[John 1:1] In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
When the father was six years old he met a girl in a Oneness church, and loved her, and wanted to marry her. When he was eight his own father took him to a Trinity church, and he was taught the Trinity. So at eight he asked, Lord, what is it? Is it Oneness, or is it the Trinity? And God, as clear as He speaks, said: it is neither. The house was built on that word, the one who came from the one. The father had an elder sister, and when he had made sense of the whole Bible, she said it was demonic. This is the story of the burden of the word of the Lord.
The man married the girl, and God sent three sons. Set side by side, their names are the name of the house: the Spear of Jesus' Way. The firstborn was named after the way, a name that also means ruler. The elder of his two brothers is Joshua, named after the Lord by a mother who never knew she had named her son Jesus, for in the Hebrew the name Jesus is Joshua, and it means JAH is salvation. The way talked so much that Joshua stuttered, because he was always speaking for him. The third is the spear, the tallest of them. And it was so in the father's own house before: the father was the firstborn son, and still he had an eldest, a sister older than him. No one planned any of it. The house carried its name before it knew its name.
They lived in the north, in the bright place, Brightmoor. He was born into that house. He still has a onesie with the name Derek on it. It came from Big Derek, another boy of that house, whose mother gave it to the way's mother, because Big Derek never could wear it. A house on a lake before he can remember. Another he does not remember. A house on a lake in Waterford that he does. Then a house in Livonia that the father finished and rebuilt with no drawing, all of it in his head, where the raccoons got into the trash. Then a house in Southfield. He went to school and to church under one roof six days a week, and felt like a little Hebrew, not knowing God would one day show him the new moon and the Sabbath. His last memory of the north is an uncle's wedding, where time stood still and Joshua stood up and sang a flawless Onward Christian Soldiers.
When he was four he walked into the living room of his mother's father, the Oneness grandfather, where that man sat reasoning over the Lord with the boy's own father. In the middle of their speaking the child reached up and turned off the lights. They kept talking. He walked into the kitchen and said, they will continue without the light.
The father is the root. He was a machinist who could go fifteen minutes without a word, computing in his own mind. He heard God say a great end time revival would start in Dalton, Georgia. So in 1990, when the way was nine, he moved his whole family south. The family in the north said, God told you to move to Georgia? They sold the Southfield house, and a year later Home Depot bought it for two hundred thousand dollars. They lost a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in a year. People said, you don't know God. That is how it goes when you hear God.
In Georgia the first home was a duplex in Dalton. His parents tried to school him at home for a few weeks, then put him in the public school, so he came into the fourth grade that fall, not on the first day, an outsider from Michigan. A Yankee. On a trip to the Chickamauga battlefield the teachers and the students pretended to shoot at him behind the cannons, him and a boy from Kentucky, because he was a Yankee. Neither of them wanted to get back on that bus. Then the house moved to a double wide in Rocky Face, and in the fifth grade he went to the school where his mother worked in the kitchen and knew every child by name. There he met the diamond in the rough, a boy from Colorado, and they were fast friends. One day the diamond brought a thousand dollars to school in his Velcro Colorado Rockies wallet and showed it to him the way a boy would. Ten hundreds. He had never seen that much. The diamond gave him three, and his parents made him give them back. The diamond's father was so glad to have it back that he said, y'all come to my restaurant, La Canasta, the Bread Basket, and they ate a thousand dollars' worth of food there over the months.
The father went looking for a church, a house for the way to call his own. In his father's house the boy went to twelve churches, and not one would confirm the word. Not one. The first was chosen for its boys' troop, so the sons could learn to tie a knot and pray. The father told the pastor the truth of the one who came from the one, and the pastor could not receive it. The next was a house in Dalton, whose pastor did not accept the father either. There they met a big street preacher with six daughters and a bus he drove from town to town to preach out of. He hollered go to heaven the way other men holler the other place. He told how he picketed a club in New Orleans until the owner took him into his office, put a shotgun to his own head, and pulled the trigger, and the gun clicked, and the man fell to his knees and heard the gospel. In the basement of that house was a big red stain that looked like blood, and it is still a mystery. Then a house called Dayspring, with a family of nine children. A house called Cornerstone, at the end of a gravel drive, and the long drive into Dalton afterward to eat. The names of the houses preach. They found pieces of the church everywhere, and good people, but never the precious stone lifted up in front of men. From then on the boy was a well digger, house to house, digging and never striking the stone.
At every house they did things outside the building, Bible studies and small groups in homes, and that was light. Faith, the oldest daughter of the Lawson house, told the boy, we were holding hands casting out a devil, and the door opened all by itself and shut, and it freaked me out. She did not lie to him. The Lawsons would not go to church. Gene, the father, refused to go to a church. Yet the signs of prophecy were in his daughters, Rose and Grace. They were young; Grace was about three, and she would prophesy to grown people in their house. Their brother Aaron, just a boy, about eleven, had a dream he could not shake: that he and the way would go around in their own trailers with horses, preaching all over the country. His father made him stop. In the double wide in Rocky Face, where they held Bible studies, the children took the PipeWorks toys and constructed a church, and the way stood there preaching. Gene came in and got mad, and forbade his children to play church. He did not like church.
Two weeks after Faith told him of the door, it came to his own home. The house lived in a duplex behind the hospital then, with family from the north beside them under the same roof. He sat watching a woman of that family scream. He broke free, opened the sliding glass door with his own hand, and said, get out of my house, you devil, you will not be under my roof again. He and his father held hands and cast it out, and his father, who did not always hear him, took him seriously that day. He saw it go. The whole family left that house that very moment and never stayed there again. He was fourteen. In that same house, about a year later, his father was having trouble and his mother was angry, and God showed the boy a dead plant and said, watch this. I am going to restore your marriage. Just like this dead plant, watch it come alive. And it came alive.
Then the father was driving the bypass and God said, start a church right there, and there was already a sign: church coming in two weeks. This is finally it, the boy thought, the house for the way. All those years since 1990, waiting. On the first Sunday the new pastor sat at the family's table, and the father told him the truth of the one who came from the one, and the pastor said, I do not have time to find out if that is true.
