House of Prayer No. 2 (29 page)

You check in with Pastor Ricks every few days. He's had a setback: the county zoning won't let him build a church as large as he wants to build on any of the land he has found. That is when you suggest he build a church on the property his church already owns. It might be smaller than the church he had planned, but he might be able to adjust the blueprints to fit the church on the existing lot.

IT IS ABOUT THIS TIME
that you are finishing writing a movie script about some Army veterans returning home from the war in Iraq. On the day you sell the script, you are pleasantly surprised at the selling price and neglect to thank God for your good fortune, and when you do get around to thanking God, you immediately remember your pledge to tithe ten percent of your earnings to House of Prayer No. 2, and the small heart in you cringes, wondering if that is ten percent of gross or ten percent of net.

You put off calling Pastor Ricks to tell him about selling the script, even though it would please him that prayers for your success are being answered. When you call him, he says they are still believing in God, looking for great things from the Lord, standing on the Word of God, but he's a little worried that the time is drawing near when the convicts will show up to begin work on the church. He is concerned that he doesn't have the money yet for the building materials, and that is when you tell him to start getting prices on pallets of brick and loads of lumber, you sold your script.

Pastor Ricks needs a building contractor, and he sees one at a gas station. The contractor's father lives across the street from
the church, and his mother is friends with your mother. Pastor Ricks asks if the contractor would be interested in overseeing a church project, and he is; the contractor has moved back from Maryland where he had been building expensive homes and has had some difficulties. He has come home to be close to his father, who is dying.

You fly home, and you and Pastor Ricks buy A-frame supports for the roof and loads of shingles, and you start stockpiling tools the convicts will need. You are spending a lot of money, and the whole idea sounds crazy as you watch trucks off-load the materials that are now stacked higher than the little church they are set beside, so you don't tell anyone.

The contractor has looked at the blueprints, and he gives you and Pastor Ricks a figure on the blueprints, and it's a lot more than you can spend, but Pastor Ricks is not worried, he knows the saints in the church will donate, and all you think about is the tabletop of singles and fives and handfuls of pocket change.

THERE IS A GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY
behind the church one Sunday afternoon after service, and everyone gets a chance at the sledgehammer, and the first things knocked down are the old outhouses.

The bus from the prison pulls up one morning, and the convicts get out in their orange and khaki jumpsuits and begin the rest of the demolition. You have forgotten to get a Dumpster, so you rent one that the convicts immediately fill up, and then you
have to go rent another. The Dumpster company only accepts cash, and you give it to them. More tools are needed, and you go and buy them: hand picks, gloves, shovels, a wheelbarrow. The prison program director says the work goes better when you feed the convicts something other than the white bread sandwiches and bottles of water they bring with them from the prison. They appreciate snacks too. So you go out to Walmart and buy cases of soft drinks and juices, and cartons and crates of snacks, and store them in the Sunday school house next to the church. You buy coolers and ice, and set up a fund to replenish the supply, and also calculate how much it costs to feed the busload of men daily hamburgers and pizza, and you set up a fund for that as well. When you get back to California, your lawyer tells you the studio is deferring half of your script payment against box office to finance the film, meaning you will never see that money after all.

Every couple of days Pastor Ricks calls you with an update. There are unforeseen costs and problems. The brick masons are so good they're about to run out of bricks, and you miscalculated how much brick you'll need, and you're writing a large check to a brick company.

You fly back home to Virginia, and you and Pastor Ricks go look at doors. You did not realize how much doors cost. There are the large ornamental doors for the front of the church, then there are the vestibule doors and the door to the new pastor's study, plus the side doors and the back door and all the emergency-exit hardware that has to be installed to bring the project up to code.

THE CONTRACTOR LOOKS WORRIED
, and you think it's about the project, and part of it is, and part of it is his dying father, and part of it is the situation he's gotten himself into that requires him to spend a week in jail. This puts the new church at risk with the prison program. If there are no materials or oversight for the convicts, the prison pulls them off the project and sends them to another project somewhere, and you lose your spot on the list, and your project can become an interrupted construction site forever or at least a very long time.

You fly back to California and begin to deal with a studio and a studio's notes on your script, which is set in Texas, and the first note you get from the woman at the studio is that she doesn't believe that men in Texas still wear cowboy hats, and from that point on, the notes get worse. You think of the shortest sentence in the Bible—
Jesus wept
.

Pastor Ricks is beginning to hate to call you, you can tell. Here are some things that are costing more than planned—the wiring, the heating, the air-conditioning, the oak trim, the carpeting, the lighting, and the new pews. Everyone is reaching deeper, Pastor Ricks and his wife, you and all the saints. You are becoming downspirited, and Pastor Ricks reminds you that anytime you sow godliness, you will receive opposition from the Devil because the godliness you are sowing will liberate someone from bondage; once you break through the opposition, the blessings will flow, and in faith you must never give up, because to give up means you will never succeed.

SMALL MIRACLES BEGIN TO HAPPEN
. Pastor Ricks watches the transformation in some of the convicts. He says some of the hard-core inmates soften and tell him they appreciate being treated as well as they are being treated on the job site, even if it is just a Walmart soda and a Little Debbie oatmeal cake. Pastor Ricks says during the day the inmates come around to the side of the building where he and the contractor are figuring the costs of the next day and ask Pastor if he will pray for their family members on the outside. For some, the closer they get to release, the more they worry about being accepted back into their families, they worry about what they will find when they get out, they worry about how they will react to what they find when they get out.

Toward the end of the project the police come around and arrest the contractor. He is charged with misappropriating materials from the state for his own personal gain. What comes out in court is that the contractor said he had been promised a bonus at work, and when his boss reneged on the bonus, the contractor ordered some paving material, paved some people's driveways, and kept what he charged them to do it up to the amount he says he was promised in his bonus.

This is not good. The church is only a few weeks away from completion, and without a contractor you have to hire someone and pay him real money, not the small amount you are paying the contractor.

This is something you do: You try to find the contractor's lawyer, and you make sure that he has retained a good one. Then you try to find out which judge the contractor will be appearing
before. The judge is one of the sons of the Commonwealth's Attorney who grew up three doors down the street from you. Without calling him directly, you send word to him through back channels, begging for mercy.

At the time of the contractor's trial, Pastor Ricks delivers almost the entire House of Prayer No. 2 congregation before the judge as character witnesses. The judge remarks to you privately through back channels that he has never had the opportunity to hear so many character witnesses. He also sends word as to the minimum sentence the contractor must receive, and the contractor receives the minimum sentence, though he is immediately sent to a correctional facility and will miss the dedication of the new church.

You write to the contractor in jail and ask if he wants you to try to figure out a way to get him released for a few hours on dedication day, and he sends word through Pastor Ricks that he would have to attend the service in handcuffs and under guard, and he'd rather not have his wife and daughters see him like that.

THERE IS AN OLDER INMATE
from the prison who has built homes for celebrities and politicians in Northern Virginia, and one day he tells Pastor Ricks,
Preacher, I'm going to build you a steeple
. And he does, and it is beautiful—louvered, a hand-stamped copper roof, and a beautiful cross on top. He tells Pastor Ricks that he built it so that at some point a bell can be installed inside. Pastor Ricks says the man choked up when he said that of all the multimillion-dollar homes he has built over the
years, nothing compares to the pride he has in that steeple. Pastor Ricks says it is the same with some of the other men who worked on the church, taking pride, making sure the details are just right, bringing their families by to see their work after they have been released from prison.