The Coffin in my Car

I’m a missionary kid (MK). For those of you who aren’t familiar with MK’s, we are a very very odd bunch.

In my case, a lot of my oddness comes from a coffin that we carried in our station wagon.

Okay, it wasn’t actually a COFFIN, but it sure looked like one.

Basically, before we could go be missionaries to St. Thomas, USVI, we had to raise the funds to support our missionary work. That meant driving all over the Southeastern United States, visiting churches, making a presentation, and asking them to pledge money to support our mission. It also meant I had to be a perfect little kid, but that’s another story.

During my formative years (ages 6-9) we had a station wagon. And in the back of that station wagon we carried a black wooden box. In that black box was a “Hell Countdown” (or something like that; I can’t remember the exact name, and I can’t find one on google). My parents would remove it from its box and cart it to the front of a church and plug it in, and it would show in big, bright, red, scoreboard-like letters the number of souls going to hell right that very second. Very scary to a kid, all those numbers ticking by and counting up.

And the best part? We’d stop at gas stations, what have you, and people would ask if that there box was a coffin.

I’m sure my father’s answer went something like this: “Um, why yes, I am traveling around the country with my two young daughters and my wife, and my great-aunt’s dying wish involved me carting her body around in the back of my station wagon.”

Course, the real answer, “oh, it’s actually a clock that tells you how many souls are going to hell at any given moment”, isn’t any better.

I don’t remember a lot about my childhood, but this I remember vividly. It looms large. The embarrassment over a box mistaken for a coffin. The souls going to hell. The freaking coffin RIGHT BEHIND ME as we drove all over the highways and byways of America.

I recently asked my mother about this, and her response? “Oh, we only did that once.”

Once?!?!? ONCE!?!??!?!?

I still don’t even know why or where we got that thing. Or where it went.

Actually, it probably went straight to hell.