She was sitting in her chair, doing her knitting, and listening to the preacher on the radio. She had been listening to the man for years. She had by now forgotten (or mostly forgotten) that she started out listening to him because she thought he was vaguely ridiculous, and she enjoyed chuckling at his inanity. Over time, familiarity had worn down her ironic detachment. Now she listened to him as intently, and with as much reverence, as she did Paul Harvey — who came on right after the preacher, but on a different station.
He was in quite a state today. He wanted it clearly understood that the recent occurrence in what he described as the “hills near Colorado†was not the descending of the New Jerusalem as described at the end of the Book of Revelations. No, indeed. It was a blasphemous forgery, spun from hell to mock almighty God.
Myra was inclined to accept his authority on this matter, at least the part about the city not being the New Jerusalem. She had seen the city on the morning news, which provided a much clearer view than she could get from her front porch. It was pretty all right. Kind of a nice addition to the mountain. But it wasn’t nearly big enough to be the New Jerusalem. Anyway, it didn’t matter to her one way or the other. Though she liked this preacher very much, she honestly couldn’t see what he was getting so worked up about. Everyone on the TV was saying that it was a hoax, or that it had come from outer space. That made sense to Myra. She doubted that hell could really spin out anything so pleasant.
