Nineteen Firefighters in the Front Pews

The Blessing

Pastor Linda stood at the front of the church for a long moment. She had a sermon in her hand. She set it down on the pulpit and did not pick it back up for a while.

“I had a sermon prepared about Lent,” she said. “I think the Lord just preached a better one. So I’m going to do something we have not done in this church in a long time.”

She came down the steps from the chancel to the front pew.

“Would the Ellerton Volunteer Fire Department please stand?”

They stood, all nineteen of them and Harold, who stood because everyone around him did and then did not know whether he was supposed to sit back down. Ted Pankratz put a hand on his shoulder and kept him standing.

Then Pastor Linda said, “And would the Kessler family come forward?”

I had not seen the Kesslers come in. They were in the back corner, Tom and his wife Ann and Eric and the two younger girls. Ann had told me at school that they almost did not come that week, because she could not stop crying.

They came up the aisle. Ann was crying again. Tom had his cap in his hands. The firefighters in the front pew moved over, and moved over again, until there was room for all five Kesslers to sit down among them.

Pastor Linda put her hand on Duane’s shoulder, since he was on the end, and she prayed for them.

She prayed for the hands that hold the hose and the feet that go in when everybody else comes out. She prayed for the pagers that go off at supper and in the middle of the night and on Christmas morning. She prayed for the wives and husbands and children who sit at home and wait.

She prayed for the Kesslers, for the barn, for the cows that lived. She prayed for Tom’s hands, which were burned on the backs from the stanchions.

And then she prayed for Trinity, that we would be a church whose door is wide enough for anyone who comes to it straight from loving his neighbor.

I do not think there was a dry eye in that building. I know there was not one in our pew.

After the amen, Mrs. Erdmann found her place in the music and played “Lord of All Hopefulness,” and the whole church stood up and sang it.