Jesus Town
    by Rhiannon Cabaniss

               Southeast Arkansas is full of people who have found Jesus.  A lot of them find him in one of the many churches that overwhelm the streets of our town.  Others find him in prison.  As for myself, it took me 18 years, but I finally found Jesus.  He was in Wal-Mart the whole time.  I don’t mean that I accepted Jesus into my heart; I literally mean I found Jesus.  There was a man with long hair and a beard, dressed in flowing white robes, wandering down the aisles of Wal-Mart.  He said “Hi” to me, and I just stopped and stared.

            I told everyone I met of my good fortune.  Everyone either looked confused:  “Yeah, I’ve been saved since I was eight,” or had their own stories.  One girl in the elevator said that he went into Taco Bell and was blessing people.  Another said that one of her friends had talked to him, and apparently he has a wife and two daughters and has walked across 48 states.  A friend of mine who works at Wal-Mart added, “Yeah, he got kicked out of Wal-Mart.  The manager was getting complaints.”

            The persecution never ends.

            Even more than the people who just see Jesus are the people who wonder if this guy is Jesus.  They don’t wonder if he’s insane and thinks he’s Jesus, they wonder if he is Jesus, and the moral repercussions that Wal-Mart manager will have for throwing him out of the store.

            I suppose this attitude shouldn’t surprise me.  After all, Arkansas is smack-dab in the middle of the Bible belt and almost everyone I talked to had already met Jesus once, in church, when they were saved.  This is particularly prevalent in southeast Arkansas, in my town, a town where there are more churches to pray at than there are restaurants to eat at.  A town where the question has never been, “What religion are you?” but “What church do you go to?” and it’s asked as soon as you move in.  All of your neighbors feel personally responsible for your salvation and do their best to ensure that you go to the right church:  theirs.  It’s a town where my father once overheard his Jewish co-worker tell someone, “Thank you for your concern, but I’m not going to hell.”

            Of course, in Arkansas, birthplace of Wal-Mart, the store is almost a religion in itself.  Most people go there more often than they go to their respective churches.  For the people in town, it’s a daily ritual to go and see what savings they get today.  Not savings of the soul, savings of the pocketbook.  People talk of going to Wal-Mart as if it’s the greatest treat and if our Wal-Mart were ever to close, the entire town would be sobbing as if Jesus had been crucified again.  Even with all of Wal-Mart’s shady business practices, making it anything but a holy place, most people feel that Jesus surely wouldn’t object to them saving money.

            With seemingly all of Monticello following some branch of Christianity or another, the reactions people had to this Jesus figure shouldn’t have surprised me.  If a man dressed very convincingly as my Lord and Savior had appeared in front of me, I’d probably take him at face value also.  All the same, it’s rather refreshing to be able to tell all the I’ve-accepted-the-Lord-into-my-heart-have-you Christians that I, too, have found Jesus.  He was in Wal-Mart, right next to the baking supplies.