I came across this while digging through some of my old writings. I decided to share it with you, my close personal friends.
This is a true story that happened over twenty-five years ago. Three teenage boys (I was one of them) decided they didn’t want to go to Sunday school, so instead they went to the church office and made prank phone calls. They made the usual prank phone calls but they soon got bored with that and decided they wanted to talk to someone in Alaska.
So they called the operator in Anchorage and asked for the number of a Mike Jones. They thought that would be a common name and it was – the operator said there were 8 Mike Jones’s in Anchorage. They had her read down the list of addresses and then they stopped her at random, as if she had said the one they wanted, and she gave them the number. Now they knew better at this point than to charge a long-distance call to the church phone, so they called collect. Now remember when it is time for Sunday School in Tennessee, that makes it about five in the morning in Anchorage.
Well believe it or not, Mike Jones accepted the collect call of these three prankster boys. After Mike Jones accepted their collect call, they told him who they really were and what they were doing. Then Mike Jones began to make sure that one way or another they got their Sunday School lesson. They had a nice conversation. He told them to call back next week.
And so they did. This went on for months.
Well somewhere in the course of this, the three boys felt bad about calling collect and so they started dialing direct and charging the calls to the church. When the church got a phone bill with calls to Alaska on it that were made during the Sunday school hour, they didn’t even ask any questions. They went straight to these boys – who else could it be? Anyway, they were banished from the church office and had to make their calls from the pay phone by the gym.
One Sunday morning many months after all of this started, Mike Jones told them to give him the number of the pay phone and he would call them. The next Sunday morning, the phone rang and one of the boys answered. The voice on the other end of the phone said, “Are you looking for Mike Jones?” The boy said yes, he was. The voice on the other end said, “Well, look around the corner. He’s coming down the hall.”
You see, he was making a trip to North Carolina and decided he would stop over in Memphis and meet these three boys who he had begun a friendship with. He had called the church office and arranged for the janitor to make the call… and it resulted in a shocking surprise for the three boys who started out skipping Sunday school and making prank phone calls from the church phone.
Up until they met him in person, the boys’ relationship with Mike Jones was only amusing and entertaining, a distraction from Sunday School, and not very serious. When he surprised them with his coming, when they heard the voice on the phone that said, “Are you looking for Mike Jones. He’s coming down the hall,” the relationship took on a whole new meaning. This one who had only been a voice on the phone, was now a real person. When the voice on the phone said, “He’s coming down the hall,” things got personal.
I have since losttouch with Mike Jones, but another of three boys, Jeff, now 43, talks to him regularly. You might even say Mike Jones changed his life.
And this was my original point when writing this story down. Yes, there really is a point to this story other than the need to keep the church office locked on Sunday morning. But that would clearly come under the category of “preaching,” which I refuse to do here. If you are at all interested, PM me.
One interesting follow-up. My kids think it is hilarious to walk into my office, pick up the phone, and say, “Operator, could you give me the number of Mike Jones in Anchorage Alaska.”
