Almost Heaven

by Chris Fabry

  “Sure is—1 Samuel. Story of the prophet sorting through Jesse’s sons to find the next king. Before the prophet went, God reminded him not to be swayed by how they looked—told him that man looks at the outward appearance but the Lord looks at the heart. That’s the same thing you were saying.”

  “I wish people would do that with Callie. Look at her heart instead of her face.”

  I didn’t say anything, just kind of stared at the floor, noticing a pill bug crawling along.

  “She’d kill me if she knew I was talking with you, but I thought I’d mention it. She cares an awful lot for you, Billy.”

  “And I wouldn’t do a thing in the world to hurt her feelings, sir.”

  “I know you wouldn’t. You’re a good man. Get that freezer fixed and use it.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  * * *

  Sometimes I wonder if God looks down on us from some parapet in heaven, all us little beings doing everything we can to control our bit of the world. There are times when it feels like all the working and striving is only for us and not for him. All of the wishing and hoping and planning that gets washed away with a big rain or a gust of wind is just for our own comfort or feeling of accomplishment. But then I come back to the fact that he has placed us on earth for a purpose, and that is to fulfill whatever mission he has. And I remember that he walked among us, God in flesh and bone, working and sweating and eating and drinking and laughing. When I got down, I’d think of that and go back to building a radio station in my house.

  I didn’t have any idea what would happen. It was just like the fellow in that movie about building a baseball diamond in his cornfield. Or like Noah building his ark. Most people looked at it as some kooky guy with a pipe dream. I’m sure some of them thought I was a conspiracy nut who wanted attention.

  It wasn’t anything like that. It was a slow, methodical process to praise the God who loved me. I wanted to tell other people about that love. When I’d get finished with one project, one room, I’d get another part-time job and make enough money for the next phase. I was as happy as a coon in a cornfield putting it all together because I could see it in my head.

  But it didn’t become real to me until the day the license showed up. I just stood at the mailbox and stared at the envelope, half-afraid to open it. I was approved for a commercial FM license at 96.3 MHz with full power at 6,000 watts. Rogers and I ate like kings that night in celebration. I left the food Callie had brought in the freezer and drove through the nearest Hardee’s for burgers. I was dangerously low on money and most of my freelance had dried up.

  The next day I called that Charles Broughton fellow at the church in Charleston, thinking about his nice business card, and I asked if there was someplace that could do the same thing for me. He asked why I wanted them and I told him my dream. Then he asked more questions and we must have talked a half hour. I told him I needed cards so I could sell time to prospective advertisers.

  He told me to hang on and not go to the local quick-print place until he had a chance to work on it. I knew I could just print it off myself, but there was so much other stuff to be done and I didn’t want it to look cheap.

  Two days later a car pulled up in front of the house real slow and a man got out with a paper bag under his arm. He walked up to the front door and knocked.

  “Are you ready?” he said, his smile about as wide as the Cheshire cat.

  “Ready for what?”

  “Your business cards and stationery.”

  He pulled a little box out of the bag and inside were five hundred white business cards with my name, address, and phone number. Over top of my name it had the call letters of the station and an antenna with a beacon in the shape of a cross. Underneath it said, Good News Bluegrass: Music for the soul, a message for the heart.

  I about jumped out of my skin. Then he pulled out the stationery that had the address and the same thing written at the top and bottom. Plus, he had printed up a rate card for spot announcements with the cost left blank so I could just write it in.

  “How did you do this?” I said, my mouth still hanging open.

  “I have a friend in radio sales. He gave it to me and I copied it. My wife and I worked on the logo, and the printer turned it around in a day. I think they did a pretty good job.”

  “Pretty good doesn’t even come close,” I said. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Just put me down as the charter member of your fan club, Billy. My only regret is that I won’t be able to hear you unless I’m passing through.”

  I didn’t have the words to thank him, but I did invite him to stay for supper. He wouldn’t hear of it and said he was going to take me to the diner and I could order the biggest steak on the menu, which I did. Rogers wasn’t too happy with me leaving, but I wasn’t about to pass up a good meal.

  We talked about my business plan, which I didn’t have. He gave me tips from his own business and how I needed to approach the owners of places around town with the chance to get in on the ground floor.

  “You’ll be reaching people in this hollow that these businesses can’t. Let’s say you sell a spot for ten dollars to the local grocery. For a hundred dollars they can run ten spots each day. And you can tell them, if they get on board now, before you go on the air, you’ll double their spot load for signing up early. For every spot they ran, you’d throw one in free. If they buy a week’s worth, you’ll throw in another week. If they advertise for a month, you’ll throw in the second month. Six months’ investment now could buy them a whole year.”

  “I’d thought about running a special to begin.”

  “Are you able to produce the commercials yourself?”

  I nodded. “I can just use the audition channel of the board and I’m good.”

  “So you can tell them the production won’t cost them a penny because you’ll be doing all of that free. Unless they already have something to play, and most of these places won’t.”

  I chewed on my rib eye and wiped my mouth. “I’ve been working on the music end of things off and on, but I hadn’t really thought that far ahead about the commercials.”

  “Well, you need to, Billy. I know you’re not in it for the money, but you’re also going to have extra bills. And there’s the mortgage to think of. How much money do you have in the bank right now?”

  I told him and he winced.

  “All right. What do you need to make each month to keep yourself afloat?”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  He got out a piece of paper and wrote down the approximate amount of bills I had each month. Some of them were a month or two behind.

  “Who are you going to hire to help you run the station and sell the time?”

  “I’m going to do it myself. I can’t afford to hire anybody. If things take off, maybe I can.”

  He looked around the restaurant. Things had thinned out a bit. “Do you know the owner of this place?”

  I nodded. “Of course. There’s not many people in town I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you ask him to come over?”

  I got the server’s attention and asked her to tell Albert I needed to see him. They called him Fat Albert after the cartoon character, but he wasn’t really that overweight; he was just short and stocky.

  He smiled and shook my hand as he sat down and I introduced my friend from Charleston. “Everything all right with your food?”

  “Our compliments to the cook,” I said.

  Charlie took over. “Albert, it looks like you have a fine place here, but you could use an uptick in business, especially at dinner.”

  “It gets slow about this time on weeknights but picks up on the weekend. Breakfast is our big draw.”

  “Well, Billy here wants to offer you a chance to increase your business and visibility.”

  “This have anything to do with that station you’re building?” Albert said to me.

  “I’m set to start in less than two weeks.”

 
“In order to make this thing take off, we need local sponsors who will advertise,” Charlie said. “You could track the response by having some kind of special you only talk about on the radio. See if it increases traffic. And since you’re the first business Billy’s approached, if you’ll agree to sign up for a month of advertising, he’ll match every spot you buy for another month. Plus, the production work is free. You don’t pay anything extra for that.”

  Albert listened intently and asked a couple of questions before he said, “Mr. Broughton, if I had an unlimited supply of money, I would advertise on the local country station and have a billboard by the interstate. The truth is, I’m struggling just to pay my servers.”

  “And Billy can help you with that. A bump in business on the weeknights will more than compensate for anything you spend.”

  “How much are they each?”

  I handed him the sheet of paper where I had written in the amount. He looked at it and frowned. “I couldn’t afford half of this, even if I wanted to.”

  “The trick with radio is saturation,” I said. “People respond to stuff they hear over and over. It takes a few times hearing it for them to decide to come here. So you have to load up on the morning and afternoon drive and then sprinkle the spots in throughout the rest of the day to get the best effect.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Absolutely,” Charlie said. “But remember, Billy’s giving you first chance at this, and as the schedule fills up, the price will also go up. Don’t wait too long.”

  We drove back to my house with Charlie telling me this was my big start. He was impressed with the way I had taken over and said if I could pitch like that to other businesses, I could have the first year of funds in the bank.

  “Don’t be discouraged when they say no. They’ll probably say that more often than yes. But one in ten will say yes, so keep knocking on doors.”

  “What kinds of businesses would be best?”

  “Any business that depends on people knowing about them. And that’s every business.”

  “Would a realty company be a good sale?”

  “You bet. You want listeners to bond with that business. So you might have them come to the studio and record their own spots.”

  “What about your realty business?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, there’s probably people here who have no idea how much help you could be to them.”

  He smiled. “You’re going to be a natural at this, Billy.”

  He wrote a check for two weeks of spots. I had him write down a little bit of what he wanted said. When he left, I had more of a feeling of what I had gotten into. My original vision was just to play music and tell people the good news. I could focus on the technical side of things like I always had and pass for an announcer, but the sales area had scared me. Now I had a vision for this side of the business and what I needed to do before I pulled the switch.

  * * *

  A week before I was scheduled to go on the air, I dressed in my Sunday best and hit the road. I had called ahead to set up appointments at Foodland, the drugstore, the print shop, and the mini golf. Other places I just stopped.

  The owner of the gas station laughed at me. “Billy, people aren’t going to come to my gas station because they hear you talk about me on the radio. They’re going to come by here because they need gas.”

  I got that reaction a lot and by the end of the day I was exhausted, discouraged, and getting pretty low. I stopped at the diner and ordered a glass of orange juice to bring my sugar level back up. I paid the server and was about to walk out when Albert sat on a stool at the counter.

  “Do you really think you can increase my business in the evenings, Billy?”

  “I don’t know for sure about anything but death, taxes, and the grace of God. But if you’ll try it out for a month, I promise I’ll give it my best shot. And if in the middle of that time, you don’t see results, you can cancel and I’ll give the rest of your money back.”

  “All right. I’ll take a week’s worth. Ten spots a day. You throw in the second week and we’ll go from there.”

  I shook his hand and went home with my second account. I recorded the spots the next day and had them in the cart machines and ready to go.

  It was hard to sleep on those nights before the station started. Slowly the rest of my freelance work had dropped off until the new station became my only source of income. It was like God was weaning me from the teat of what I had always known. A paycheck. Benefits. He was taking me into uncharted waters and I was buoyed along by my vision and his grace.

  I’ve heard it said that the best place to be is in the will of God. Every night as I tossed and turned, with Rogers lying at the foot of the bed, I prayed that’s where I was. I wanted this to be something that could only be explained by God’s intervention. Those days I walked by faith and not by sight. It was the most exciting time of my life.

  15

  On the day Billy began his second radio career, he was forty-four years old. He could hardly sleep the night before, preparing the music reels that would loop and play continuously when there was no thirty-minute program. He had set the looping up so that if all of the reels were full, he could leave the station for four hours. Four hours of sleep at a time was all he would have for years, which wreaked havoc on his health.

  In those early days, he ran on adrenaline, instant coffee, and Callie’s food. It was clear to me how she felt, and clear to everyone in their church, but for some reason Billy remained uninterested. Perhaps there was only one love of his life. Perhaps he believed God had called him to singleness.

  My theory was not any of the above. I believed Billy was somehow “stuck” in his mind-set, settled into a way of thinking and a way of life that was not wholly chosen by him, but determined by past events. I am not discounting the fact that he was a committed follower of the Way. There is no question that his motivation for the things he did with his life was to bring others into the truth about God. But in the lives of many humans, there is an event that brings them to a point of irreconcilable difference with themselves, and the enemy uses this to mire them in despondency and despair. This clouds their vision of the future and what might be with things that are not. The evil one loves to distort what is by looking through the prism of the past. It could have been the flood that did this to Billy or possibly the rejection he’d experienced from Heather, but I had an inkling it was something else.

  I sent word to my superior and asked for any explanation or lead. I explained my theory and posited that someone may have witnessed a crucial event during those years when I had been absent, but the response was less than satisfactory. There was no record of past events given.

  For the moment, I had little choice but to abandon this line of questioning and merely observe Billy as he settled into his new role with the station. There seemed to be no enemy activity around him during this time. This concerned me, for there should have been at least some opposition to Billy’s radio venture. It appeared the forces of evil did not regard his efforts as worthy of an attack.

  In an intuitive move, I visited Callie and there discovered a shockingly different story. Sometimes the evil one casts a frontal assault, but at many others he uses unconventional means. He stages a peripheral attack.

  Callie lived alone just across the county line in a double-wide trailer. She spent her days at a job she did not enjoy with people who vexed her. These she faithfully prayed for and treated with as much kindness as she could muster. She had a vision of the future that was not commensurate with reality. (I know this from several diary entries, not from reading her mind.) She believed Billy was the one for her and that he would eventually discover the truth that they were meant for each other. She had helped with his mother out of an equal amount of kindness and longing. After he began his radio station, she would listen each day, setting her clock radio to hear his first words.

  I discovered an im
p bent on Callie’s destruction at her home. Simpering and twisted, he was frightened at the first sight of my light.

  “What do you want with me, servant of the Most High?” the evil one seethed.

  “Why do you torment this woman?”

  He cocked his head. “Why do you protect worthless human debris? Why do you spend your days tethered to a man whose life is of no consequence?”

  “Every life has consequence. Every beating heart. Every tortured soul. They are worth something because the King places His worth on them.”

  “Save your tripe,” he spat. “Even you don’t truly believe every life has value. Not even your Leader believes that, for He has destined some to us. He chose some to believe and let others fall.”

  “He is not willing that any should perish,” I said, tight-lipped. “He proved His love by the sacrifice of His own Son.”

  The imp backed away, but there was a sneer in his voice when he said, “You exult in His sovereignty, but all I see is chaos. The One who orders the universe is incompetent. Look at the calamity and the bloodshed and the tears.” He was emboldened by his own words and moved closer. “And with all of the battles to be fought, with all of the skirmishes between yours and mine, you continue to follow an inconsequential, dithering, inept human. Has your Sovereign forgotten your power and skill?”

  “I do not answer to you.”

  “Agreed. But wouldn’t your experience and expertise be better suited for battle? If you would come to our side, you could serve a being with such great power. He is responsive to those who call to him, not negligent and uncaring.”