When I was growin’ up in northeast Alabama, revival season arrived with all the subtlety of a freight train in a thunderstorm. One day, the church bulletin board was hangin’ there mindin’ its own business. The next, it sprouted a sign three feet tall that hollered

REVIVAL STARTS MONDAY. GET YOUR HEARTS RIGHT WITH GOD.

I don’t know whose job it was to pick the dates, but they had the uncanny ability to choose the hottest week of the entire year, and they chose it with the enthusiasm of a man layin’ out picnic blankets on the surface of the sun.

Our little congregation didn’t hold these events inside the church proper. That would have been too tame, too predictable, too easy on the air conditioning. No sir. We erected a revival tent. A giant white canvas stretched tight over poles that looked as if they had once served as masts on a Greenland whaler. Men drove those poles into the ground with sledgehammers, singin’ hymns off-key to drown out the noise, while the women hauled out a week’s worth of casseroles that each weighed as much as a small child.

I remember walkin’ toward that great tent for the first time. I was old enough to take it all in. The air outside was thick with humidity. The air inside the tent was thick with expectation. That canvas held the heat like a biscuit holds butter. You could smell sawdust, sweat, Avon perfume, and a peculiar something that I later learned was called “anointin’ oil.” At the time, I thought it was furniture polish with heavenly aspirations.

I stood beneath one of those tent poles, lookin’ up at the high ceiling far above me. The canvas glowed from the sunlight outside, and for a moment I felt as though I was standin’ inside some sacred lantern. I remember thinkin’ the Lord must surely be close by, if not waitin’ just outside the flap, tappin’ His foot and clearin’ His throat because we were already ten minutes late gettin’ started.

Then the music began.

Not the gentle sort of hymns that rock a man to sleep. These were revival hymns, the kind sung by folks who believed the Almighty preferred things loud. The piano player attacked those keys like she was tryin’ to pound sin clean out of the instrument. The tambourines shook with the enthusiasm of a nest of hornets. And the choir delivered their lines with such force that the rafters trembled in protest.

I reckon half the tent came for the singin’ alone. The other half came for the spectacle.

And the spectacle always delivered.

People would raise their hands, sway in place, and let out little cries that grew louder as the spirit moved. Some folks stomped the sawdust floor so hard it puffed around their ankles like fog. Children clapped, though they had no idea what they were clappin’ for. The old men nodded solemn approval. The old women fanned themselves as if tryin’ to wave away the devil himself.

Then came the preacher.

He did not walk to the pulpit. He marched. He moved with the swagger of a man who had been personally deputized by Heaven that very morning. He planted his feet wide, cut his eyes across the tent, and began preachin’ with a fire that made the lanterns tremble.

It seemed to me that preachers in those days did not speak much about love or comfort. They spoke of sin. They spoke of damnation. They spoke of the trumpet blast that would split the skies and leave half the congregation clutchin’ empty clothes in their hands. This was not gentle persuasion. This was holy intimidation. And it was effective.

As a small boy, sittin’ stiffly on a folding chair that pinched the back of my legs, I listened to those sermons with my heart pattin’ the inside of my ribs like a bird trapped in a shoebox. The preacher described the Lord’s return with such dreadful detail that I expected to hear angelic hoofbeats outside the tent at any moment.

He warned us of the lake of fire.
He reminded us that God watched every thought we had, even the ones we tried to hide from ourselves.
He described Heaven as a place so perfect that it was a shame most of us would never see it because we had stolen cookies or told lies or kicked our sisters at inopportune moments.

By the time he finished his sermon, I was convinced that judgment was scheduled for sometime later that night, maybe before bedtime.

But for all that terror, there was wonder too. The preacher’s voice rose and fell like a storm. The choir answered him. The people shouted their amens. The tent glowed like a ship at sea. There was a mighty and mysterious beauty in it all. A beauty that frightened me. A beauty that held me tight regardless.

And I will tell you this.
Whether or not the Lord truly hovered outside that tent, I believed He did.
I believed He could hear every heartbeat.
I believed He saw me sittin’ there, small and anxious, hopin’ against hope that He might overlook my shortcomings for one more day.

That was the night I realized revival was not just a service.
It was an experience.
A spectacle.
A confession.
A carnival of salvation with a heavy admission price.

And my soul, small as it was, felt the weight of it.

I walked out of that tent with sawdust in my shoelaces and fear in my pockets.
But I also carried a strange warmth in my chest, like the flicker of a lantern I didn’t yet understand.

I reckon that was how faith first found me.
Not with gentleness.
Not with ease.
But with a trumpet in one hand and a warning in the other.

*****

New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.