The Test Tube

Every Wednesday for three years I spent an hour-and-a-half with Mary Harris, a wise woman in her 80’s. I told myself I wasn’t going to her for therapy, but therapy was what was going on in her living room. I was in Seminary at the time. I had come to California from a big church in Texas. I figured I had exactly what California needed. How Texas of me.

One morning it occurred to me that maybe Mrs. Harris needed a dose of the old-time religion. I asked her if she’d ever heard a really good sermon. She said she wasn’t sure. I told her I had one. She asked me, “Whose?” I told her, “Mine.” She told me she’d be glad for me to bring it by next time. I touched her hand and told her I’d be right back. (I happened to have one in the car).

I fully expected her to pop it into the player immediately. She didn’t. Maybe she was waiting until after I left.

I fully expected her to call me on the phone that night and rave on and on about me.

She didn’t.

I came back the next Wednesday. She didn’t mention it. She didn’t mention it the next Wednesday either. Finally, I asked her if she ever heard the tape.

“Yes,” she said. “I heard it twice the day you left it with me.”

“What did you think?” I asked her.

“I don’t think you are ready to hear,” she said.

I told her I was ready to hear. I assumed she was afraid I would become too inflated from all her praise.

She said that both times she heard it she kept getting a recurring picture:

“There was a big test tube filled with people, like ants, working. There was a house 100 yards away from the test tube. Every day you would come out of the house carrying a tall ladder and a bull horn. You would lean the ladder against the test tube, climb to the top, lean halfway in and shout instructions down to the workers. But no one ever listened to you because they all knew you had never been in the test tube yourself.”

The next summer I fell in. It about killed me, but it was the most fortunate fall I’ve ever taken. I ran into God who had been living and working down there all the time.