ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

I was just listening to one of Elvis’ songs on the radio.

A full four decades after his death, he remains by all accounts, the most gifted male soloist of all time. (Given the opportunity to nominate a female soloist, I might add Whitney Houston or Karen Carpenter to the head of the female list).

Elvis Presley must have been one of the first singer/entertainers ‘to go by’ his first name, and forty years later those two syllables still elicit a smile, a nod and even a tear. Elvis was one of a kind.

I can tell you my ‘Come to Elvis’ moment happened during the second half of my life. As an adolescent I listened to ‘The Beach Boys,’ (and only ‘The Beach Boys’). I remember skateboarding down a sidewalk in my petite hometown with a transistor radio pressed up against my right ear; listening to ‘California Dreamin’ or ‘I Get Around.’ Oh, it wasn’t as if I wasn’t keenly aware of the existence of ‘The King.’ I was. I mean, by the time I turned five, he was already a nationally known musical artist.

I can tell you that there’s still plenty of his music which I simply don’t like, (but which, to be fair, someone else may dearly love). No one can deny his vast repertoire of musical genres was among the most diverse of all his peers; (if indeed, it can be said he had any peers).

I love to listen to Channel 19 on the Sirius Network, though I don’t mind telling you more than once I have informed them that their selection of their hero’s recordings is limited and repetitive. I mean, didn’t the man record hundreds of songs, and didn’t he make hundreds of live appearances? (But that is a consideration best saved for another ‘editorial.’)

George Klein, one of Elvis’ best friends, who hosts a program on the Elvis channel, and has written a ‘tell all’ (well, maybe not all) posthumous, (Elvis, not him) book readily admits the so-called king displayed plenty of flaws and inconsistencies; including the abuse of prescription medication, womanizing, and adultery.

And it is said that Elvis’ behavior ‘on the road’ and his ‘enjoyment of the ladies’ contributed to a great deal of contention between himself and Pricilla. So much so that a divorce was in the offing. (I have often reflected that in spite of Presley’s propensity for ‘wine, women & song,’ in recent years this hasn’t kept Priscilla from ‘cashing in’ on his lingering popularity and the profits which flow from it).

And yet, in spite of his glaring inconsistencies, it seemed Elvis’ heart remained sensitive towards the Savior; “A friend who sticketh closer than a brother” and whom he’d met as a boy.

As a young man, Presley was raised in poverty and southern Pentecostalism. He attended a conservative Assemblies of God church, but would often sneak off in the middle of the service to listen to the preaching and singing at a black church less than a mile away. Elvis loved gospel music and dreamed of singing it professionally before his own career took off in the mid 1950s.

“We used to read the Bible every night, if you can believe that-he used to read aloud to me and then talk about it," testifies Dottie Harmony, who dated Elvis in 1956. "He was very religious-there was nothing phony about that at all."

"I never expected to be anybody important. Maybe I'm not now, but whatever I am, whatever I will become will be what God has chosen for me," he told Photoplay magazine in 1957.

(Steve Beard)

J.D. Sumner recalls a woman who approached the stage in Vegas with a crown which set atop a pillow. Elvis asked her what it was. She responded, “It’s for you. ‘Cause you’re the King.” With this, Elvis took her hand, smiled, and exclaimed, “No honey, I’m not the King. Christ is the King. I’m just a singer.”

If Elvis was a king, he was very much like an historical king of the same exclusive notoriety, and very much the same failings. King David. And yet, God refers to this king as, “a man after my own heart.”

In December 1976, Elvis requested that television evangelist Rex Humbard and his wife Maude Aimee meet with him backstage in Las Vegas in between sets. “Jesus is coming back really soon, isn’t he, Rex?” Elvis said as he began quoting all kinds of Scriptures about the Second Coming. “It really shocked me that Elvis knew all of those Scriptures from the Old and New Testaments about the Lord’s return,” Humbard told me in an interview.


Elvis, Maude Aimee, Rex and J.D. Sumner were sequestered into a large closet in order to have some privacy and speak about spiritual matters. “I could see he was reaching back to his childhood when he used to play his guitar and go to church and sing church songs,” recalled Humbard. “And I could see he was reaching back to the past–that spirituality, that feeling that he had years and years before that had been planted in his heart.”


What really shook Elvis up during their time together was when Maude Aimee told Elvis about her prayer that he would become a “bell sheep” for God.


As Elvis asked her about what that meant, she explained: “In the Holy Land, they put a bell on one sheep and when it moves all the rest of the flock moves with him. I have been praying for years for you, Elvis, that you would become a bell sheep.


If you fully dedicated your life to God you could lead millions of people into the kingdom of the Lord.” According to Humbard, “Elvis went all to pieces. He started crying. She really shook him up by that statement.”


As the four of them held hands and prayed, “he rededicated his heart to the Lord,” recalled Humbard. “I asked God to bless him and to send His spirit into his heart and meet his every need.” Right after their prayer time, Maude Aimee went to the hotel gift shop and purchased a symbolic bell with a little diamond in it.


During the evening’s second show, Elvis held up the small bell and smiled to Maude Aimee and then dedicated “How Great Thou Art” to the Humbard’s. (Steve Beard)

And so, like King David, Elvis found himself supplicating at the foot of the cross throughout the course of his stardom, and based on the foregoing and other accounts, he continued ‘to run to the altar’ and, no doubt, prayed similar words to that former king of so long ago.

Have mercy on me, O God,
    according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
    blot out my transgressions.
² Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
    and cleanse me from my sin!

³ For I know my transgressions,
    and my sin is ever before me.
⁴ Against you, you only, have I sinned
    and done what is evil in your sight,

(Psalm 51:1-4)

Now, if I were a legalist and assigned the most severe interpretation to the holy writ, I would say that when Elvis breathed his last on that fateful day in August of 1977, there can be little doubt that he ‘split hell wide open.’

…Well, I honestly don’t believe that.

It has been reported that as Elvis sat in (or on) that familiar place in his upstairs bathroom at Graceland that evening, and as he sustained his fatal heart attack, he was reading a book related to the Shroud of Turin.

Now I don’t know if Elvis ever sang that wonderful old hymn, “Oh Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go,” but it might well have been his unofficial theme song. God’s love simply refused to let him go, and followed him throughout his rather short, complicated, and sometimes contrary life.

And while I believe that Elvis is ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’ as a pastoral counselor and mentor, but more importantly an evangelical Christian, I’m not sure Elvis fulfilled Maude Aimee Humbard’s prophetic utterance that he would become God’s ‘bell sheep,’ nor that he led millions into the Kingdom; (outside of his own earthly kingdom).

I think that while Elvis excelled in the gift which he knew and loved best, in terms of that most crucial facet of his life, his spiritual character, and the ‘bell sheep’ he might have become, he fell short.

Nonetheless, I believe ‘the king’ has stepped down from the stage, shed his ‘fancy duds’ and is at this moment standing shoulder to shoulder with a billion other worshippers, and enjoying the presence of THE KING.

I can almost make out the words of their song,

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.

(I admit it. I may be biased in Elvis’ favor. I’m glad his eternal disposition isn’t up to me).

by William McDonald, PhD. From "Elvis Stories." Copyright pending