The Street
The Street
The Street
David Arnold
© 2020 David Arnold
The Street
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Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New King James Version®. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020903357
ISBN 978-1-400330751 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-400330768 (eBook)
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Thank You
First I wanted to thank the Lord Jesus Christ for rescuing me from my life as a vampire and bringing me to life as a man.
I also want to thank Pastor Phil Reynolds for having enough faith to recommend me to take over his position as the senior pastor of Community Christian Church.
Also a huge thank you to the congregation of Community Christian Church for sticking with me on this 10 year processes of God turning an evangelist into a pastor. It has not been a smooth road.
And I must give special thanks to 3 amazing women
My daughter Renee who, in spite of my terrible parenting skills, still loves and respects me and is always supportive.
My sister Eve who has stuck with me for more than 60 years, even through my horrible vampire years. She has always believed in me and always supported me even when my ideas were very bad.
Most of all my beautiful wife Cathy. Her love for me is boundless. Her respect for me is towering. Without her support and protection I could not preach a new sermon every week. Find time for my congregation and a full time job and to some how make time to write this book. Honey Bear you are truly bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
Table of Contents
Thank You
Introduction
Chapter One
A - The Dark Street
B - We Are Sinners
Chapter Two
A - The Wet Street
B - We Are Dust
Chapter Three
A - The Filthy Street
B - We Are Drowning
Chapter Four
A - The Faithless Street
B - We Are deaf
Chapter Five
A - The Original Street
B - We Are Loved
Chapter Six
A - The Prison Street
B - We Are Slaves
Chapter Seven
A - The Gray Street
B - We Are Crucified
Chapter Eight
A - The Street of Pain
B - We Are Whole
Chapter Nine
A - The Righteous Street
B - We Are Sanctified
Chapter Ten
A - The Long Street
B - We Are Walking
Chapter Eleven
A - The Abandoned Street
B - We Are the Remnant
Chapter Twelve
A - The Balanced Street
B - We Are Balanced
Chapter Thirteen
A - The Chaotic Street
B - We Are Persecuted
Chapter Fourteen
A - Temptation Street
B - We Have Grace
Chapter Fifteen
A - The Glorious Street
B - We Are Singing
Chapter Sixteen
A - The Exit Ramp
B - There Is truth
Conclusion
Introduction
As I was writing this book, I had many people asking what kind of a book it would be.
Will it be fiction or nonfiction? Will it be theological or instructional? Will it be a novel or essay? Maybe it’s a commentary or your observations on life.
I guess the answer is yes. I would never advise anyone to write a book like this. But then no one would ever ask my advice on writing.
I think the best way to describe this book is to tell you something about me. As far as writing experience, I have very little.
I have one completed novel that was never published, and at this point in my life, I am grateful for that.
I have a few stand-alone articles published in the Christian Standard and in the Lookout. Those are magazines connected to the Church of Christ.
I also had monthly articles on music and preaching in the now-defunct Christian Music Perspective and in the also defunct Gospel Notes Magazines.
So if an impressive résumé is needed to get this book published, then most likely only my wife and myself will ever read it.
But I think that some knowledge of my journey will help to explain the unique format of this book.
I was raised in a Christian home that never went to church. My mother and father were wonderful people; they are both with Jesus now. They did not evangelize and did not take us to church, but I knew the words by heart to so many hymns that by the time I finally made it to church, folks figured I had been attending my whole life.
That was my mother’s doing; she loved the hymns and played recordings of them all the time on phonograph albums by the likes of Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jim Reeves, and George Beverly Shea. If you recognize those names, then you are most likely my age.
I was born in 1955 in Columbus, Ohio, and except for my two years in the army, I have lived here my whole life and have no plans to leave.
I was born a sinner just like the rest of you. Though we never went to church and my parents almost never brought up religion, I remember them being adamant about defending God when challenged. I remember telling my father about learning evolution at school and he quickly dismissed that as foolishness. I was allowed to answer questions on the tests, but I was not allowed to believe it. I didn’t either; I agreed with my dad that it was foolishness. Lacking biblical training, I was not able to formulate a rebuttal, but I was still convinced that evolution was foolishness.
In high school I began drinking and taking and selling drugs (my favorites were downers and LSD). I also chased and caught many girls and never treated them with the respect due to them as a child of God.
I was a jerk! That is the most polite word I have been able to come up with. My time in the army was like being lost in a mental and spiritual fog. It was true as I was living it and still true now, even as I try to remember it. I can’t explain it except that I know something was terribly wrong with me.
So I was an absolute self-centered jerk in high school and a really weird creep in the army.
Then came college. Completely self-absorbed, I was convinced that I was smarter than all of my teachers. But I did begin exploring religion as I stopped attending
classes. During this time I supported myself as a restaurant manager at Wendy’s, Zantigo, and Mr. Hero. There was also a little fast-food place that I remember as being a McDonald’s rip-off.
My memory gets fuzzy in here because I was still drinking very heavily although by this time I had finished with drugs.
But through all of this, I read the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu holy book. I also read the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and the holy Bible, King James Version.
I knew there must be more to life but I was still convinced of my own greatness. I ended up marrying my first wife basically to prove that I could win her in spite of all the other guys chasing her. Neither she nor I won that contest, but we were stuck together for about five years and had one daughter together. My daughter, Renee, is, along with salvation and my wife, the greatest gift God has ever given me.
Starting in high school and growing into the debilitating sin of my life was pornography.
It colored my sick relationship with women and was a major reason for my divorce. I never spent enough time with my daughter because of this addiction, and so now we do not have the kind of relationship that she deserves.
After the divorce, all of the shaky pillars that my life was standing on crashed hard to the ground.
We were divorced before my daughter’s first birthday. I lost my job at Mr. Hero at the same time for embezzling funds to pay for my various sins.
I lost everything material and ended up living in my sister’s basement for a time. In a profoundly weird time of my life, God tossed me into a spiritual tornado. Spinning around like a dervish, I ended up in the arms of Jesus Christ. Alone with only Him, I studied His word. I read it over and over again until I fell in love with Him and His Word.
I lived in a cheap third floor apartment working for a 100-year-old department store in Columbus in their food service.
I was coming out of the fog and beginning to feel like a real boy. During those ten years of my life, I did little more than work and read, a date now and again to see a movie but nothing serious until I was transferred to the store’s Northland location as a manager in the food court.
That’s when I met Cathy. She worked with me in the food court as a baker. She is a stunningly beautiful woman and everyone loves her. So I thought I would ask her out.
We watched Pretty Woman. We had dinner at the Olive Garden and we talked about God for hours. I knew that I was being led by the Holy Spirit all through the ten years of my life up to Cathy. However, I was confident that this leading was only to give me the knowledge I would need to live a good Christian life. I honestly thought no further than volunteering to help at whatever church I would finally settle on for my home church.
I had been confident that I would never marry again. After all I was thirty-five when I met Cathy. We were married when I was thirty-six and she was thirty-seven. That’s when God kicked our lives into high gear.
I have always loved music. I have no musical talent but I love music, all kinds of music—classical, jazz, rock, pop, soul, R&B, and country. I love Igor Stravinsky, Herbie Mann, Herb Alpert, Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk, Neil Diamond, The Bangles, Aretha Franklin, The Commodores, Hank Williams, and Merle Haggard, and these don’t even get into the greats of Christian and Gospel that I am committed to now.
After we were married, I took Cathy to a Southern Gospel concert. She had been gracious enough to attend many contemporary Christian and Christian rock concerts with me, but I knew that she loved country music. I didn’t know there was any Christian country until I heard an ad on the radio for The Bishops coming to Columbus for a concert. They played a little of the band’s music in the commercial and it was definitely country.
So we went. We both fell in love but Cathy became convinced that she wanted to sing for the Lord. She felt the calling that night to travel and do Christian concerts just like The Bishops.
I had never heard her sing but the group sold soundtracks to their songs, so I figured I would invest $10 or $20 for her to see if the calling was true.
She sings like Patsy Cline! I am not kidding!
We were on the road for about twelve years. We traveled from Maine to Florida and from New Jersey to Colorado. She had two top ten hits on the country gospel charts, six albums, and numerous awards for her singing.
More important were the lives touched by her testimony and songs. I traveled with her as the soundman and the navigator. I kept track of her bookings and schedule. She was busy singing in concerts, radios, televisions, churches, fairs, festivals, and prisons and doing revivals. Singing was her calling and there was no way to deny it.
But then something weird started happening. It started with a preacher who called for her to sing for the Sunday service while he would be on vacation. That wasn’t unusual but he asked for me to preach the sermon that morning.
“I am not a preacher,” I told him.
“You’re an evangelist.”
That was it. The church was a Nazarene church. All of my learning outside of the reading I had done on my own came from the Church of Christ and the Xenos Christian Fellowship. So I went to the library and studied Nazarene doctrine. I didn’t want to stir up controversy, so I learned.
Opportunities to preach kept coming, more and more of them: revivals and special services. Along the way Cathy and I were ordained by the nondenominational church that we belonged to.
Instead of seminary God trained me in preaching the word through the power of the Holy Spirit and a God-given desire to research the beliefs of every Christian denomination.
This went on for years until one day the pastor of our home church passed away. Tragically the church fell apart. It was important for Cathy and me to always have a home church where we would pay our tithes even though we were seldom ever able to attend a Sunday service, so we decided we would see about joining up with Community Christian Church in the Hilltop neighborhood on the west side of Columbus.
Cathy had been invited to sing there a number of times, and I had even preached there once or twice. Their Pastor Phil Reynolds had been a senior pastor there for seventeen years and was ready to retire.
My wife had been telling me for more than a year that I would be the senior pastor of a church one day. I resisted that. I had seen that the life of a senior pastor was often more than challenging, and although I believed being an evangelist was also a challenge, I knew that it was a challenge I enjoyed. I thought it unlikely that I would enjoy the challenges of being a pastor.
I did accept the challenge, though, and that brings us to this book. I had been the senior pastor for almost a year when I took a year off from work to see if I could find a way to grow the church. I didn’t succeed and we still have between fifteen and twenty-five in attendance every Sunday.
But during that year, I began this book. The first chapter just came to me one night while I was at the church alone working on Sunday’s sermon. I had no idea what it was for. Mostly it was stream of conscience. It grew though chapter by chapter as I discovered that each chapter coincided with a principle in a chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
So I guess the book is a commentary on Romans and also a novel about life on Powell Avenue through the eyes of a new senior pastor. Having a few folks read the book convinced me to add the B sections to each chapter to help explain the principle being highlighted though I found that I was unable to go fully expository in my writing in these sections.
So whatever this book is, I can say this: it comes from my heart and is fully inspired by my love for Jesus and His word and my love for my congregation and the people living and dying on the street.
This book is my mind and it is my heart. Though I didn’t tell her until recently, the structure of this book has a lot to do with my wife’s influence on my life.
Before I met the Lord, I had no use for people except for pretty girls and my desire for them was short-lived. It might be a stretch to say that I hated everyone but myself, but it wouldn’t be a huge stretch.
Ca
thy loves everyone but when we met, she was terribly naive. God brought us together so that we could help each other in the areas we were lacking. I helped her to learn to use her mind and her intellect to protect her heart.
She helped me to bring my heart to life. Before I met her, I understood the way and the truth of scripture, but she helped me to bring it to life through love for my fellow man.
Before God made her a part of my life, I could never have pastored a church. She helped me to understand what real life looks like and what it feels like. This is a blessing and a curse. I don’t think that I ever really felt a broken heart until I became a pastor.
I pray that the heartfelt truth of the scriptures comes through in the “A” section of these chapters and that the logic and wisdom of the scriptures come through in the “B” sections.
That is my explanation of the journey you are about to begin. Don’t torture yourself; if it is too hard to understand, I get it. I finally come to understand why I wrote it. The love of God and the wisdom of God have set my bones and my spirit on fire. I preach long and loud. I praise and I chastise because of the fire that burns inside of me. I want people to feel the way I do.
I guess I am trying to spread a fire, a fire that will burst my reader’s souls into an inferno that will save souls from that other fire—the fire of hell.
Before you dive in, it is very important you understand something. Many of the characters in the fiction portions of the book are identified as vampires, and I even use Dracula as a character.
I do this purely and simply metaphorically. The vampires of this book are meant to be nothing more than regular people who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. The Dracula of this book is quite simply Satan.
I am emphasizing this because I do not want anyone to be confused. I do not want anyone to think that I believe vampires to be real or that I believe Dracula to be anything other than make-believe. These fictional creatures are, however, a very good metaphor for those still lost in their sins.
Obviously, though if they were real, they would be beyond redemption. Thank God that the metaphor breaks down at such a crucial point.