How Church Once `Saved' My Life

I am both horrified and curious about this name.

While I?m not the most theologically inclined person in the world, I can?t help but wonder if there isn?t some religious rule somewhere that prevents the naming of a plastic doll after part of the Holy Trinity.

I am worried that at age three my niece may have already committed some unspeakable blasphemy, and that by the time she?s five there might be a plague of frogs on her house or a pox on her teddy bears.

At the same time I?m not one of those who believes in a fiery and wrathful deity ? what kind of crummy omnipotent being would punish a 3-year-old girl for sitting around and playing with doll named Baby Jesus every afternoon?

My niece?s father ? the part of her parentage that I?d like to stress is related to me solely through the legal institution of marriage ? is named Wachovia.

That is his legal name, given to him by a mother who hoped that it would inspire him to make money. Wachovia?s name goes nicely with his sister?s, a girl by the name of Bible for reasons that have nothing to do with banking.

Religious issues notwithstanding, I?m not really surprised that with half my niece?s DNA coming from a family whose genealogy reads more like a phone book than a family tree, she would come up with a name like Baby Jesus.

The other half of her genes, what I like to imagine as the good half, or at least the better half, comes from my sister, Liz.

Liz feels pretty much the same as I do about church: it was a big pain in the butt while we were growing up, and we both try to avoid it these days.

But then there was the day church saved my life.

Call me lazy, but even as a kid I resented being dragged out of bed at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning so I could get ready for church. Then there were the scratchy and uncomfortable clothes, the tie that left me blue-faced and gasping for air and the shoes that always seemed at least a size too small.

My Sunday school classes were usually full of creepy and mischievous kids, none of whom I ever saw outside of church. The Sunday school teacher was inevitably an older woman with gigantic nose hairs or a hat that was disfiguringly unattractive, with roosters or giant palm trees or an elk sticking out the top.

Then there was the sermon, usually about being nice to everyone, which always made me kind of sad, even as a child. I wasn?t the perfect kid, but I tried to be nice for the most part and it bummed me out to think that some folks were so mean that they had to be continuously reminded about being nice.

Church did have its good parts, though.

There was the coffee, sipped scalding from a Styrofoam cup during the post-service fellowship in the parlor. As a kid, coffee was a forbidden drink, but at church I was allowed a single serving, topped off with generous amounts of sugar and enough non-dairy creamer to turn the muddy brown liquid into the color of the white cup in which it was served.

I always grumbled about going to church, but I always ended up happy when it was over ... a nice caffeine buzz will do that to you.

After walking home from church one morning, back home to the fixer-upper that my parents were slowly but surely fixing up, my dad met us at the front door. He had a weird look on his face and he pulled my mom aside for a quick grown-up conference. There were whispered words and quick glances back at me as I shifted nervously in my Sunday dress clothes.

Was I in trouble?

Had I done something bad, something so wrong that my parents had to think about what to do? I discovered the problem when my mom silently led me by the hand up the stairs to my room. Actually, what was left of my room: while I had been at church that morning, the ceiling had collapsed. Giant white pieces of plaster covered the floor and my bed, and there was dust, wood splinters and mess everywhere.

My electric train was smashed, my desk was covered in debris, and on my bed, in the still-warm indentation where my head had rested just hours before, was a jagged, thick piece of ceiling.

My mom and I stood there looking at the mess and didn?t say a word.

We were both thinking about what would have happened to me if I had still been sleeping when the ceiling fell. While my mom went over emergency procedures in her head the same way any mother would in such a situation ? the fastest way to the hospital, how to stop the bleeding, who could come and watch my sisters during the long nights in the hospital while I recovered from the head injuries ? I found myself thinking about what I?d look like with a huge chunk of white plaster sticking out of my head. Had it not been for church that morning, I might have been killed.

Now that I think about it, Baby Jesus isn?t such a strange name for a doll after all.

Maybe my niece knows something that I don?t about the way the world works.

Bill Hill will be telling his story of divine intervention at the next fellowship meeting. Tell him about the time when the hand of God saved your life. Reach him at wbhill@email.unc.edu.