Three Elders and a Door

Track two is the first narrative on the record, and the first door that closed. The album shifts gears hard here - sparse opener, then a Sun-Records freight-train beat - because a story this grim moves better over an unstoppable rhythm. I was twenty-six years old the morning that they called. Said come on down and see us, son, it is nothing much at all. It was not nothing. It was three elders and a door, and an empty chair.

The charge was tithing. You have not tithed the way the Scripture says you must. I answered the way I still would - the Scripture says a cheerful giver, and I trust. I stand fast in the liberty that Christ Himself made free. But the song tells the truth about that room. They did not want the Book from me. It escalated to the real charge - a man should not go reading where his elders have not gone. They took the little ministry I carried, called it done, and told me to find another place.

The song ends on the wound, not the resolution, and that is deliberate. I walked across the gravel and I sat down in the car. I wept there in the parking lot, a young man cut adrift. And one line plants a seed the album will pay off much later - I did not know that morning what that shut door was. The bridge names this the first of many. It was the first door. It was not the last. But the song stops there, in the parking lot - in Movement I the album tells the cost before the grace.