Wrong Place at the Right Time
or the other way around...you decide.
What happens when you are in the right place at the wrong time?
I was studying for an exam in the seminary student center (right place) during an hour of the morning before anyone is really “getting up” for the day and most would not be proud of “still” being up from the night before (wrong time). I was not a great student – as great students are typically understood. I made good grades over the course of my academic life but my study habits, if you could call them habits, have always been slightly off-kilter.
We all had the key code to get into building after hours, so it was the perfect place for me to study alone. The problem was that if I added just one other person it became the perfect place for me to study for 40 minutes and then play ping pong for 20 minutes which would usually become something like 87 minutes of ping pong, which then would become just however many more minutes would get us to an even hour or half-hour on the clock, (because no one starts something serious like outlining Pauline Epistles at 1:37 AM. We should start at 1:45, no, 2:00 am) then “we will work hard for another full hour” and then we will be “as ready as we can be.”
By the end of this particular night, I was truly alone. I was grinding through the process of writing a paper and had entered the stage when my work consisted of 10-15 minute energy surges that would come right after my chin hit my chest and my eyes would snap open with a renewed focus. The effectiveness diminishes when you begin to wake up to realize you have been holding the space bar through page after page of a blank white .doc abyss.
Anyway, I knew even then that I was not a great student (as student greatness should be measured) but I had survived my academic life with what most would consider very good grades and so here I was in the wee hours of the morning in the back room of the student center. What I soon realized was that in the front of the student center there was another person who thought he was alone as well.
I had remained buckled-in in my makeshift study chamber through the night, and now the custodial staff had come in to sweep and vacuum and make sure that the facility was clean and in order for the Presbyterian types who would file in and out that day. Assuming that he would eventually need to check the room that I occupied, I quickly began gathering my things so that I could crack the door to reveal the light that would let him know that I was there. I did not want to startle him. Just as I reached for the door handle, I heard the first indication that part of his checklist for that morning was a thorough sound-check for the PA system that was next to the piano situated in the corner of the lunch-tabled meeting area in the largest main room.
“Check one…CH… CH… CH…CHECK one, two…”
I don’t know what held me there for an extra second. I hesitated. I wanted to alert him to my presence and spare him a fright but on the other hand, the inner spotlight-hound in me knew that if I gave him just another moment, I might be in for a quite a performance. I thought that there was even a slight chance that this was one of my classmates playing a prank on me. I would afford a mischievous friend the same courtesy I would expect, at least let him think he was getting away with it. Oh, if it would have been that simple.
I removed my hand from the doorknob just as he (not a clowning classmate) started into a stop-and-start medley of the first few or favorite lines from a number Motown and R&B hits from decades past. Sometimes he would sing part of the same song in different “keys” providing him access to the highest or hardest parts of each number with enough breath and pitch to satisfy his expectations. And of course, he intermittently employed voice-made drum and horn sounds to fill in the breaks. I can say with integrity that I sat back down without the slightest trace of judgment in my being. Who among us can resist a hot mic in an empty room at an hour that required you to be awake and working while the rest of the world is still sound asleep? Several times I thought, “wait for a tune you know, open the door, join in for a few bars, quickly congratulate him and slip out the side exit before he has a chance to be embarrassed.” I couldn’t bring myself to turn the knob. Maybe I could wait him out. Maybe there was another exit or a way for me to pretend like I had just entered the building rather than having been an unseen audience to his one-man Rhythm & Blues Revue.
Every time there was a break in the action, I was certain that he was about to resume his cleaning routine, come down the short hallway and expose me standing there with my bags over my shoulder and books under my arms. What would I say? Though I could not see him, I knew that this was not one of my classmates, I had filed through the entire student body in my mental rolodex. This was someone who would not know me – but who had in his performance revealed to me a part of himself that may never come to light for even his most intimate friends. I would wait. I hoped to have the opportunity to slip out and if not, I would put earphones in my ears, re-assemble my study station and pretend that I had heard nothing if he opened the door. We would both know better, but he would know that I had the dignity to pretend. That was what I would do…
And then he began to preach.
Many a visiting bow-tied professor had held forth from this lectern. Missionary organization recruiters had given presentations to nodding students whose interest waned as the free catered lunch filled their stomachs and dulled their ears. I can say that more than once I heard things through that microphone that have stuck with me through the years from preachers that I hold in highest esteem. BUT none of them preached like this…
This was the kind of preaching that a white kid like me only heard in movies or on the local access shows that aired on the networks before NFL or PGA tour coverage started. Energy, emotion, passion and interaction. And then he would slow down and speed up and ease back into and out of songs and rhythms that made me wonder if maybe this was some kind of dream that I was having on my couch or that my head might snap up to reveal a laptop screen saver.
I share this knowing that I might lose readers down YouTube rabbit holes right now. BUT if you can wait until you finish reading, you might could feel what I felt that morning by listening to an old recording of Sam Cooke singing Nearer to Thee1 with The Soul Stirrers (linked below). This man was no Sam Cooke undiscovered. He was not a “great singer” but I wonder if he could hear the baritones behind him and the choir encouraging him. He found a rhythm in the sounds of clapping hands that only he could perceive. I sat back into the couch against the wall by the door. I was stuck. I don’t know how much time passed but at some point, by God’s grace and in answer to maybe some of my most earnest prayers in seminary, I got the chance to dash down the back hallway, through the parlor door labeled “Mrs. in Ministry” (which was reserved for fellowship gatherings for the wives of pastors and seminary students) and through their rear exit, which seems like it may have even been labeled “emergency exit”. (this qualified)
As I sit in my office in the wee hours of the morning some 20 years later, I realize that my study habits have only slightly changed, but I have accepted that not everyone works the same way. This is how I get where I am going.
I hope that whoever he was that morning, if he never got to do “that” in front of anyone else besides me and the Three-in-One, that he somehow knows that while God delights to hear him sing, that I did then and I do now in my remembering it into the same white .doc space some 3 or 4 laptops later.2
(Nearer to Thee by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrer)
THANKS FOR READING - If you followed me because I write about golf, hang in there. I assume that the golf stuff will be my mainstay, but have conceded that if I am going to make it to 52 posts during my 46th year, I will have to empty some of the memory files in my brain of other silly stories like this one.