Homemade Ice Cream is the sort of thing that makes grown men weep for joy. Plenty of half and half cream. Eagle Brand condensed milk. Lawd, I almost cut my tongue licking the inside of the can. Eggs. Sugar. Vanilla extract. Then a heaping portion of whatever you think makes up the perfect flavor.

Berea Christian Church used to hold a Summer Revival during the first week of August. I’m sure the preaching was good. But I was a kid. What do kids know? Well, kids know ice cream. And although Tuesday night after preaching was watermelon night; Thursday night was homemade ice cream night.

Jesus could have preached on Wednesday, but the crowd on Thursday would have been bigger. That’s the power of ice cream. If Jesus had ice cream, He would have had to have fed 10,000, not 5,000. There would have been 47 apostles, not 12. The implications are overwhelming.

The church women looked upon it all as a competition of sorts. Wooden churns of hand cranked wonders. Banana. Chocolate. Peach. Strawberry. Pecan Carmel. Coffee. Even Peanut Butter. And, of course 31 silky textures of Vanilla. Nobody had even heard of The Marble Slab or Baskin Robins back then. You take one bite and fall out in a coma. Small children reeling on the ground in the pains of brain freeze.

“Well, that’s what you get when you eat it too fast. Take it slow.”

We didn’t have time for slow. Churns of sensuous temptations were calling our name.

Mrs. Jones (fake name to protect the innocent) was the only one to bring the Peanut Butter ice cream. The men bragged a little too much. The wives gave sideways glances that said, “Be careful. You have to ride home with me.” Right there at church, out under the old Oaks, the competition was hot.

I’m not sure whether or not our son-in-law had ever had homemade ice cream before he met us, but I do know this: after he met us, and after he tasted my wife’s elixir from heaven in a churn, and after he asked my daughter to marry him; the next thing he asked for as a wedding gift was an ice cream churn. Again, that’s the power of ice cream.

We were at their home not long ago for the birthday of their youngest. She was turning one. I found out that they are now a two-churn family, and that Vanilla and Peach concoctions were in the works for the afternoon. I swelled with pride. I thought about telling everybody that this was the result of my influence in their lives. I wanted to take credit. But his parents were there, and my Mama didn’t raise a fool.

The amazing thing is that there were some in attendance who had never had homemade ice cream. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

“Can you really make your own ice cream?”

“Yeah, I had some homemade ice cream once, and it was soupy and not so good.”

My wife made two peach cobblers to go with the ice cream and by the end of the evening we were all in a coma. The churns were empty. The men were weeping. All were converted by the gospel of peach ice cream on top of hot peach cobbler. The naysayers had been slain. And that, my friends, is the power of ice cream.

Paul W. Chappell is a former Hampton resident. Subscribe to his blog – Georgia Bred / Stories That Matter at https://georgiabred56.com/. A book of his columns is available for purchase on Amazon, and on his website.