On a Sunday morning, with the snow whipping sideways, I pulled open the church’s large front door and stepped into the vestibule. The sanctuary was freezing-and empty. The roof hole was above me. I could hear the wind whipping the blue tarp. An organ sound was coming from somewhere, but there was no one around.

“Psst.”

I turned to see the thin man with the high forehead, motioning me to another door on the side. I walked in and did a double take.

Here was some kind of makeshift mini-sanctuary, just two short pews wide, with a side “wall” of plastic sheeting staple-gunned into wooden two-by-fours. It was like a fort that kids make in the attic. The plastic wrapped overhead as well, creating a low ceiling.

Apparently, with no heat to fight the cold, the church had been forced to build a plastic tent inside its own sanctuary. Congregants huddled in the limited seating. The small space made it less frigid, although people still kept their coats on. And this was where Pastor Henry Covington now conducted his Sunday service. Instead of a grand altar, he had a small lectern. Instead of the soaring pipe organ behind him, there was a black-and-white banner nailed on the wall.

“We are grateful to you, God,” Henry was saying as I slid into a back row. “God of hope…we give you thanks and praise…in Jesus’s name, amen.”

I glanced around. Between the roof hole, the heat being shut off, and now a plastic prayer tent, you wondered how long before the church withered out of existence altogether.

Henry’s sermon that day had to do with judging people by their past. He began by lamenting how hard it is to shake a habit-especially an addiction.

“I know how it is,” he bellowed. “I know what it’s like when you done swore, I’ll never do this again…next time I get my money, I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna do that,’ and you go home and you promise your loved ones, ‘I messed up, but I’m gonna get back’-”

“Amen!”

“And then you get some money, and all those promises-out the window.”

“Way-ell!”

“You’re so sick and tired of being sick and tired-”

“Sick and tired!”

“But there comes a time when you have to admit to God, this stuff is stronger than me-it’s stronger than the rehab program-it’s stronger than the pastor at the church…I need you, Lord…I need you, Jesus…”

He started clapping.

“But you gotta be like Smokey Robinson…”

He burst into song. He did two lines from “You Really Got a Hold on Me.”

Then back to preaching.

“And maybe you make it to the supermarket and buy some groceries, then someone comes up to you and you get weak…and all the groceries that you bought for seventy dollars, you’ll give ’em away for twenty-”

“Fifteen!”

“Yes, sir…fifteen…that’s right, if you on a hard enough mission to get high…I’m tellin’ you, I know what it’s like to be in, and I know what it’s like to be out.”

“Amen!”

“But we gotta fight this thing. And it’s not good enough for just you to get clean. If someone else is trying, you gotta believe in them too-”

“Preach it, Pastor!”

“In the Book of Acts, we read that Paul-after his conversion-people distrusted him because he used to persecute the church, but now he praised it. ‘Is this the same guy? Can’t be! Nuh-uh.’…It’s amazing how folks can’t see you, ’cause they want to keep you in that past. Some of our greatest problems in ministering to people is that they knew us back before we came to the Lord-”

“Yes it is!”

“The same thing with Paul…They saw him…they couldn’t believe that this man’s from Jesus, because they looked at his past-”

“That’s right!”

“They just looked at his past. And when we’re still looking at ourselves through our past, we’re not seeing what God has done. What He can do! We’re not seeing the little things that happen in our lives-”

“Tell it now.”

“When people tell me that I’m good, my response is, ‘I’m trying.’ But there’s some people that know me from back when-anytime I make that trip to New York-and when they hear I’m the pastor of a church, all of a sudden, it’s like “I know you gettin’ paid, boy. I know you gettin’ paid. I know you.’”

He paused. His voice lowered.

“No, I say. You knew me. You knew that person, but you don’t know the person that I’m trying to become.”

Sitting in the back, I felt a shiver of embarrassment. The truth was, I had struggled with similar thoughts about Henry. I’d wondered if, back among his New York world, he’d laugh and say, “Yeah, I got a whole new thing going on.”

Instead, here he was, preaching in a plastic tent.

“You are not your past!” he told his congregation.

Did you ever hear a sermon that felt as if it were being screamed into your ear alone? When that happens, it usually has more to do with you than the preacher.

After all his years of dogged survival, the Reb, I believed, could beat back any illness; he just might not beat them all.

The attack that had left him slumped in a chair, confused and mumbling, proved not to be a stroke at all, but rather a tragic consequence of his multiple afflictions. In the stir of doctors and prescriptions, the Reb’s Dilantin medication-taken, ironically, to control seizures-had been inadvertently increased to levels that pummeled him. Toxic levels.

Simply put, pills had turned the Reb into a human scarecrow.

When the problem was finally discovered-after several terrible months-dosages were quickly adjusted, and he was, in a matter of days, brought out of his crippling stupor.

I first heard about this in a phone call with Gilah and a subsequent one with Sarah.

“It’s amazing…,” they said. “It’s remarkable…”

There was a buoyancy in their voices I hadn’t heard in months, as if an unexpected summer had arrived in their backyard. And when I caught a plane to the East Coast and entered the house myself, and got my first glimpse of the Reb in his office-well, I wish I could describe the feeling. I have read stories about coma patients who suddenly, after years, awaken and ask for a piece of chocolate cake, while loved ones stare in dropped-jaw disbelief. Maybe it was like that.

All I know is that he turned in his chair, wearing one of those vests with all the pockets, and he held out his bony arms, and he smiled in that excited, crinkle-eyed way that seemed to emit sunlight, and he crowed, “Hellooo, stranger”-and I honestly thought I had seen someone return from the dead.

What was it like? I asked him, when we’d had a chance to settle.

“A fog,” he said. “Like a dark hole. I was here, but somehow I wasn’t here.”

Did you think it was…you know…

“The end?”

Yeah.

“At times.”

And what were you thinking at those times?

“I was thinking mostly about my family. I wanted to calm them. But I felt helpless to do so.”

You scared the heck out of me-us, I said.

“I am sorry about that.”

No. I mean. It’s not your fault.

“Mitch, I have been asking myself why this happened,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Why I have been…spared, so to speak. After all, another couple of whatchamacallits…”

Milligrams?

“That’s it. And I could’ve been kaput.”

Aren’t you furious?