Anxious Gravity. Jeff Wells

Holy Spirit’s been speaking to me about doodling too much in Doctrine class.

       2

      Overcomer’s been blessed down through the years with a bountiful share of stalwart ladies of faith. Almost from the day we turned the sod there was dear Clenda McGully, O.B.l.’s first euphonics teacher. An ex-flapper not unfamiliar with what the world could offer a maid, she proved herself cherished of God and a veritable lighthouse of divine love, heroically warding away many a soul from the shoals of concupiscence. The McGully Music Building, consumed in the fire of ‘49, was named in her honour. And who could forget saintly Valerie Hall, dean of girls for more than three decades? Or old “Praying Maggie,” our cheery Dining Room hostess since 1958? Now, in later years, the Lord has favoured us with the likes of Amphora Faulkner .…

      Charles K. Barstowe, At Home With God

      “Church hist’ry is not for the faint a’ heart.”

      Those were the first words I heard skip through Amphora Faulkner’s unpainted lips, my first Church History class on my second day of classes. Her hickory-smoked voice — a hash of ripe innocence and suggestion unlike anything I’d heard since the cancellation of Petticoat Junction, and wouldn’t hear again until Designing Women— concentrated my mind like the pinch of a patrician dominatrix. Just once, after a long night polishing a paper on Mexican Mariolatry, did Faulkner’s lush harmonics lull me to a podgy sleep, my head nestled on the desktop crib of my arms. When I awoke to a suddenly hushed classroom with a smattering of heads turned towards me, and Faulkner’s odd, forbearing smile (a worldly sneer mellowed by deathless mercy) fixed upon me like a Romulan tractor beam, she rapped her pointer at the chalk words “Diet of Worms” and drawled, “Well, Mistah Gast?”