THE TURQUOISE PEN

BRIMMING OVER

Noël R. King

Reverend Nicholas Mulder was a Baptist preacher. You wouldn’t think it, what with Nicholas being a Catholic saint’s name and all, but that he was.

Reverend Mulder pretty much preached fire and brimstone every week until one Sunday morning he decided to preach about gravel instead. He could see the looks of perplexity on his congregants’ faces, the incomprehension, the confusion, as he veered off the familiar, well-worn path of sin and death and the torment of hell and onto this new path of rocks smashed small and fine.

He himself was mightily surprised as the words came spewing out of his mouth, surprised but, to tell you the truth, relieved as well. He hadn’t realized until then just how tired he was of hell and fire and brimstone. In fact, he didn’t even know what brimstone was, to be honest. He figured it was hot and unpleasant and stony, but other than that, who knew?

So he forged ahead on this particular, surprising Sunday, boldly and powerfully, albeit a tad nervously (which he hid well under his preacher’s vestments), just as eager as his listeners to discover where he might be heading.

"Boulders," he said, pausing to let the word rebound around the large, ornate chapel, lined with marble along the edges, " . . . boulders are what we encounter practically every day in our lives. Do you all run into boulders, my friends? Let me hear you now. Do you run into boulders? Tell me about your boulders!"

"Amen, Brother! We got boulders—yes we do! Preach it, Brother, preach it!"

Once he had gotten the congregation down this familiar track, affirming the rightness of all that he was saying, he could see them start to relax. They began to settle back down into their seats with a bit more confidence and a bit less approbation, a bit less bewilderment and a lot more interest.

"Well, do you know what happens to boulders when you run into them?" he continued, practically shouting now. "Do you know what happens when you slam right into one of those cold, hard slabs of stone?"

"No we don’t, Brother! Preach it, Brother, preach it! Tell us now, tell us!"

"What happens is they smash into little bitty bits! That’s what happens when a boulder does not yield the right of way—and you do not either.

"You have heard it said, my friends, ‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.’ Well now I tell you, ‘Boulders to gravel and gravel to travel!’ So be it!"

With this bold statement, Reverend Nicholas sat back down in his velvet-lined chair behind the pulpit, not without a little astonishment at all that he had just declared. But so it was.

The First Baptist Church of Marywood was never quite the same again, and neither was Reverend Nicholas Mulder, although nobody ever quite knew why.

—As circumstances warrant, through her Turquoise Pen column Noël R. King, South Riding, Virginia, reports on strange and wonderful things, including preaching on boulders.