“If only my anguish could be weighed and all my misery be placed on the scales! It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas.”
—Job 6:2-3
Columbia, Missouri, September 3, 1935—At two in the morning, any building can seem spooky and inhospitable, but the Holiness Church of Columbia took unfair advantage of this fact. By far the largest structure for miles, it towered over the darkened town. A harsh autumn wind flapped the hand-lettered banner above the main doors, declaring FIFTY YEARS IN CHRIST, 1885-1935 to the deserted street. Above the doors, carved in the granite transom, were the words ‘I stand at the door and knock.’
Knocking at this hour would have been futile; the doors were obviously chained shut. If one were observant, however, one might notice that the lock on a side door had been jimmied open, then carefully closed.
It would take a brave person, indeed, to walk through the church at night. Cold as the grave, but not as silent. The steam pipes banged. Things creaked. More than one caretaker had mentioned a feeling of being watched when alone in the building. And yet, past the sanctuary and down a tiled hall, light showed under a closed door.
Eleven portraits hung on the corridor wall. Ten simple charcoal drawings, and one photograph. It was not hard to place the men in the portraits as former ministers of the church. Dour expressions, white hair, humorless glowers. Only the man in the photo stood apart. Early-thirties, with hair neatly parted down the middle, he was dressed as severely as the other ten. But he was smiling. And not a ‘say cheese’ type of smile either. He was happy.
The brass nameplate below his picture read ‘Rev. David Gowen, 1931—’ The same name appeared above the door to the only lighted room in the building.
If one could pass silently into the closed office, one would see the reverend seated at his desk, massaging his temples. Nothing unusual about the scene, though if one only knew Rev. Gowen from his photo, the change in his face might have seemed alarming. He’d gone grey since 1931. And lost weight. From the expression on his face, one might wonder if he ever smiled any more.
He closed the Bible on his desk and strode across the room. A very poorly executed paint-by-number of Jesus hung among the minister’s cheap office furniture. Gowen paused and faced the wall-eyed Messiah. He stared for nearly five minutes in intense silence. What was he thinking? Was he worrying? Praying? Listening for that still, small voice?
If indeed he was waiting for an answer, he was probably disappointed with the result. His office door banged open with a noise like a great peal of thunder. Two hulking, shabbily dressed men stood in the doorway. They did not smile. Both of them wore similar lapel pins, embossed with an odd symbol: a sideways capital E over an X.
Gowen straightened up and faced the intruders. He seemed to know what was coming, but hoped that somehow the two goons had arrived for another reason.
“Gentlemen…”
That was as far as he got.
When the church’s elderly caretaker unlocked the building at seven the next morning, he was horrified to find that the head minister’s office had been trashed. The desk was in splinters, the portrait of Jesus smashed, the reverend’s personal library torn and heaped on the floor. As he rushed to contact the police, the caretaker almost tripped over the prone body of the minister himself.
The blood coating Gowen’s head seemed to indicate he hadn’t survived the attack. Only when the caretaker determined that he was still breathing did he run for help.
As it turned out, Gowen’s injuries were severe, but not life-threatening. Not that his attackers hadn’t meant to threaten his life. When you rip someone’s eyeball out of his head, his survival is probably not at the forefront of your mind. Still, the doctor later admitted, they had taken the time to plaster a couple of wadded pages of the Old Testament over the reverend’s eye socket. The crude bandage may have kept him from bleeding to death.