Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist
A friend said his church’s Sunday school had taken on the task of teaching its students to memorize the 23rd Psalm, and that some of them had been struggling with it.
These are little kids, mind you. I told him that if they thought that learning the 23rd Psalm was difficult, wait until they tackle the Nicene Creed.
“You’re right about that,” he said. “I know it.” So do I. Sort of.
He said the day came when it was time for the youngsters to recite the 23rd Psalm, and:
“One little girl got up and said, ‘The Lord is my shepherd ... and that’s all I need to know.”
My friend and I agreed it was hard to argue with that kind of reasoning.
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Once upon a time, a husband and wife decided to adopt their preacher’s dog. The minister was retiring and planned to move to a location where there would be no room for a Great Dane.
After the dog had settled in with his new owners, the couple who lived next door came to visit.
“Watch this,” the husband told them. He turned to the dog and said, “Fetch the Bible.” The dog leaped to his feet, went to the bookshelf, located the Bible and brought it to him.
“Find the 23rd Psalm,” he said. The dog opened the Bible with his nose, then pawed through it until he found the page with the 23rd Psalm.
He told the male visitor to stand and begin walking around the room, then pointed to him and told the dog, “Heel!”
The dog sprang to his feet, went to the man and stood on his hind legs in front of him. Then he placed one forepaw on the man’s shoulder and the other forepaw on his forehead, and began to bark.
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That story made me laugh for a couple of reasons, including two that fall into the “I don’t know how it works. All I know is that it does” category.
Some years ago, I was at a Fort Hill Rifle and Pistol Club shooting match in which we were using World War II-vintage M-1 Garand semiautomatic rifles.
They shoot eight shots as fast as you can pull the trigger, General George S. Patton described them as the greatest battlefield implement of all time, and they are notorious for throwing spent shell casings in all different directions.
These shells are hot when they come out, and one of mine landed on the side of my neck. It stuck there, and it took me two or three swipes to knock it off.
I told one of my buddies that I’d better get to the emergency room because I was going to have a nasty burn.
“My wife can take the burn out of that,” he said. He was dead serious about it, so we went to his house instead of the hospital.
The first thing she asked me was if I believed she could heal the burn. I told her that based on my own experiences and some of the things I’d heard from people I trust, I absolutely did.
She made the sign of the Cross, put her hand on my neck and said some things I don’t remember, and the burning sensation stopped. By the time I got home that night, I couldn’t tell where the shell had landed.
Only years later did I notice that each summer when I develop a tan, the pale outline of that shell casing appears on the side of my neck. It’s there now.
Time passed, and one of the remnants of a younger life ill-spent in athletics caught up with me: a torn meniscus cartilage in my right knee.
I had reached the place where I was hobbling around like Chester on the old Gunsmoke TV show and seriously considering going to a surgeon about it.
One Sunday in church, our former pastor — the Rev. Matthew Riegel — said he was going to have a healing service.
Matt and I had gotten to be friends by this time, in part because he had awakened in me a desire to know more about my faith, and to learn why we believe the things we believe.
He had a wonderful sense of humor and mischief and was blessed with great intelligence and logic. I always wanted to see him go one-on-one with either a Jesuit priest or a backwoods fundamentalist tent preacher.
When he asked for folks to come up and be healed — physically or spiritually — I remembered that shell casing and thought, “Why not?”
I went to the front of the church, knelt before him and said, “My right knee is like Ahab’s white whale: It tasks me.”
The look in his eyes said clearly, “Don’t smile even a little bit, or I’ll lose it right here.”
His jaws worked some, then his face straightened up and he made the sign of the Cross with one hand, put the other hand on top of my head and said a prayer.
I felt a surge of energy come out of his hand and go into my head. It went down the right side of my body and into my right leg, and when I got up to walk back to join my dad in the pew, there was no pain in my knee whatsoever.
After a few weeks of testing that knee to be sure, I told Matt about it and said, “It actually works.”
“I know it does,” he said with a huge grin, “and the first time it happened, it scared the hell out of me!” That is how he worded it.
More time has passed, and I do have a few twinges in that knee — but then, there is no joint in my body that is twinge-proof.
The knee no longer tasks me, but like the faint image of that hot shell casing, it puts in an appearance now and then, just to remind me.
Like I said: I don’t know how it works.
All I know is that it does work, and it’s just one of the many reasons why I believe.
