15 December 2009

The World is a Better Place Today

I used to live with a woman named Rhonda. She was pretty generally excellent, and we were together for four years. I have fond memories and no complaints about her.
When she was a little girl she used to stay with a family friend named Opal while her parents were at work. Opal was not actually related to Rhonda, but she seemed like a grandma so Rhonda called her “Mamaw Opal,” even after she had grown up. Opal was the sort of old woman that the movies think Appalachia is full of: tough but big-hearted, desperately poor, bright but barely literate, and of course devoutly religious.
When Rhonda was a little girl Opal was already old, so thirty years later when I knew her, she was very old indeed, and very sick. When her illness got so bad that she couldn’t bear it anymore, she wrote a letter to world-famous faith healer Oral Roberts, asking him to pray for her. She believed that he had the power to heal her, even from that distance. He wrote back, full of sympathy for her suffering, and told her that of course he’d be happy to pray for her, provided she sent him twenty dollars.

I hear that Oral Roberts died today. I wish I could have been there.

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