If Voting Results Throw You In Pit Of Despair, Be Like Pastor Bob

CHICAGO — A couple of years back, Pastor Bob Neuman retired after 43 years of tending to his flock at Lansing Assembly of God.

Stepping away from the pulpit has given Pastor Bob, as he’s known around town, more time to post memes and make wisecracks that he thinks are funny on Facebook, according to people who know about these things.

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Still, from time to time, Pastor Bob gets asked to deliver a sermon or officiate a religious rite.

If the Cubs aren't on TV, he's usually willing to oblige.

And last month, with the Cubs long knocked out of the playoffs, Pastor Bob agreed to officiate the funeral of a former parishioner.

Freshly fallen leaves covered the ground, near the final resting place of an 82-year-old woman who sometimes came to hear him preach at the tiny white chapel in suburban Lansing.

Pastor Bob got out of the car and solemnly strode through the leaves when the ground beneath him swallowed his right leg. His left leg twisted like a pretzel. He crumbled to the earth in pain.

His wife, Judy, exited the car and happened upon a small crowd tending to someone on the ground. "My first thought was, ‘I hope it’s not an elderly person,’" she would later recount to her elderly husband.

The pretty foliage Pastor Bob had stepped on covered an open sewer, which he would later learn the cemetery landscaping crew failed to mark with orange cones as a warning.

Pastor Bob did not appear to be suffering potentially mortal wounds, but out of an abundance of caution — because falls are the leading cause of injury-related death for old people, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention — somebody called an ambulance just in case.

So it goes in 2020, a year of unexpected pitfalls and an uncertain future that has left so many people hurting, worried, angry and afraid, or — in Pastor Bob's case — crotch-deep in a leaf-covered sewer hole.

I'm no preacher, but the aftermath of Pastor Bob's graveside tumble seems suitable for a sermon on navigating these inauspicious times — as a divided nation braces for riotous reactions to the pending presidential election results.

If, after all the votes are counted, you feel as if you'll never be able to recover: Remember the retired suburban preacher who fell in a sewer.

Pastor Bob pulled himself out of the sewer and laid on the cool cemetery grass.

As strangers leaned over his body, he thought to himself: “I need to finish this job.”

Flat on his back, Pastor Bob summoned people there mourning the loss of their loved one.

“If you do not mind," he said, "I can finish the committal service here before the ambulance arrives.” They agreed.

Someone put a coat under Pastor Bob's head. Another good Samaritan covered his body with a blanket like a funeral shroud. At a glance, he looked as if an elderly man with a Bible in his hands in an unzipped body bag might be conducting his own funeral.

As Pastor Bob read from Scripture and said a final funeral prayer, screaming sirens grew louder and louder until paramedics arrived graveside.

They lifted Pastor Bob from the ground and took him to an emergency room.

Pastor Bob and Judy phoned their eldest daughter. They put the call on speakerphone to explain the surprise crisis that befell her father: Dad fell into an open grate at the cemetery.

"You fell in a GRAVE!?" she replied. Their laughter worked like pain meds.

Pastor Bob's legs were scraped and severely bruised. X-rays showed his fractured ankle, doctors told him. They sent him home with a blue boot on one foot.

He took the setback in stride, dad pun intended, telling folks that the walking cast was his “blue suede shoes” outfit.

Pastor Bob got around with crutches and a walker, refusing to let a painful setback keep him from moving forward.

He picked himself up, leaned on his family and friends, never took himself too seriously and finished the job he had set out to do.

If you start to feel like the whole world has crumbled under your feet when all the votes are finally counted, take my advice:

Be like Pastor Bob.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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