Fields of Grace Page 3

  When the plane landed, the philosopher nearly knocked over other passengers to get away from me. I didn’t care that he was annoyed; I had done what I was supposed to do. Even if it hadn’t led him to a breakthrough moment, I had done what God (and Papa) expected of me. If the man chose not to be saved, it was his bum in the fire, not mine.

  3

  Young Evangelist

  Let eloquence be flung to the dogs rather than souls be lost. What we want is to win souls. They are not won by flowery speeches.

  —CHARLES SPURGEON, SERMONS ON PROVERBS

  You know the expression Army brat? There’s a whole blog about it where people complete the sentence: “You know you’re an Army brat if.” You know you’re an Army brat if: “You learned your alphabet as ‘Alpha, Bravo, Charlie.’ ” “Your accent changes to fit in a new geographical location.” “Your father comes into the bedroom at 0455 hours and turns on the light; comes back at 0500 hours and turns over the bunks.” And so on.

  Well you know you’re an evangelical brat if: You believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. (I did my best to imagine Lot’s wife literally turning into a pillar of salt.) You pray daily every day, and then some, about anything and everything because nothing is too big or too small for God. You know that the most famous musician in the Bible, King David, used music for worshipping God, and you avoid secular music in favor of Christian songs. You don’t take up the vices of the devil, like smoking or drugs or drinking. Above all, you share your faith and enlist others to get “saved” because the alternative is so frightening.

  You’ve earned the title of mega evangelical brat when you’ve spread the word of God to people on six continents, hung out with Christian giants Oral Roberts, Joyce Meyer, and Jimmy Swaggart, played Jesus on a mission trip to India, and witnessed to a stadium of ten thousand screaming teens before you’ve turned ten years old.

  That’d be me.

  It was my father’s idea to get me out onstage with him at his Christian youth rallies, a combination religious revival and rock concert called “Acquire the Fire” because the idea is to get kids “on fire” for Jesus. Papa is a superstar in the charismatic Christian world. Every year, he packs stadiums and coliseums in major cities across the country with his appearances. I grew up attending them. I hadn’t even been to school yet the first time he invited my younger sister, Charity, and me to come onstage and belt out our favorite Christian song at the Mabee Center in Tulsa. Our little-girl voices were squeaky and out of tune (way out of tune), but we knew every word, and I even slapped my thigh to the beat. The crowd went wild for us. “My God is big enough; my God is big enough; My God is big enough for every situation.”

  Once, I got up the nerve to preface our song with one of my favorite scriptures, Ephesians 4:29–32: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” Papa was so proud. “That’s the first time she’s ever done that in front of anybody,” he said. “Amen!” Those little performances were kind of fearsome for such a little kid, but at least I had Charity’s hand to hold on to. And, I have to admit, as much as I suffered from stage fright, I kind of liked the attention—as long as my sister was by my side.

  But the first time I had to go it alone was a different story. I nearly threw up backstage while I waited for Papa to introduce me. We were at the Denver Coliseum, and the place was filled to capacity with ten-thousand-plus teens who were on fire for Jesus. I wasn’t quite a teenager yet, but I had big news to share with my Christian peers. Papa had always put a lot of pressure on us to start thinking about what we wanted to do with our lives. So, when, at the age of twelve, I decided to build my own website for God, he wanted the world to know.

  What I’d done was really quite an accomplishment. The idea came to me one day while I was at home, searching on the computer for God sites. I couldn’t find anything for kids my age, which surprised and frustrated me. I was so disappointed that, all on my own, I searched for and employed a web designer to teach me how to build my very own God site. The designer came to our house once or twice a week for several weeks until I got the gist of what I was doing. Papa footed the bill, and I designed and launched the site.

  I called it “Girls for God.” It had a pink background with yellow borders, and it was divided into sections on Christian bands and clubs, overseas missions, health and beauty, and, of course, boys. In the middle of the site was an “Ask Hannah” column where preteens and teens were invited to write in with questions about everything from religion and the Bible to hair and makeup tips. My first post about fashion was adorned with a little red lipstick icon and a quotation from Papa, who always said, “Makeup is to highlight your natural beauty, not to cover up your natural ugliness.” Ironically, I knew less about how to be fashionable than most other people my age because I was so sheltered and isolated from my generation, but I sure knew plenty about God.

  My section “On Getting Saved” got a lot of traffic. I posted the Salvation Prayer there. “Dear God, I am a sinner and need forgiveness. I believe that Jesus Christ died for my sins. I am willing to turn from sin and invite Jesus to come into my heart as my personal Savior. Amen.” The one called “More about God” was a channel for me to give more advice, and I took it seriously. One of the first questions I got was, “Do all dogs go to Heaven?” I spent hours leafing through books and the Bible looking for sourcing. Finally, I wrote: “In the Bible it talks about how people have spirits, and while our physical bodies don’t go to Heaven our spiritual bodies do. Because dogs don’t have spirits, or rather, it’s not clear in the Bible whether they do, my answer is that they’re harmless and loving creatures, so why wouldn’t they go to Heaven?” It was only years later I learned that my Christian friends had fed me the dog questions—as well as many others—and then cackled amongst themselves over my fraught but earnest answers.

  Papa was so proud of my initiative he insisted I share the website with his followers. I thought that was cool. He was pleased with me, and I loved having his approval.

  My debut was in Denver, and I spent hours getting myself ready for my big night. In the hotel that morning, I styled my hair in zigzags, separated the pieces with little butterfly barrettes, and clipped on a pair of my mother’s shiny hoop earrings. I pulled on my favorite bright orange top and matched it with a woven orange necklace I’d gotten during a mission trip to Africa. I sprinkled my arms with sparkles, and then brushed each of my eyelids with a wisp of white eye shadow from Mom’s makeup bag. I wondered how many boys in the audience would think I was cute.

  Backstage, I paced the floor, waiting for Papa to introduce me. I was a ball of nerves. What if I messed up? What if I slipped in my new platform shoes? What if the cat got my tongue and I couldn’t speak? I’d prepared some notes, just in case I forgot what I was supposed to say. Waiting and worrying, I read them, over and over, until I thought I knew them by heart. But how would I do, out there, with a blinding spotlight shining in my eyes and ten thousand teenagers watching me?

  If I do this right, I said to myself, I could change the world for my generation and maybe even make an impression on Danny Brenner. Danny was a Messianic Jewish kid whose parents worked for Papa’s ministry. He was scrawny, with spiky hair, and he wore diamond studs in his ears. I thought he was the bee’s knees. We played chess together occasionally, and I had a secret crush on him. Knowing he could be in the audience made me even more jittery. Maybe I can pretend I’m sick and back out, I thought, just before one of the stagehands whispered to me that Papa was nearly ready.

  I heard him wrapping up a prayer and knew I was next. “When you leave here you have to have a plan,” Papa s
aid softly into the microphone. “How are you going to use your strength and your energy for God? Let me just give you an example tonight.

  “A twelve-year-old girl gets an idea. She thinks it’s from God. ‘What can I do this year to make a difference?’ she asks herself. ‘Hey! What if I could put a website together that could help other teenage girls and preteen girls to get on fire for God?’ So she began working—this was just a few months ago—putting all the material together, and just this week rolled out a webpage for young girls to get on fire for God! In fact, this young lady happens to be my oldest daughter, Hannah Luce. Hannah! Would you come out here?”

  I walked onstage, and a spotlight followed me to my place next to Papa. I could see pride written all over his face. That was what mattered most to me, Papa’s approval. “Tell the people what you’ve done,” Papa said, handing his microphone over to me.

  My voice was a Minnie Mouse trill, a sort of chirpy falsetto. “Well, um, the idea came to me, um, I was looking around, searching the web, and I couldn’t find any godly websites for preteens and teens, and that’s when the idea hit me. God just struck me in the heart! I just had this desire to make my own website for God. So I went for it!”

  The more I talked, the more I relaxed. There are probably a lot of cute boys in the audience and they’re all watching me, I thought. I felt so important, so accepted. “It was God working through me,” I said. “If He can use me, he can use every single one of you!”

  The more I talked, the more settled my nerves became. The audience cheered me on. They liked me! They really liked me! I didn’t need my notes anymore. I was on a roll. “And I just encourage you to open up your heart this weekend and for the rest of your life, just to really listen to God and what He has to say,” I said. “There are people who have just given their lives to Jesus. This is designed to help those people to be more of a Girl of God.”

  I had spoken longer than I’d ever intended, but no one seemed bored or in a rush for me to leave, and that felt kind of nice.

  “So,” I said, wrapping up somewhat abruptly, “I hope you have a great night, and . . . God Bless You!”

  When I finished, Papa swept me up in his arms for thousands of teens to see. His eyes were alight with pride, and he had a huge grin on his face. He puffed up his chest, gave me a big kiss on the cheek, and I twirled around in my pretty platform shoes and ran as fast as I could offstage. As I ran, I heard Papa say, “That’s my girl! That’s my firstborn! Hannah Luce!” The kids in the audience whooped and hollered.

  It was the most proud of me I would ever feel Papa was.

  I was twelve years old.

  4

  Africa

  And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;

  They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

  —MARK 16:17–18

  I took my first steps in an African jungle. By the time I was ten, I’d traveled to every state in the country to spread the word of God. By high school I’d talked Him up to people on six continents. My parents could have named their ministry “Missions R Us.” We were always on the road looking for people to save. A lot of those mission trips were overseas to remote villages at the ends of the earth where people had never even heard about Jesus and the Bible, but that was the point of our being there. It wasn’t just Americans who needed saving, although our youth were being lost to what Papa called “virtue terrorists, the purveyors of popular culture.” Papa said people all over the world were in danger of languishing for all of eternity in Hell because, through no fault of their own, they didn’t even know the name Jesus. It was up to people like us to reach as many people like them as we possibly could.

  I loved taking mission trips overseas. The more uncivilized or culturally foreign the land was, the more I wanted to be there. The hardships we encountered on those trips were well worth the experience I got from them. I was just a little girl when I saw my mother and a group of team leaders from the ministry pray over a frail-looking woman living in India to command the demons to leave her body. My parents were always encountering people with demons, and both are very capable of confronting evil spirits.

  I remember that on one of our trips to a remote village in Africa, my sister looked at a woman and cried, “She has red eyes! She has red eyes!” She claimed the woman was trying to engage her using silent mannerisms. I didn’t see any red in the woman’s eyes, but I knew we didn’t have to worry about catching her demons because we had Jesus in our hearts.

  Returning to life as usual after those missions was tough, but there was always the next adventure to look forward to. A couple of years after the trip to east Africa, I rode for four hours in a canoe, in alligator-infested waters, to reach natives in the jungles of Panama. I’ve played with monkeys in Tanzania, ridden elephants in Thailand, danced with warriors from the Maasai tribe in Kenya, and visited Buddhist and Hindu temples in India to observe their religious practices and pray that I might one day have an opportunity to persuade them to see things our way—to become one of us. One of the high points of the India trip was putting on a drama of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, and I got to play Jesus on the cross.

  But my most memorable trip was to a place in South Africa called Harrismith, a shantytown about two and a half hours through mountainous terrain from Johannesburg. Some thirty-five thousand people lived there, most of them in abject poverty. The language was native South African Sesotho, and many of the people still relied on witch doctors to cure them of sickness and cleanse them of evil spirits. The region was predominantly Christian, but Islam was fast gaining a foothold in many of the poorer black communities, mostly for its emphasis on charity and social reform, but also because of a radical rejection by blacks of the Christian-based society that had permitted the tragedy of Apartheid. It was not an easy audience for us, but challenges never stopped a good evangelical Christian from his work.

  We spent a month in Harrismith, camping on nearby safari land where gazelles and zebra grazed. I woke up every morning before sunrise to read Bible verses and watch the sun turn red, orange, and gold as it came up above the horizon. We started out early every day and did most of our work on the edges of the city, where there seemed to be nothing but rows of tiny, broken-down houses. There were thirty of us on that mission and plenty of neighborhoods to hit, so we split into teams of five, each with a translator, and walked from one rundown shack to the next, knocking on doors with messages from the Lord.

  Neither language nor cultural barriers gave us pause. We had a system for most any situation, and this was no exception. The first step was to ingratiate ourselves at each stop by offering to do odd jobs for the homeowner or tenant. “Hi! We’re from America!” I’d say. “We came here to help. Is there anything we can do to help you?” The task could be sweeping, chopping wood, preparing food, or washing clothes, pretty much any kind of household chore. People were usually leery of our offer at first. You could see the question in their expressions: What’s the catch? But most of them accepted.

  One of our first jobs was helping a family prepare for a funeral. A funeral was a decadent ritual in Africa. People dressed in colorful, native costumes, and the host family, the bereaved, prepared a feast big enough to feed everyone who came. While the cooks prepared dishes like Bobotie (lamb casserole) and Geel Rys (yellow rice) with Blatjang (apricot and raisin chutney) and Komkomer Sambal (cucumber relish), my job was to help make a traditional beer they call Umqombothi. Making the beer involved stirring a mixture of malt, maize, yeast, and water in a cast-iron vat (a potjie) and simmering it over a fire outside the house. The finished brew was a fermented mash of stuff with a sickening sour smell, which was then strained and poured into a communal drum they called a “gogogo.” Once the brew cooled, it was finally ready for sharing. I could hardly handle the gigantic wooden stick I used to s
tir, and the smell almost made me sick, but I still had fun.

  Some of the jobs we did were short, and others took hours. We worked however long it took to get it finished and then proceeded to step two, which was, you guessed it: the pitch. “Now that we’ve done this for you, would you do something in return and listen to our story?” People were so gracious; they almost always did. We figured if it took a special tactic to give people the chance to be saved, so be it.

  Our pitch was right out of the Evangelism Explosion Workbook. The goal was to get others to recite the Salvation Prayer. We started off with a deck of colored flash cards that showed the way to salvation with a story: the rainbow colors that lead to Jesus. The first was a picture of a boy with the black heart of a sinner. The red card represented the blood of Jesus when he died for our sins. The blue card symbolized baptism, and the white card showed the boy acknowledging his sin and praying for forgiveness, just as David did in Psalm 51: “Wash and I shall be whiter than snow.” The final two cards were green, symbolizing growth, or discipleship. And, finally, gold, which stood for the crown God brings you in heaven for being faithful to His command. (As a kid I was taught that for everything I did for God I’d get a jewel in my crown, and I always worried when I did something wrong that I’d end up with a light crown.)

  The goal was that, after every time we told the story, we tried to get someone to recite the Salvation Prayer. “Dear God, I am a sinner and need forgiveness. I believe that Jesus Christ died for my sins. I am willing to turn from sin and invite Jesus to come into my heart as my personal Savior. Amen.” I always elaborated. “I want you to change my world. I want you to help me stand strong against the enemy. To help me to see through your eyes, to speak to me in my greatest hour of need. I want for you to be my all. I want for you to be my everything. Please forgive me for my sins. I need you, Jesus. I need you to help me stand strong. Amen.”