The Key The Pastor Handed Me
Pastor Harmon, all those years
Carl Harmon came to Shiloh Union in 1981 and he stayed until this fall. Forty-five years in one little country church, which almost nobody does anymore.
He married Raymond and me, though that was before, up in his first church. No, I have that wrong. He baptized my children. He buried my husband. He was the fixed point my whole adult life turned around, the way a good country preacher gets to be.
He was not a showy man. He wore the same gray suit to funerals for thirty years. He drove a Ford that he kept until the floorboards rusted through, and he knew the first name of every dog in the congregation.
Over the years I noticed small things I did not think to add up.
I noticed that the fund drive which should have left the church in debt for a decade somehow got paid off early, in a bad farm year when I did not see how anyone had the money.
I noticed that when the roof needed redoing, a gift came in from someone who wanted to stay unnamed, and the roof got done.
I noticed that Pastor Harmon, who made a country preacher’s salary his whole life, never seemed to have much for himself, drove that rusted-out Ford, and yet the church never went wanting when it mattered.
I noticed, but I did not understand. You do not go looking for the shape of a kindness that is being done quietly. That is the whole courtesy of it.
I noticed, too, that in all forty years he never once hired a service to clean, never once suggested the church did not need me, even when I was sixty-five and slower and it would have been the sensible thing. Other churches went to a company with a van and a man in coveralls. Shiloh Union never did. I thought it was loyalty to an old woman. It was something else, and I see that now.
A few times over the years he would catch me on a Saturday with my bucket and he would just stand in the doorway a minute and watch, not saying anything, with a look on his face I could not read.
Once, maybe ten years ago, he said, “You know, Edith, the Lord sees the work nobody else does.” And I said, “I should hope so, Pastor, or I have wasted a lot of paste wax.” And he laughed and let me get back to it.
I thought it was just something a preacher says. I did not know he was telling me the plain truth about himself.