Revival was my prayer.

By revival I meant a massive, miraculous undertaking of the spirit of god that would transform the world. I read books on the subject. I studied the history of the Great Awakenings. I read the sermons of those who had precipitated American revivals. Charles Finney was my favorite. By day I escaped to the woods to read his sermons, to read the Bible, to play, and to meditate. I sometimes took a companion. Often it was Rix. In my morning prayers, which were becoming longer and longer, I wandered about the OBU campus and into the city of Arkadelphia and I called forth prayers. I felt the need to make myself subject, to make myself into nothing, yet in attempting to do so, I was making more of myself than I ever could. I was addicted to religious power, and I was under a stressful messiah complex, for I truly believed that my efforts would save the world and that by doing so I would have to be destroyed. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if…” My life hung on that “if.” All else seemed meaningless.

I wanted to be an immortal. Yet my humanity was a glaring reminder that I would never be so. I could not embrace that humanity, though. Not yet.

I found comfort in my academic pursuits. I took to the academic study of religion with great aplomb. I began to out-step my cohorts. They were lazy. They were good people but too earthly minded. They could not focus their attentions on the deeper mysteries, as I could. My teachers took notice of me and began to encourage this pursuit of the mind. Scott Duvall, especially, took a shine to me and I reveled in his praise. Slowly my thoughts began to change. Slowly, I began to realize that the revival I sought was going to take place in me and that it would work its way slowly to the surface as I began to change hearts and minds within the church, or so I thought.

In truth it was a rubric on which to hang my insecurities. It was a way of surviving my late-teens and early twenties. It was all destined to crash, but when?

The folks that I met on this journey became more important than the journey itself.

In those early days, Rix was of prime importance. The cast of characters expanded a bit to include folks like Jenny Ashley, Siobhan and her beaux Perry, Dennis from the Ivory Coast, and the band of freaky believers.

Dennis proposed that we start a weekly Bible study for our male friends. It was to be male dominated simply because it would be held in the dorm room that he shared with Rix and women were not allowed there. The group that gathered there every Tuesday night was the band of freaky believers. Each one of us was marred, flawed, physically and mentally. We were, all of us, true freaks such as Barnum and Bailey would have gladly accepted. There was Tony and Quinton, Dennis and Homer, Curtis and Rix, and of course, myself. We would gather and sing songs; we would usually read a Bible passage and talk about it, and then we would share prayer requests and pray.

It was during one of these Bible studies that I realized how I had come to hang with the lowly. Dennis was from the Ivory Coast and he lacked much of the reserve that I was accustomed to with respect to life and religion. He believed in the curative powers of Vaseline. On this particular night he had liberally applied petroleum jelly to the blemishes all over his face. It was a night time ritual for him, but on this occasion he had done so immediately prior to our Bible study. Homer did not share the same hygienic tastes. His face was a sea of white heads and black heads in various stages of ascendance and decline. He helped them along by picking at them unconsciously, and as we sat for Bible study, he pinched hard at his face, squeezing the white heads dry and then licking the puss from his fingers.

Tony was a big man who liked to go barefoot in the dorms. As was his custom, he came to the freaky believers with no shoes, and this prompted a picking of a different sort. As we all shared our prayer concerns, Tony vehemently decried his lot in life, his need for the Lord’s favor, and his love for the lovely, spunky Anne (Oh, unrequited love, how you dogged our steps through the forests of Blakely Town.). I tried to listen to Tony’s woes, but it was difficult because he was anxiously picking the callouses from his rough feet, and letting them fall to the floor.

Tony had a powerful voice, but Curtis’ was stronger. Curtis was another big fellow with a handsome boyish face. He was freckled, had a round belly, and looked like a model for the old Big Boy statues. His conversation turned at every moment from joyous to somber. If he stopped you on campus to talk, within two minutes he would whisper to you conspiratorially of all the trouble he faced, the torture of being Curtis, and then end with a head splitting laugh before sauntering off. He acted the same at the Freaky Believer’s Bible Study, falling into a pit of prayerful despair but then climbing out with a laugh that reverberated down the halls of Daniel Dormitory.

Clinton was the quietest of the bunch, but his quietude was accented with a cowboy hat covering a bowl cut. He had a way of listening, accepting, and offering no comment like that of priest at confessional. Perhaps this is why, he and Curtis got along so well. Curtis needed someone to listen to his trouble and his laugh, Clinton needed someone to give him a voice.

Looking around at this eclectic group of eccentrics gave me a sense of hope in my early days at OBU. These were the folks on the fringe of the OBU society. Long before the grundge movement swept the nation and eventually OBU, these were the folks that made OBU different. I always asked for prayer for the campus. Revival was my prayer, and I truly believed that amongst these folks, I would see it happen. Until, of course, it didn’t.