Reverend Billy Walker had not been given the title America’s Pastor. He had earned it. He had always followed the scriptures assiduously, since even before he attended Bible College. He had tended his flock above all his own matters. He had even foregone forging a family of his own to grow the family of God.
Ultimately, though, he owed his greatest stroke of fortune to a devil.
Walker’s office was never what one could call ostentatious, although it could have been and nobody would have faulted him for it. Walker’s books were always open, his accounting activities blatantly transparent—so consistently transparent for so many years that now auditors barely glanced at them. His desk was a dark mahogany—real furniture, not typical office supply store variety—and the bookshelves lining two walls from floor to ceiling were filled with a variety of texts ranging from theology to geological surveys to military technical manuals. Walker’s interests ranged a wide gamut.
Almost none of it meant anything to Walker. They were merely worldly possessions, and his treasures were stored up elsewhere. Still, the Reverend Billy Walker was packing. The box was small, little more than a shoebox. His clothes had already been loaded aboard his private jet.
A private jet, Walker mused, smiling as he shook his head. He could hardly believe how far he’d come, how far God had brought him, just by being true to the Word.
It had taken him a good twenty years of preaching the gospel and saving souls to fill God’s house to the rafters. And even then, his greatest pain had come from seeing believers fall away. He could add ninety-nine converts, but if he lost one he would sit up at nights agonizing in prayer for that one lost soul.
He remembered the night when the idea first came to him. He had been beseeching God for hours when he had turned on the nightly news in time to catch the first reports of the capture, introducing him to the first of two men who would forever alter the course of his life.
“…taken at Mount of Olives General by police, after leaving three more dead bodies in his wake,” the pretty blonde reporter was saying, putting on her practiced ‘serious’ face. “If you’re just joining us, a joint task force of FBI and State Police have taken into custody a man fitting the description of the wanted serial killer social media has dubbed ‘The Cradle Robber.’ Our cameras were on the scene to capture the end of the manhunt.”
The frame cut to one of several officers manhandling a struggling young man—clean-shaven but wild-eyed, dressed in hospital scrubs. “I’m saving them!” he screamed. “They come here, and we just corrupt their innocent souls!” An officer pushed down on the man’s head to get him into the back of the waiting squad car. “I’m saving their souls!” he shrieked one last time before the door was slammed shut.
“That was the scene at Mount of Olives General,” the blonde reporter’s voice narrated, “after a nurse reported an unfamiliar person administering immunizations in the obstetrics unit, which turned out to be syringes of air. Three babies died of embolisms, bringing the killer’s death toll to twenty-three.”
Walker had turned off the television in disgust, praying for the serenity and peace of the bereaved parents. But the so-called Cradle Robber had awakened something in him—an idea he could understand, even though that understanding disgusted him at first.
It would be a few years later when divine providence would open another door for the Reverend, when he sat down at that same mahogany desk, took a sip of his black morning coffee, and opened up his newspaper. Staring up from the front page of The Clarion was his own face.
He wasn’t all that surprised. It was in vogue at the time to dig up dirt on those who had made a life of doing the Lord’s work. Hypocrisy was taking down nationally recognized evangelical figures left and right, as investigative inquiries turned up everything from drugs to promiscuity to prostitution.
The story from The Clarion was one of embezzling, claiming that Walker’s local megachurch was as rife with corruption as all the nationally famous ones that were falling from grace.
It was an easy story to believe, because pastors were assumed to live in poverty. A photo of Walker’s nice house, a rundown of the costs of his suits and his car—it was all people would need to believe that the pastor was helping himself to funds he should not. The reporter, one Jacob Riser, was making a bold statement—one he must have assumed he would not have to support beyond the superficial. After all, a good Christian was supposed to turn the other cheek.
Walker turned the other cheek in the direction of his phone, which he used to dial his attorney. By the end of the day, The Clarion had been served with a defamation lawsuit. Twenty-two hours and an editorial board meeting later, the newspaper decided it would not change its position, and would let Walker’s challenge be determined by a jury—a trial The Clarion planned to cover extensively, with early and updated editions every day. What they had not counted on was just how wrong they were. By the end of the suit, nobody trusted The Clarion to wrap fish. Their competition took to referring to their stories as “Jell-o urinalism,” a term which meant nothing and yet communicated everything.
What was also unexpected was America’s response to the whole thing. America had searched in desperation for an honest man, and had found one in the Reverend Billy Walker. When Walker, much to the chagrin of his attorneys, asked the jury to lower the award fee to just his legal costs and a printed retraction, America fell completely in love with the humble preacher. Walker’s ministry was suddenly coast-to-coast, and the money came flooding in from all corners. Suddenly, Billy Walker was an insanely wealthy man, who reinvested his wealth in America, creating jobs across the country, initially by opening consignment clothing and household goods stores to serve as job training for the homeless and undereducated, before later moving into investments to make America energy independent. And yet, all the wealth in the world could not erase the guilt and sorrow he felt when people fell away from the faith. If anything, it magnified the feeling, because his flock had grown from thousands to millions.
And then he met the girls.
Billy Walker liked to work at the personal level, something he found harder to do as his congregation began to number in the thousands. So when he travelled from city to city, he made it a practice to slip out without an entourage and minister where he could to the lost, the homeless, and the helpless. And on one such night, in Sacramento, he came across the sisters. Having lost their father, they found themselves without a means of support, and were making a living prostituting themselves out as a duo. They were bedraggled, desperate, and full of worldly notions. When they came up to him, they asked him if he wanted a ‘job.’ He smiled, and told them that he already had one. This made them giggle, which he found infectious. He then asked about their needs, which were simple: money.
Often when he would be asked for money, he would find himself quoting Peter. “Silver and gold, have I none”. Only that wasn’t true any longer. He had silver and gold in plenty.
He offered to buy them dinner. They accepted the offer, then seemed to be taken aback that he drove them to a restaurant, and a nice one at that. When the waiter turned up his nose at their attire, Billy pretended not to notice while also assertively assuring that they were treated with respect.
They ate. They talked. And when the girls realized their clever little innuendos and subtle overtures didn’t faze him, they talked about other things. And Billy Walker learned these girls had a depth of intelligence and experience uncommon among the homeless.
In the end, the girls who had offered him a job were offered jobs themselves, which they accepted.
Later that next week, he saved their souls during a tent revival meeting in Los Angeles, and they had been part of his organization ever since.
And then one night, as he began to lament once more in his office, they overheard his sobs. He shared his dreadful dream with them, and they shared their knowledge. What wonderfully smart girls they turned out to be! It was then Walker knew that the crossing of their paths was fate. Together, the three of them spread Walker’s ideals to all the right people. Walker invested heavily into worldwide oil exploration and then, more recently, sold off those operations to invest in mining and urban gentrification projects. The public followed his every move, and applauded his providing jobs with each project.
He was well down the path now, and victory was all but assured. When he thought about The Clarion these days, and the disgraced reporter who set the ball rolling, he understood how Joseph felt confronting his brothers after spending years of slavery in Egypt. “Ye thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good,” he would mutter to himself with a smile.
And now he was packing. A knock at the door made Walker look up from his reverie, greeted by the curvaceous bodies of the two girls whose conservative attire did little to hide the earthly pleasures of their flesh. He’d long ago fallen in love with them both, despite the chasm of years between his age and theirs. But being a godly man who would never fornicate outside the bonds of marriage, he remained chaste. However, he often entertained the notion that perhaps, just perhaps, those gentlemen in Utah were onto something righteous and holy after all. After all, didn’t Jacob take two wives to himself and birth a nation through them?
“It’s time,” said the first girl.
“The plane’s all warmed up, and so are we,” purred the second.
The Reverend Walker could not suppress a smile when he looked up to see his beautiful helpers silhouetted in the doorway of his office. He blushed at their forwardness, a quality he at first tried to tame but later learned to just accept. They were precious to him, young and full of life and so ready and eager for…
He shook the thought out of his head. “I’ll be right there, sweethearts,” he said. “Just making sure I’m not leaving behind anything important.”
“We’ll be waiting on board,” the first girl said with a giggle. They turned away, slowly, their behinds swaying in synchronized rhythm like upside-down hearts on two pendulums. He sighed. They were as lovely going as they were coming, he thought, then mentally chided himself for the lustful thoughts.
Walker took one last glance around the room. Then, finding nothing else he absolutely needed, he put the lid on the small box of his necessities, among which were his worn-out well-read copy of the King James Bible and a seldom-used .38 snub-nosed revolver. Then he tucked the box under his arm and thought about tomorrow, wondering, as he often did, whether it was a day that would actually happen—whether this day would be the day that began eternity for everyone. He could only hope, but he was more certain than ever of two things: God would return, and he would be alive to see it.
As he shut the door, he happily murmured a tuneful congregational hymn under his breath. “As I’m bid-ding, this world, good-bye.”