would be a give-away show aimed at commercial radio stations across the country."
Before we hung up that night we were talking about a three-hour prime-time format geared to general radio. In December Nedra and I went to Pat's and Dede's home in Portsmouth and actually began putting things together. "The name of the program," Pat said, "would be the Scott Ross Show."
"Oh, no. Pat, I've been fighting this ego thing for months now." I described a few recent failures in this area.
"But it's got to be that way," Pat said. "People relate to a person, not a title. And we can let you have Larry." Larry Black was a top-notch production and marketing man from CBN-Northeast. It was a real index of Pat's excitement that he would let us have Larry.
And so I left my job at the Ithaca station. Left it not in rebellion and anger, but in God's timing, and for His purpose -- with the best wishes of Andy Andersen ringing in my ears.
Within weeks we were making our pilot program, using CBN facilities in Ithaca. Before long 16 stations were using the show and we were getting a hundred letters a week from listeners. It was hopeless trying to answer them all. I was at my typewriter late at night and early in the morning: the questions people were asking and the problems they were facing would tear you apart. About this time I was in New York City to give a talk about Love Inn when a young black girl introduced herself. "I don't suppose you needed a secretary up there," she said. A few weeks later Jacki Brown joined the staff of the Scott Ross Show.
We were acquiring other full-timers. One day in the spring of 1970, into my office came Jim Harrington, a shy, lanky, slow-talking college student who for months had been spending weekends at the barn.
"Hi, Scott."
It was rare to hear him put even two words together. I said "Hi" back and waited.
"I graduated."
I thought hastily. Then I remembered: Jim had been studying agriculture at the State University of New York at Cobbleskill. "Congratulations. What are you going to do now?"
"I was wondering," said Jim, "if you could use somebody to manage this farm. You know, grow some real crops. Breed livestock."
Jim was one of the first residents in the new dorm rooms Ken Spafard was helping us build where the pony stall had been. Jim taught us organic gardening and started upgrading our small stock of cows, sheep, pigs and rabbits. One evening a few weeks after Jim moved in, I saw Debbie coming out of Peg's house wearing a dress...I hadn't known she owned such a thing.
"Going out with Jim again, Debbie?" Each weekend the funniest sight at the barn had been silent, down-to-earth Jim trailing about after the whirlwind, which was Debbie.
But that night as I watched Jim holding the door of the red and white VW and saw Deb demurely gather her skirt as she climbed in, I suddenly knew that Love Inn was going to produce its first marriage.
What a celebration it was on July 11, 1970. All of us gathered on the lawn next to Peg's house as Debbie and Jim became Mr. & Mrs. Harrington.
How much the Lord had done, I thought, in the year and a half since Nedra and I first drove out Route 13 to see a tumble-down barn. I looked at the handsome bark-sided building, the parking lot jammed with cars, the joyful faces all around us.
And yet, in a way, the very success of the place was providing a boomerang.
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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