Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty

Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty is the signature exclamation of the backwoods Pentecostal and Baptist congregations—the First Backwoods Church of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty—in which Paul Edgecombe was raised by his mother and aunts. The phrase encapsulates a theology of direct, miraculous divine intervention: healing, restoration, and the power of God working through human vessels. It recurs throughout Paul's memoir as a touchstone of the faith he was taught as a boy, a faith that both shapes and is tested by the events of 1932.

Origins and Doctrinal Context

Paul grew up attending churches whose blunt square steeples and Thursday-night rejoicing services were steeped in a tradition of miracles and healings. He recalls a neighbor, Roy Delfines, who testified at one such rejoicing that after he accidentally chopped off his son's little finger with a hatchet, the boy's finger grew back over the winter—even the nail. Delfines stood with his hands jammed into his biballs and spoke with "a naked, uncomplicated honesty" that was "impossible not to believe." The congregation's response to such testimony was the cry "Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty." Paul absorbed this belief system as a child: healing was never about the healed or the healer, but about God's will, and the person healed had an obligation to meditate on what God wanted.

Application to John Coffey's Healing

When John Coffey cured Paul's urinary infection in his cell, Paul immediately reached for the language of his youth. He thought of Roy Delfines and the Thursday-night rejoicing, and of the doctrine that "healing is never about the healed or the healer, but about God's will." He asked himself what God wanted badly enough to "put healing power in the hands of a child-murderer." The phrase "Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty" is the unspoken framework through which Paul tries to make sense of the miracle—a miracle that does not fit the simple moral categories of the churches where he learned the words. Later, when Brutus Howell describes John Coffey's healing of Mr. Jingles, Paul responds with the exact phrase: "Praise Jesus, the Lord is mighty." Brutal, however, qualifies it: "I dunno if Jesus comes into it," he says, "but it seems to me like John Coffey is one mighty man."

The Phrase as a Measure of Lost Certainty

By the time Paul writes his memoir from Georgia Pines, the phrase has become a marker of the gulf between the faith of his childhood and the knowledge he has carried for sixty years. He recalls the sermons of his youth, "booming affirmations in the church of Praise Jesus, The Lord Is Mighty," and the preachers who said God's eye is on the sparrow. Yet this same God, Paul reflects, sacrificed John Coffey "as savagely as any Old Testament prophet ever sacrificed a defenseless lamb." The phrase no longer arrives as a triumphant declaration; it is the name of a lost world of simple belief, a world that could not contain the truth of John Coffey—a man who healed the sick and raised the nearly dead, yet was executed for a crime he did not commit. The exclamation endures in Paul's memory as the sound of a faith that could not survive the Green Mile.