Home to Harmony by Philip Gulley

bus from a rock band and use it as a church bus.
    The group was named Venom. They wore leather pants and went without shirts and had rattlesnakes tattooed on their chests. They writhed on the stage and hissed at the audience. It was hard to make out the words to their songs, except for the cuss words, which they spoke loudly and clearly and often. No one mistook them for a gospel quartet.
    Venom was driving through Harmony when their bus broke down. It was towed to Harvey Muldock’s garage. It took Harvey two weeks to get the parts, bywhich time the members of Venom were gone, to the great relief of our town. Harvey Muldock was telling about their bus during an elders’ meeting, which was when Dale Hinshaw suggested the church buy the bus for the cost of the repairs—three hundred dollars.
    â€œWe could take the money from our missions fund. It could be the start of our bus ministry,” he said. “We could drive to the nursing home and bring the people in. We can use it for mission trips. The devil has had that bus long enough. Let’s see what the Lord can do with it.”
    So that’s what we did.
    Dale painted it himself, with a paintbrush. Royal blue. On the sides of the bus he painted the church name, and on the back he painted Follow Me to Harmony Friends Meeting!
    Now the paint is faded, and if you look closely you can make out the word Venom and the faint outline of a rattlesnake. The bus was used two Sundays before it broke down again. We now understand why the members of Venom never bothered to come back for it. This was five years ago, and the bus still sits in the meetinghouse parking lot, a monument to shallow thinking.
    There is one window in my office. When Dale Hinshaw parked the bus five years ago, he parked it right in front of the window. The next Sunday the bus wouldn’t start, and it’s sat there ever since. Instead of looking out at sky, I look at the bus. It is a strong discouragement.
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    O ne Monday morning, late in August, I was sitting in the office reading the newsletter from theQuaker headquarters. The front page was the superintendent’s letter. He believes in the power of words, that we are one newsletter article away from vitality. He uses nouns as verbs and writes about impacting the world and visioning our objectives and imaging our destiny. He reveres numbers. There are newsletter articles about “Eight Ways to Impact Our World!!” and “Ten Steps to Visioning Our Objectives!!” He makes extensive use of the exclamation point and bold print.
    On the next page were the prayer requests. I scanned the list. Prayers for our leaders. Prayers for various sick people. Then, there it was: “Prayers for Brother Norman as he ministers to the Choctaw Indians!! Needs transportation for youth programs!!!”
    Brother Norman was a nice guy, but not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. When he’d graduated from seminary, no church would have him, so our superintendent talked with him about impacting the world as a missionary to the Choctaw Indians and sent him to Oklahoma, where Brother Norman began a building program.
    Each month Brother Norman wrote the Quaker headquarters to report his prayer needs. Electricians one month, plumbers the next. Before long, the meetinghouse was built. Now he was praying for a bus to transport the Choctaw youth.
    I raised my eyes from the newsletter and peered out my office window. The tires were dry-rotted and stuck to the pavement. The bus wouldn’t start, but Harvey Muldock could fix it.
    The week before, I had suggested that the men of the church needed a ministry. Dale Hinshaw had proposeda baseball ministry. His idea was to repair the bus and drive to the ball games in the city and invite other men from the town to join us. Then on the way home to Harmony, we could witness to them.
    He had come across this strategy in the Quaker newsletter. It was idea number four in the “Eight Ways to