I have posted 2,464 articles since this blog’s inception. As a regular feature at the beginning of the week, I will re-post “Classic” Stone the Preacher articles so you can catch up. I can almost guarantee that you’ve never read any of these. This one was originally written before I started this blog, in August of 2005.

Just one word. Maybe two. A whole sentence with the word “Jesus” in it. Friendly reminders. Tell the whole gospel: How one has sinned. Christ died, was buried and rose again. God will use what you say…

“Hi Yolanda! Guess what?” I asked perkily.

With feigned excitement the Rite-Aid clerk answered, “Jesus loves me.”

“And why’s that?”

In staccato, she replied with great bemusement, “Because he died for all of us.” I could almost see her eyes role.

Every time I see Yolanda I tell her the same thing; it’s almost a game. She expects it. I speak, she mocks. The truth ignored, still she hears. Someday though, someday…

Drip.

Glenn bugged me. Greasy long hair, large-framed glasses and a big black Bible that he’d thump while I worked at Vons on the frozen foods aisle in ’78 or ’79, the tail-end of the Jesus Movement. He insisted that I turn my life over to Christ. I mocked. Undeterred, he persisted.

Drip.

Eddie was a joyous black man with reddish hair who was the assistant manager in the eighties. Despite my protests and sarcasm towards his Savior, time and again he told me about Him.

Drip.

My best friend’s wife nagged me relentlessly about Jesus being the only way. I scoffed at and belittled her. Their home was the refuge sought when in a drug induced panic I thought the rapture had occurred.

Drip.

On meth in the nineties I sold stereos at the Victorville Swapmeet. The camouflaged couple kept their headlights trained on me as I furiously packed away my equipment in the dark because I miscalculated sunset. Their gift, a Gospel of John, sat in a bucket next to my drivers’ seat.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

I challenged Satan to show himself to me while standing in a barren field in Riverside at midnight. Soon after, I lost it all.

Full.

Then life eternal.

Memories.