and the air itself sweated,
thick as molasses left too long on the stove.
Richmond’s cicadas rasped their shrill fiddles
while I bent over Spurgeon,
“Human Responsibility” spelled in block type,
the page mottled under the dim yellow lamp.
The house sulked at the corner,
its eaves peeling like scabs,
its porch groaning under every footstep.
Inside, plaster sagged,
the ceiling one hot sigh from falling.
The fan rattled in the corner,
a drunk uncle wheezing himself to death.
The air was soup.
Evening thickened against my skin,
iron water from the pipes,
damp wood and mildew in my breath.
Tammie’s sleep behind the bedroom door,
our boy’s ribs lifting and falling in dream—
both depending on me.
And I, with pockets turned to lint,
sat down with Spurgeon.
The sermon barked from the page:
"You are not a mere automaton -
you have a will, a choice,
and upon that choice your destiny rests."
I wanted to laugh,
to send his book flying across the study,
but his London voice swelled louder
than the cicadas outside.
Did he know this Virginia air,
thick as boiled okra?
Did he know bills stacked like tombstones,
the price of milk against a wife’s weary sigh?
Still he thundered:
"If lost, your ruin shall be your own."
The sentence hung heavy -
a noose and a crown in the same breath.
I argued in whispers,
sweat dripping from my chin:
If ruin is mine, Spurgeon,
what of hunger?
What of poverty’s iron bit?
Choice is a cruel joke
when the world has chosen first.
Yet something cracked open inside me.
What if the burden was never escape,
never rescue,
but the ache of enduring?
To love in want,
to stagger forward without applause.
Maybe responsibility
is the one gift no thief can steal.
The lamp flickered.
The fan died.
And in the silence,
Spurgeon’s words curled like smoke:
"The responsibility is with yourselves."
I chuckled, half-crazed.
Imagine the devil himself
mocking my empty pantry
as a crime against heaven.
Even angels must smirk
at a man sweating through his shirt
while lectured on “choice.”
But laughter is sometimes prayer.
I pictured Brother Charlie in Elmira,
pressing this book into my teenage hands -
as if he knew one day
I’d need Spurgeon’s thunder
to keep me from drowning
in my own humidity of despair.
By midnight, the sermon was done.
The house leaned in around me,
breathing its old wooden lungs.
Tammie shifted in her sleep,
our boy murmured in a dream,
and I sat with Spurgeon’s ghost,
the Bible damp in my lap.
No comfort,
but a crooked resolve -
that even in heat, in debt,
in this sagging house on Chamberlain Ave,
responsibility was mine to bear,
and strangely,
that bearing it was grace enough.
But the sermon shut,
my mind did not.
"Your eternal destiny hangs upon your choice"
buzzed like a gnat at my ear.
I lay on the thin couch,
springs biting my ribs,
listening for the baby’s next cry,
for the landlord’s knock even in sleep.
I thought of Spurgeon in his London pulpit,
velvet voice and candlelight,
crowds pressed close to hear his thunder.
And here - me,
pressed flat by want,
hearing the same thunder
echo inside peeling wallpaper.
A laugh rose, bitter as chicory coffee:
if destiny really rests in my hands,
God must have small hands indeed.
Then dawn -
a crack in the curtains,
a line of mercy widening.
The night unknotted itself,
and morning leaked through
like cool water after drought.
The cicadas hushed.
A bird began its one-note sermon.
Tammie stirred in the bedroom,
the boy babbled a hymn
no preacher could write.
And outside, Richmond began to move:
the hiss of a bus braking at the corner,
a milk truck rattling its glass cargo,
tires slapping wet asphalt
where last night’s storm
had steamed itself into the soil.
The air smelled of wet magnolia,
diesel fumes,
and the faintest bread rising
from the bakery two streets over.
A neighbor’s screen door slammed.
Somebody cursed at a dog.
Life lumbered on,
heedless of sermons,
heedless of sweat-stung prayers.
And yet, in the common racket of morning,
there was an order,
a rhythm that asked me to join.
I, still unwashed,
still poor,
still half-doubting Spurgeon’s thunder,
felt dawn’s hand on my forehead.
Not absolution, not triumph,
but a kind of truce:
Yes, the burden is yours.
Yes, the choice is yours.
And still the day comes,
whether you rise to meet it or not.
So I rose,
barefoot on warped floorboards,
stepping into the stink and the sweetness of morning,
into the world that had not changed,
but somehow waited for me.
Later, I carried that sermon
through the gates of the Virginia State Pen,
past razor wire humming with sparrows,
past the echo of iron doors slamming shut.
The men sat waiting -
faces etched with years of choices
or chains mistaken for choices.
The classroom was a cinderblock cave.
Metal chairs scraped concrete as they gathered,
orange uniforms bright as warning flares.
Some arms folded hard against their chests,
some hands jittering with cigarette hunger,
one man grinning with all his teeth
as if to say, preacher, convince me.
I opened my Bible.
I opened Spurgeon.
And I told them what he told me:
“You are not machines.
You have a will.
You are more than ruin waiting to happen.”
I asked them to read a verse aloud,
and voices cracked against the walls.
One said it fast, as if saying the words too quickly
would let him escape them.
Another stumbled, paused,
then laughed, a hollow sound,
and the man beside him shook his head
like he’d never been allowed to hear a joke.
I asked what choice meant to them,
and silence fell heavy as iron.
Then someone muttered, “Sometimes I don’t get a choice,”
and I nodded, understanding -
but I pressed on:
“Yes. But there are still the small ones.
The choices to forgive, to rise, to speak when it matters.”
A cough rattled the back row.
A shoe squeaked on the floor.
Hands tapped desks impatiently, rhythm like a heartbeat.
Eyes shifted.
Some leaned forward, some slumped.
And yet, despite the orange walls,
despite the weight of the place,
I saw it flicker—attention.
A spark.
One man - broad, scarred across the cheek -
raised a hand, tentative.
“What do we do if we fail?”
I held Spurgeon open.
I let the silence answer first.
Then I said, “You try again.
You rise again.
That is all anyone ever asks.”
A few nodded.
Some looked away.
Some smirked.
Some stared as if parched for words
that might taste of dawn.
And I thought -
maybe the sermon was never just for me.
Maybe responsibility is a burden
best carried together,
even in chains,
even in sweat,
even in this broken place
that still somehow rings with hymns.
And I remembered last night on Chamberlain Ave,
the fan’s last gasp,
the lamp’s flicker,
the ghost of Spurgeon in the plaster.
How I learned, in the thickest heat,
that responsibility is not damnation,
but the stubborn mercy of rising
to face another day.
GBS
Ansbach, Germany
1989
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