Columnist Scott Dickensheets: He will be God’s man today

Scott Dickensheets

Saturday, Feb. 21, 1998 | 3:56 a.m.

SCOTT DICKENSHEETS' column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at 259-4082 or dickens@lasvegassun.com

GOD AND booga-booga dwell within Jim Reid. That is to say, he is a man of God as well as a man of booga-booga, as well as a man of the pawn business who happens to have a pistol strapped to his side as he prays with despairing customers and cures his employees of their aches and pains and radiator burns. Those are just a few of the things worth knowing about him.

Welcome to Jim Reid's ministry of pawn, conducted in his temple of spirituality and used goods, the Pawn and Gun Store on Boulder Highway. In an age where you need only a brooding manner and a few body piercings to be considered intriguingly complicated, Jim Reid is intriguingly complicated. Yet, paradoxically, simple.

"My personal mission statement is simple, six words," says Reid, a man who at first seems gruff but who opens up quickly. "'I will be God's man today.'"

And so he is -- just as he was God's man as a Southern Baptist minister working Strip backstages many years ago; just as, later, he was God's man as a kinesiologist, massaging away people's pains. I will be God's man today is a flexible, adaptive charter. It may mean praying at the pawn counter with a customer forced to sell her valuables when her mother dies. Another day it may mean extending a "chaplain loan," giving some hard-luck case more cash than his pawn strictly warrants.

"Ministry is ministry," he says, "whether you wear your collar backwards, or you're behind a pawn counter or alongside a massage table."

Another thing worth knowing about Jim Reid is that he never wanted a pawn-store pulpit. "I intended to spend all my life as a minister," he says. "But my denomination abandoned me." He describes himself as a "liberal heretic" in a church that hardened toward conservativism, leaving no room for him.

Luckily, he had booga-booga to fall back on. "Booga-booga" is his cutesy term for the mysteries of kinesiology -- a form of healing based on massage and manipulation of bodily energy -- a practice he'd picked up to augment his ministerial work in hotel backstages (dancers are more willing to lend an ear to your theology when you're working out the knots in their calves).

You should also know that Jim Reid isn't afraid to change his mind. Reluctantly forced into the pawn business when an estate deal put his wife in control of the Pawn and Gun Store, he was anti-pawn and anti-gun. "I used to think the pawn business was a form of usury," he says. But he came to see that the pawning of valuables is the bank of last resort for those many with neither savings accounts nor access to credit. As for guns, he's now a National Rifle Association instructor and packs heat around the office "as a deterrent."

You should also know that the booga-booga comes in handy around the store. Ask his employees. Hey, Richie, what's your story? "Radiator got me," Richie says, indicating the forearm he burned sometime back. "I thought it was going to be a third-degree burn!" But Reid stepped in with a move he calls "Tibetan figure 8s." And the pain went away! "Didn't even blister," Richie says. "It really works. You've got to have a real bad pain and have Jim fix it to know how good it works."

So that's the other thing you should know about Jim Reid and about being God's man today, whatever day it is: There's no telling what a guy can accomplish with both the Lord and a little booga-booga on his side.