Scott Free: Chapter 7

CBN.com - And all the while the weather grew colder. The colors outside the studio window were so brilliant they almost hurt my eyes. Then the leaves fell, the hard freeze came, and finally there was snow.

And more snow.

Many days I took Nedra and Nedra Kristina with me to the transmitter, for we were all having problems with lonesomeness. We'd sit at the farmhouse windows watching the snow build up, waiting for the plow to come through. One day when we got back to our little mobile home, the thermometer outside read 20 degrees below zero.

We had no way of knowing that the winter weather itself was one of the ways God would lead us in His direction.

At last, all the paperwork was complete. The Christian Broadcasting Network was in full possession of the five stations interlocking across the top of New York State. Pat Robertson flew up from Portsmouth for the official opening of CBN-Northeast. A friend of Pats, Harold Bredesen, was supposed to join us too, but Harold got mixed up and flew to Utica, instead of Ithaca.

Typical, said Pat. But he'll probably end up discovering that the Spirit sent him to Utica for a special reason.

Still, we were quite a crowd who gathered to launch the new outlets in prayer: Pat, Nedra and myself, Andy Andersen who was to be general manager of the stations for CBN, Robin Andersen, the guys who were to handle the morning and afternoon programming, a secretary, technical staff. Together we claimed the airwaves for the Lord, asking that from the very first day miracles would be performed in these hills and valleys.

January 1, 1969, was our first full day of broadcasting. My show ran from seven P.M. till midnight, Monday through Saturday. That first night, to my surprise, I found myself talking about Nedra Kristina's healing how Dr. Roe had called her his miracle baby. I kept wondering why I was telling this now I certainly hadn't planned to. I kept getting the feeling I was talking not just into the air, but straight to some particular person.

It was several weeks before I heard the other side of the story.

A few miles outside of Ithaca, in a little town with the improbable name of Freeville, lived a widow named Peg Hardesty. Peg's home was a brown-shingle farmhouse sitting close up to the road next to a tumbled down barn.

For thirteen years Peg Hardesty had been crippled by arthritis, so painful she couldn't even lift herself out of bed in the morning, but had to roll down onto the floor, then struggle to her knees and her feet. She got through the day on large doses of Darvon and Valium.

It happened that the very first night we were on the air Peg had trouble with her AM radio: not a single station would come in. So she switched to FM and twirled the dial, looking for music. Suddenly to her surprise she caught the word Jesus. Some man seemed to be talking about religion. He was saying that Jesus had come to set people free and to heal. We saw this happen in our own family. When our little daughter, Nedra Kristina, was born . . . As Peg lay on her couch, listening, a great peace flooded her entire body. The next morning she sat up; then stood. She walked about the house with no desire to take the usual drugs.

The pain was gone.

Just like that.

At first, although she was a Christian and believed theoretically in God's power to heal, Peg couldn't accept what had happened to her: people just didn't get over arthritis with a snap of the finger. All that day, and the next, and the next, she gingerly went about her house and farm chores, fully expecting the crippling pain to come back.

It never did.

But though, as I say, we didn't know this story, we were hearing others like it. We started getting fantastic letters the very first week. People were finding Jesus, or breaking destructive habits, or receiving the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, all while listening to the show. It seemed like every prayer we ever made for these stations was being answered. Not just among young people, either. And elderly man wrote that cataracts on both eyes had simply "dissolved" one night as he listened to a college girl phoning in to accept Jesus. A marriage in Elmira was headed back from divorce. A Cornell professor overcame a problem with jealousy.

And it wasn't only Christians who were tuning us in. We really were reaching out to all kinds of scenes. People would call up from bars and taverns, talk to us and ask for prayers. Students would call in the middle of a wild party and come to the Lord. Right on the air.

I remember one night while I was chatting about how we'd seen a deer that morning from the trailer window, a long distance call came through. A young man's voice said, "This is Bob Whyley. I'm a college student in Albany."

Bob Whyley must have racked up a huge telephone bill that night because we talked for an hour and a half. He asked some heavy questions: why did I think the Bible was inspired; did I really believe prophets could foretell the future; what made me think that Jesus was God? As often happened, we stayed on the air past our scheduled sign-off time of midnight, and about 12:30 that morning I suddenly knew that I should ask Bob outright if he would like to know the Lord.

"Yes," Bob said. As quick as that.

We prayed together and Bob accepted the Lord then and there, over the air. When he hung up at last, I was too exhilarated to sign off. I kept playing records and every few minutes Bob would call back.

Man, I can't understand what's happening. It's like no trip I've ever been on!

And a few minutes later: "Scott, I've just got to sing. Why didn't someone tell me about this before!" It was three o'clock that morning before we went off the air. This is what I had been wanting to do! Reach out with radio to where the young people were and talk to them straight.

Only with Bob as with all the other people I knew by voice only I had this unanswered question. What next? Where was Bob supposed to go now, to be fed and encouraged and get all the other things a new-born Christian needs? How I wished there was some place guys like Bob could be culturally comfortable while they grew up in the Lord. After all, the people in the red brick churches did exactly that: they were culturally right at home as they worshiped God. But their way of talking and dressing and living would be as off-putting to Bob Whyley as his would be to them.

At the station we were having trouble in this same department. Listeners were calling up in varying degrees of culture shock. Did Jesus Christ listen to rock and roll records? one man demanded. I wanted to remind him that Jesus didnt call people on the telephone, either, but you know whats the use. Another time a lady sent in a donation of a hundred dollars with the stipulation that we never again play that record about dancing. (Robert Edwins beautiful song, "Lord of the Dance") It was Portsmouth all over again, except that this time we were able to send back the money and go on playing the music. Tell It Like It Is, we explained to these people, was aimed from the start at non-committed young adults especially the non-church-going college student.

Still, we wished there was a way for us to follow through better.

With Bob Whyley we were lucky. We couldnt go to him, but he came to us.

It happened one night after we'd mentioned on the air that CBN-Northeast was looking for a newscaster. Once more the long distance call came from Albany.

"Hi, Bob! How's it going?"

"Cloud nine, man. But Bob had something else on his mind. I heard you need a newsman, he went on. Did I ever tell you I'm studying radio?"

Right away, I suspected we'd be seeing more of Bob Whyley. "Come on out and we'll give you an audition."

The following Saturday Bob drove from Albany to Ithaca. We gave him a news report to read and he was really good. He made arrangements to take a leave of absence from college as soon as the current semester was over. And soon we were able to report on the air, "Do you remember, folks, how we've been praying for a newsman? Well, we've found him. I'll turn the microphone over to him now. Here is the Christian Broadcasting Networks most recent employee, newsman Bob Whyley."

The weather was setting all sorts of for-the-date records. If we'd been in a house with good insulation and a good furnace, it might almost have been fun. But living in that little trailer with the thermometer out the window now reading minus 25 in no way could this be called fun.

Nedra Kristina was walking now - running was more like it, the precipitous, headlong charge of a 16-month old but since outside was nothing but snowdrifts and sub-zero gales, her space for exploring was the few narrow feet between the bed and the kitchen table. In addition, the erratic temperature of the little trailer affected her bronchial tubes, which doctors had warned us were unusually narrow. Especially when she lay down we would hear her struggling for breath, crying out in fear when no air came. Many nights when I came home form the studio in the small, dark hours, slithering and sliding over the ice-glazed snow, I would find Nedra rocking the sobbing little girl in her arms, every blanket in the place wrapped around the two of them.

One morning Nedra poked me awake just after dawn. I could see our breath hanging above the bed. "Listen," she said. "It's awfully quiet. I listened, but couldn't hear the hum, buzz, clink of the oil burner."

"Oh, oh," I said.

I got up and checked the furnace. Sure enough, no heat. Even the inside thermometer read below freezing. If it went any lower the pipes would break.

"Nedra, I don't know what to do. I'm no furnace man."

Nedra leaned out of bed, lifted the baby from her crib, and tucked her beneath our covers. "When in doubt, kick," Nedra said.

I kicked but nothing happened.

"When still in doubt, pray," Nedra said.

"Oh come on, Nedra."

"No, you come on; I'm serious. Nedra Kristina's cheeks are like ice."

And so I laid hands on the oil burner and prayed very simply, "Lord Jesus, I know You don't want us to freeze. Please make this furnace go."

Of course nothing happened. I was starting back for the comparative warmth of bed when, . . . wwhrr, wwhrr, that old burner started up.

Nedra and I spent quite a while that morning praising God.

Still, this was no way to be taking care of a baby.

"Scott," Nedra said to me one morning as she turned on the stove burners to try to get a bit of extra warmth, "the Andersens said we could stay at their place anytime it got too cold here. I think that time has come."

So Nedra and the baby moved in with Robin and Andy and a good thing.

It was a few nights later that I slid down the hill from the radio station, parked the car beside the trailer, opened the door and knew that he had spent our last night in that little home.

While I had been at the studio the furnace had gone off again and this time the pipes had broken for sure. Cascades of ice tumbled from the bathroom and the kitchen. Nedra Kristinas toys were frozen solid onto the floor. I slithered and skidded into the bedroom only long enough to pick up a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush.

And even in this, God was at work.

But at the time it only seemed hairy. All three of us were now living in a single room at the Andersens.

"You should have seen it, folks," I grumbled over the air. I told about the broken pipes and the ice-skating rink inside the trailer and Nedra Kristina's cough that was no better even in the Andersens warm house. Now the Andersens aren't getting any sleep either. "Please join us in praying for a place of our own. If the Lord can start up a rust old oil burner, He can find us an apartment."

But several weeks went by and nothing turned up. We did have one rather humorous reply to our appeals over the air. A lady called up from a place called Freeville. Peg Hardesty she said her name was and told us a long story about being healed from arthritis the very first day we were on the air. "You mentioned you were looking for a place to live," she continued. "There's a barn here on my place."

"A barn?"

"Yes. A great big one."

"Full of pigs and horses and cows and things?"

"Just the four cows and a pony. And the chickens, of course."

"Well, ah, Mrs. Hardesty what was your thought?"

There was silence over the telephone. Then a half-embarrassed laugh. "You know, I don't have the slightest idea! It doesn't make any sense, does it? I only know every time you've mentioned needing a home. I've had this incredible nudging: Tell him about the barn. So finally I did."

"Well, ah thank you very much, Mrs. Hardesty. But I don't really know what we'd do with a barn. It must be as cold inside those things as out."

"Pretty near. But are you sure you don't want to just come out and take a look?"

And so, more to get her off the phone than anything else, I said great. Some day when Nedra and I were out toward Freeville we would drop in to see her barn. You know, radio stations get all kinds of crazy calls.

But it was almost immediately after this one that we did in fact find an apartment. It was almost as if we had needed to keep hunting, needed to keep mentioning it over the air, until Peg Hardesty made that call. Then all at once the perfect place turned up. It was a duplex apartment in a big white frame house on Elm Street near downtown Ithaca. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bath, downstairs a large living room, a dining room, a den, even a (ha! ha!) maids room off the kitchen. After the narrow confinement of a trailer and a single room it seemed to us a palace -- and to Nedra Kristina a whole continent to explore.

"Why do I keep thinking about that crazy woman with the barn?" I asked Nedra one day as I balanced a board across some bricks to make us a bookcase. "Last night I even dreamed about barns."

"Maybe you're supposed to go out and look at it like you said you would," Nedra said. "I'd love to take a drive."

So that afternoon we bundled up little Nedra, got into the second-hand Karman Ghia which we had recently purchased, and headed out of town. From the map, Freeville appeared to be about ten miles east of Ithaca. We drove out the four-lane highway overlooking the lake. Beyond the airport Route 13 narrowed. Huge pile of snow banked the sides of the road. It was bitter cold; wind blasted off the tops of the banks and whirled them across the highway. About ten miles out we passed a sign saying Kirk Road.

"Weel now, lassie," I said in my best Scottish brogue. "Kir-rk Road. That means Church Road. A bonnie fair-r-r portent."

Sure enough, just beyond this road was a mailbox with the name Hardesty. I wanted to keep right on going. The farmyard was filled with derelict tractors and rusting bits of machinery, and beside the road was an enormous flimsy-looking hulk of a barn, only here and there sowing traces of an ancient coat of red paint. The driveway down to the farmhouse was sheeted with ice.

"We'd never get back out of there," I said to Nedra.

"Oh come on, Scott. We're here now."

So I inched down to the side of the house. We got out of the car and dashed through the wind and snow up to the porch. I rapped on the glass door-pane and the next minute was looking into a pleasant round face.

In fact Peg Hardesty's face was one big smile. She looked about 50, stocky, fair-haired. And barefoot.

"You must be that fellow from the radio station," she said.

"That's right. This is my wife Nedra, Mrs. Hardesty."

"Come inside where it's warm. And call me Peg."

She took us into the principal room of the house: the kitchen. Peg lived in the downstairs of the house only; the upstairs, she explained, was rented out. The kitchen was warm, bright and spotless.

"How's the arthritis?" Nedra said.

Peg held out her hands and flexed her fingers. "No crippling. No pain. And that's not the only thing. When you started talking about the Baptism in the Holy Spirit on your show, I asked the Lord to baptize me too. And you know, He did!"

So this was the explanation of Pegs sparkle. I wondered how many other stories, parallel to hers, were being repeated in isolated farmhouses throughout New York State.

"Would you like to see the barn?" she asked after a while.

"Sure," I said untruthfully.

Peg put on a coat, pulled rubber boots over her bare feet and headed across the snowy yard, the three of us following. Huge snowdrifts lay up against the weathered barn side, and I discovered immediately why barns have sliding doors in this part of the world. Peg hauled one of the doors aside and we stepped through. If anything it was colder inside the place than out. It was also dark. A 25-watt bulb, further dulled by cobwebs, gleamed wanly from the ceiling high above. A growl greeted us and Peg stooped to pat a white shadow against the wall.

"This is Niki," she said. "He's a Samoyede. A Siberian sled dog. I have to keep him chained or he gets the chickens."

I didn't say anything. I was having typical city-boy's reaction to the smells of a barn. Peg led us through a door to where some cows were munching their stanchions. A cat scurried away and Nedra Kristina wanted to run after him, but I couldn't set her down in this muck. I kept wiping my feet to get the smell off.

"This is your first time in a barn, Scott?" Peg asked.

"Does it show that bad?"

Peg took us trough some more doors. There was some rickety old furniture, stacks of boards, mattresses, pipes, an old piano. These people must have been saving stuff all their lives, I thought. We climbed up into a granary which was covered with old license plates and metal Coke signs to keep mice out.

And then, suddenly, at the top of another ladder, we were in the part of the barn where the hay was stored.

My heart gave a strange little leap. What was there about this dim dusty loft with pigeons strutting along the beams and a wintry sun struggling through the cracks in the roof, that should set my pulse pounding? I stood there a moment on the top rung of the ladder, struggling with the feeling that I'd seen this all before.

But that was impossible. For the first time since we'd entered the barn there was light enough, up here, to read my watch. "We have to head back," I called down to Nedra. I had to be at the station at 4:00 each afternoon to go on the air by 7:00.

"Well, let me give you a little milk before you go," Peg said. We picked our way out of the littered barn, sliding the doors shut on the smells and the clucking of chickens. Back in the kitchen Peg gave us a gallon of ice cold milk which we accepted gratefully. I set the jug on the floor of the car as Nedra settled Nedra Kristina on her lap. That driveway was just as treacherous to get out of as it had looked. At last when the highway was clear I got a running start and gunned it up the little rise.

We made it onto the road but the jug toppled over and all the way home a small lake of milk was sloshing over our shoes. With rags and towels we mopped it up as best we could, but it was weeks before we got the sour smell out of the automobile.

All in all, then, the visit to the barn was something short of a pleasure.

Which made it all the more difficult to explain what happened next.

In late March I flew out to Minneapolis to give a speech; Nedra and I were depending more and more on honoraria from speeches like this. As the plane left Ithaca airport, I looked down at Route 13. And there, like a doll set, was the Hardesty farm. I could see the crazy old barn, Peg's awkward driveway, her house. I could see a square-shaped cattle pond out back and the boundaries of the farm outlined by fence rows.

And as I looked I had the incredible impression of God's voice in some inner ear. It was as if the Lord were saying to me that this was His barn. In spite of the fact that it was filled with muck and smells and abandoned, rusting relics, this was His place and He was going to use it.

I tried to shake off the idea. It was too far-out.

Lord, is this my head, or is this really You?

In answer I received a crisp impression:

I want you to go out to the barn again.

So in sheer obedience, after work a few nights after my return from Minneapolis, I drove out to the Hardesty place again. I parked the car and slid open the big door, grateful for the chain which held Niki, and hoping his ruckus wouldnt have Peg phoning the police. I stood just inside the door, trying to adjust my eyes to the gloom. It was just as I remembered it cows and dirt and accumulated trash. So how to explain what was happening inside me? For instead of seeing the barn as an ugly old place held together with baling wire and license plates, I was seeing it somehow with eyes of love. It was almost as though Jesus Himself were showing it to me.

Scott, you're beginning to get it. Keep looking. I want you to learn to see things the way I do, not as they are, but as they can be. I want you to see the shimmering beauty that is hiding in dirty old barns and in men waiting only to be released.

Not as they are . . . I wandered further into the barn, feeling beneath my feet not these creaking boards and rotting straw piles, but strong and holy ground.

I climbed the ladder to the loft, moonlight sifting through the splintered roof. And then I remembered where I had seen this room before. On the bus. This was the very place Id seen in my vision as the bus crawled up Eighth Avenue nearly two years ago! I swallowed to keep down the lump in my throat. This big square room, those beams up there, that high peaked ceiling, every detail exactly as I had seen it. Only in the vision the room had been packed with young people, and there'd been a band where there was only a decaying pile of hay. And thered been singing and laughter and joyful faces and a lot of other things that made no sense at all in this silent old loft on Route 13.

Read Chapter 8.

This excerpt from Scott Free is reprinted with permission from the author.  Any use of this material without written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.