ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 24, 1997 TAG: 9704240014
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: MARK CLOTHIER THE ROANOKE TIMES
Baptist preacher made the switch from saving souls to massaging them.
How Milt Hankins went from the Baptist ministry to massage therapy is a question not easily answered.
But there is this: the decision came, like all good things, from the heart.
It's Christmas Eve 1991. Hankins has just given the early sermon at Mineral Baptist Church in Louisa County. He's on the living room recliner, waiting for his wife, Deborah, to fry up a few between-service cheeseburgers.
He reclines.
He lights what will be his last cigarette.
He has a heart attack.
"I was healthy. I had no idea I had any heart trouble. I thought it was the stomach flu at first," the 55-year-old Hankins said. "It had been going around. But there was this terrible pain in my chest."
The doctors blamed the attack on stress. And, as is so often the case, a life-threatening experience became an eye-opening one.
"This is something you can't understand until you go through it - this business of being absolutely well and everything's going just splendid and literally the next instant being as sick as you've ever been in your life."
So, Hankins seized the opportunity: he looked over his life; examined things, if you will.
There was 30 years - almost half his life - spent in the ministry. Rewarding stuff. No regrets there.
But it had been stressful, too. A minister is on call. Always. Weekends are iffy. Vacations can end short. And two 20- to 30-minute sermons a week don't just appear by themselves on Sunday mornings.
"You have to be there for the people," he said. "There's no excuse."
The more he thought about it, the more he realized the heart attack had cracked open a door to something new.
Now, behind this foot in the door of major life-change, place the weight of heightened awareness: the Christmas Eve cardiac scare got Hankins thinking about his body. Kind of like the way you learn more about your water heater when the pilot light goes out for the first time.
It opened the door even wider.
The stress on which the doctors had blamed Hankins's heart attack also factored in. It reminded him that stepping back into the on-call life of the ministry wouldn't exactly increase his downtime.
"I personally think, as you get older, as a minister particularly, people begin to look up to you as a father figure, as a grandfather figure," he said. "People more readily seek and accept your counsel. It becomes more pressure, more of a burden; particularly for a small-town minister, where you end up ministering to the community.
"I needed to be more relaxed," he said. "I needed to start looking at things I could do if I couldn't continue in the ministry."
So he enrolled in the Richmond Academy of Massage. He graduated in September 1992, but continued in the church until December of last year.
Then he moved to Pearisburg to help care for his mother-in-law. His wife is a teacher and plans to join him when the school year ends. For work, he picked Blacksburg. It seemed a bit more cosmopolitan than Pearisburg.
So it was that on the first day of 1997, the Rev. Milt Hankins, CMT - Certified Massage Therapist - hung his shingle on South Main. The shop is called Relaxation Therapies.
But this move from pulpit to massage table, from the spiritual to the corporal, is not as far-fetched as it might seem.
Hankins had always been a searcher at heart, even as a kid he was the question-asking type. Answers are what led him to the church. They're also what led him to massage.
And there's nothing really new about religion and healing by touch. A certain Nazarene was doing it 2,000 years ago.
"When you stop and think about it, how did Jesus heal people? He touched them. He used his hands," he said. "So it was just a natural transition to think in terms of healing by touch.
"But the terrible thing is that healing by touch has such potential and has such a bad reputation," he said.
It's been four months so far and business has grown steadily. He earned his rent in January; rent and expenses in February. By April, he was getting repeat customers.
He also has a little more free time. Massage therapists are on call by choice. If he wants a day off, he just doesn't schedule any appointments.
He's found, though, that no matter the uniform - frock or lab coat - some things have stayed the same.
"You'd be amazed at the people who seek me out for counseling," he said. "It's still happening. I guess I'll never get away from that altogether. I'm still concerned about people's spiritual welfare as well as their physical well-being.
"I guess I didn't really retire, did I? I just changed the focus a little bit."
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM THE ROANOKE TIMES. Milt Hankins is a retiredby CNBminister turned massage therapist. color.