Detained

The church held nine thousand people.

Crane knew this because he had counted them. Not literally — he had never stood at the back with a clicker the way the ushers did. He knew it the way a shepherd knows his flock — by weight, by sound, by the silence nine thousand people hold when they are waiting for something they believe is coming.

He stood in the wings.

The worship band played the last chord. It hung in the air and then it was gone and the silence came in and Crane walked out and the silence changed — it did not break, it deepened, the way silence deepens when the thing it was waiting for arrives.

He did not use the podium.

He took the mic from the stand and he held it in his right hand and his Bible in his left and he walked to the center of the stage and he stood there and he looked at them. All of them. The third row left side where Harlan sat with his wife, her hand in his. The balcony where the young families were, children in their laps, bulletin boards folded into fans. The back where the new people stood because new people always stood at the back until they decided to stay.

He held the silence one more second.

Then he opened his mouth.

He said: Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.

He did not say where it was from. They knew where it was from. These were not people who needed a reference. These were people who had grown up with the book the way Crane had grown up with it — not as a document, as a language, the first language, the one underneath all the others.

He said: For there is no authority except from God. And those that exist have been instituted by God.

He closed the Bible.

He did not need it anymore. What he needed was already in him.

He said: I want to talk to you this morning about what it means to love something. He paused. Really love something. Not the feeling. The act. The cost of it.

He walked left, slowly — not pacing. Pacing was nervousness. Crane was not nervous.

He said: A shepherd loves his flock. You know this. You have heard this your whole life and I am not going to insult you by explaining it. But I want to ask you something you may not have been asked before. He stopped walking. What does the shepherd do at night?

He let the question sit.

He closes the gate, he said. That is what love does at night. It closes the gate. Not because the sheep are bad. Not because the world outside is bad. Because there are wolves. Because the shepherd knows what he has been given and he knows what will happen to it if he is not faithful. And faithfulness — he paused, the deliberate pause, the pause that had built this from two hundred people to fourteen thousand — faithfulness is not a feeling either. Faithfulness is a decision you make before the wolves come so you do not have to make it after.