{"id":416,"date":"2012-06-12T08:51:54","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T08:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/?p=416"},"modified":"2012-06-12T09:00:30","modified_gmt":"2012-06-12T09:00:30","slug":"shelbyville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/2012\/06\/shelbyville\/","title":{"rendered":"Shelbyville"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>by Gord Sellar<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">on the other hand, is like any other place. People work<br \/>\nthe land, tumble their bones back home at sundown,<br \/>\nmarry, bear babies in their arms, sleep not enough,<br \/>\nand every so often they drag their sweat-drenched skins<br \/>\ndown to the big tents by the cool twisting waters,<br \/>\nto hear \u2019bout the Lord and the fearsome fires of Hell.<\/p>\n<p>Issachar watches their faces as they get dunked below<br \/>\nthe surface of the water, the faces they make<br \/>\nwhen the Lord touches the roots of their heart<br \/>\nwith the tip of His old finger. They look scared,<br \/>\nto him, at first, and then the sudden sunburst<br \/>\nof relief, of vigilant baptized love, suddenly blooms.<\/p>\n<p>The water up to his waist, Issachar is pensive.<br \/>\nHis preacher\u2019s voice doesn\u2019t roar the same in the river:<br \/>\ninstead, he whispers salvation to any who have<br \/>\nears to hear. His mind is not on eternal salvation<br \/>\nor damnation, however. A forgivable distraction.<br \/>\nNo, he\u2019s thinking about the souls in a city named Canton.<\/p>\n<p>Issachar watches them in the tents, after his sermon.<br \/>\nSeems every year, more people know the words,<br \/>\nand sing along, over the gee-tars and the banjoes, like<br \/>\na pack of rabid toothy angels, hungry for Paradise.<br \/>\nThey break their bread, they set themselves again<br \/>\non the highway out of Hell and back to the Lord.<\/p>\n<p>It would be one thing, if he was thinkin\u2019 himself<br \/>\nanother John the Baptist, pridefully sinning.<br \/>\nBut in the end, it is just a matter of economics,<br \/>\nthough Issachar Roberts could never put it that way.<br \/>\nNo, old Issachar\u2019s never read Adam Smith, but just<br \/>\nthe same, he\u2019s an economist of the human soul.<br \/>\nZealotry is hardly enough to bear him to the East.<br \/>\nBut imagine him imagining the dividends,<br \/>\nimagine the profits, the demand in that kind of market<br \/>\nso starved for some good old-style salvation.<\/p>\n<p>The hungry Chinamen. The needy, poor struggling<br \/>\nmasses. Tennessee has its share of ignorance, but<br \/>\nit ain\u2019t got nothing on all of China. Sometimes<br \/>\nhe puts his ear to the ground, and he can hear them<br \/>\ndown there, crying out for salvation from the shackles of<br \/>\nsinful ignorance. Old Issachar knows what they need.<\/p>\n<p>The letter from Gutzlaff, a Chinese missionary,<br \/>\nwhat letter arrived the other morning in<br \/>\nthe post, is laden with enticements and<br \/>\nexhortation, yet clinches it. He sets his wife down,<br \/>\nexplains that they will need to start packing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Gord Sellar on the other hand, is like any other place. People work the land, tumble their bones back home at sundown, marry, bear babies in their arms, sleep not enough, and every so often they drag their sweat-drenched skins down to the big tents by the cool twisting waters, to hear \u2019bout the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems-from-taiping"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xIep-6I","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions\/420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}