Chapter 6. Junior Tent

The next year at campmeeting, I graduated to Juniors. It was everything I had imagined and more. The Junior tent looked like an Army tent, a dark green square with a massive center mast. Two sections of white picket fence flanked the entrance. The center aisle bright with fresh sawdust aimed straight at the stage and backdrop. And no kiddy chairs. These were real, adult seats, folding metal chairs.

It was all by itself right across from the old bathhouse at the bend in the road at top of the hill coming up from the lower campground.

The music was fantastic. We sang our lungs out. Boys competing with the girls. Standing up. Sitting. The preacher in charge was a cool, guitar-playing young pastor named Terry McLean. He taught us a new song, he said came from South Africa.

I’m happy today
I’m happy today
In Jesus Christ, I’m happy today.
He’s taken all my sins away.
And that’s why I’m happy today.

I’m singing today . . .

I’m laughing today . . .

I’m smiling today . . .

The verses could be multiplied endlessly.

We had meetings at 10:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. The evening meetings were down at the hill at a campfire bowl set into a hillside. Again there was music. And there was a continued story. One year it was Corbett’s tales of the Man-eating tiger of ????

Another year, a woman told a continuing story about life at the end of time. An Adventist family–Mom and Dad, three kids–struggled to stay alive while maintaining their faithfulness to God. Probation had closed–that is God had already closed the books of the heavenly judgment. The eternal fate of all humanity had already been determined.

Just a few months remained before the return of Christ and the end of the world. But during those few months, the true people of God had to perfectly resist all the temptations of the Devil. They were to be God’s final demonstration to the world of the validity and value of God’s holy Ten Commandment law.

Of course, no one could know for sure what God’s decision had been. So the members of this good family were constantly reviewing their lives, wondering if they had confessed all their sins before it was too late. They lived with a crushing sense of unworthiness and doom. Still they were heroically faithful.

They were hiding in the mountains, eating weird plants and food they found in unlocked hunter’s cabins. They lived in constant fear of the police and vigilantes who were searching for them.

The family’s crime? They were Saturday keepers (that is they observed Sabbath in the Jewish pattern from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday). In a time of national emergency (never quite precisely defined) the president of the United States had declared the United States to be a Christian nation and persuaded Congress to pass a law requiring Sunday church attendance by all Americans. The law had specifically prohibited the practice of Saturday- keeping (the observance of Saturday as the holy day). The penalty for keeping Saturday was death.

The reason for this unAmerican turn of events was national desperation in the face of overwhelming catastrophe. People became convinced that the reason for the catastrophes was God’s anger. If only American’s would return to the proper worship of God, then God would reverse our national fortunes. The most obvious expression of America’s Christian identity was Sunday church services.

Saturday keepers were the most flagrant transgressors of this Christian rite, so they were the special target of punitive legislation and negative public sentiment.

Nothing about the story seemed strange to me. It was fiction, true. But it sounded like the theology I heard at the Adventist school and in evangelistic meetings and around the dinner table on Sabbath after church.

I had heard my father remark with pleased wonder about our prophet’s prediction that at the end of time, people would attack us with swords and the swords “would break like straw.” In Bible class at school teachers talked about the Close of Probation, The Time of Trouble and the persecution of God’s people at the end of time. Evangelists preached fantastic sermons about the National Sunday Law and the Seven Last Plagues and the Mark of the Beast.

This stuff was as normal to me as Memphis accents, massive elm trees that formed green arches over the street or having a Colored maid. This was just reality. It was the world I lived in.

The story connected with my profound, ineradicable sense of unworthiness and guilt while at the same time giving my personal struggles cosmic significance. My church was part of a movement called by God to resist the creeping forces of spiritual corruption. My own calling was to make sure I was ready for the close of probation and the last- day contest between true religion and a world seduced by a false Christianity. I was often miserable with guilt and vague self-reproach, but the endtime stories taught me that my current misery was, at worst, a mild training for the spiritual and personal agony of the Last Days which were just ahead.