Bob Sanders: Revivals not what they used to be

Dog Days. Fish won’t bite, mad dogs are roaming. Scratches won’t heal. Dog Days.

Plowing in the cotton and corn patches is over.

We have dropped sody around the corn and wrapped it up with a turning plow and busted out the middles with a big shovel plow and sweep ... after planting peas, so they’ll run up the corn stalks and we can have a later crop of peas.

There is always something to do around the farm.

Fences to be mended firewood and stove wood to be cut and hauled and split and stacked.

Always something.

But comparatively slow now, time for protracted meetings.

I look with amusement when I see that some church is going to have a big revival for ... three days? What kind of sissy stuff is this?

What happened to real, sho-nuff protracted meetings?

Can’t you take it anymore?

Let’s talk about the real thing.

Not three days, seven days, twice a day.

Usually, a hired gun (well, a love offering) would be brought in for the event.

He’d eat his meals at members’ houses.

You almost hoped he’d come to yours, because that would be the best meal of the year.

And, strangely, down out of the pulpit, preachers seemed almost like normal people.

But up there ... success was measured by how many people joined the church, got “saved.”

He would put the pressure on you.

The traditional invitation songs included “Why Not Tonight” and “Just As I Am” and “Softly and Tenderly,” and the preacher would call for “Just one more verse. Somebody out there ...”

On into the humid night.

All windows open, no breeze except that created by the funeral home and Brown Service fans, babies sleeping on pallets in the aisles, preacher wet with sweat.

I heard on a recent “Today in History” type thing that the year I turned seven was a bad rainy time in the eastern U.S.

Hmm ...

It had been extremely dry. At the meeting that night, cousin Mary Todd had prayed passionately for rain.

By the time we started home, the two creek bottoms on the way were flooded hill to hill.

Water over the running boards.

Fortunately, Grandpa’s Model-T would “Ford” almost anything. Bridges were blown out.

Creek channels changed. Roads were messed up for weeks. They just don’t make revivals like that anymore.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.