The way Langston Hughes said he was saved but he wasn’t
really saved kind of gives the whole plot away at the beginning.
But he said it like this to grab his readers’ attention and make them
keep reading on to fully understand why he was or was not saved.
This indeed did catch my eye. I have also had a similar
experience with the thoughts and feelings of our Lord.
There have been many times when I have sat in that long,
padded church pew and wondered why exactly was I there? Then I
would look around me and wonder if the people in the congregation were
thinking the same thing. I would have the most trouble during silent
prayer. I never quite knew what to pray for. Finally, when I did
figure it out and actually prayed, I never got a response. I understood we
should pray for our family and friends, cures for disease, the hungry to
be nourished, and for there to be no more wars, I just never thought of that while
I was at church. I do believe in God and everything but it is really hard
to believe fully in something that is not a “physical being.” It
reminds me of when I was younger and my parents told me that Santa
Claus brought everyone in the world Christmas presents on Christmas Eve.
I never actually saw Santa, unless it was my uncle or my grandpa in that
big, jolly red and white suit, but I still believed. Now I
The Essay on Salvation Saved From Sin
... was not going to Jesus. She knelt there and prayed for him. Langston sat there waiting for something to ... many old people came and knelt around us and prayed, old women with jet-black faces and braided hair, ... for the fact that my parents taught me to pray to him and be thankful for all that he ... though the reader knows that he truly is being saved from sin. He is doing something good for himself. ...
am not saying I still believe in Santa, but I do believe in the
spirit of Christmas. I think this is exactly how Langston was feeling
about God. He just had a gard time realizing that there is not going to be any physical,
vocal, or emotional change in the way he feels. Ok, there will definitely be emotional
change, but that will only come after he accepts God in his heart.
One by one, as the children go up to the platform to be saved, they left Langston and Westley behind.
I thhought Westley was a real jerk. He wasn’t really saved either,
obviously. He just fell to pressure. The thhing that really
gets to me though is he used the Lord’s name in vain. I have
slipped a few times myself and sad His holy name, never intentionally.
Just because he was tired of sitting on the mourner’s bench doesn’t
mean he had to falsify in God’s house. What the two boys do not
understand is that the only way they are going to be saved is by
opening their hearts to the thoughts and sayings of Jesus Christ.
In the closing paragraphs of the story, Langston cried himself
to sleep. His aunt heard him and proclaimed to her husband that he
was crying because he was saved earlier that day. If she had just
gone and asked him what was wrong, and if he had told her maybe she
would have understood. It does say that he could not bear to tell
her that not only deceived her, the church, but also God, because
it would hurt her too much. I think it could have been explained, at
least in this day and age but back then it probably woud have
been very hard.
