“By Way of Remembrance”
In celebration of my latest book, Gone to Carolina: Stories from a Coastal Church, Jennie and I were gone to Carolina last week to visit that coastal church – First Christian in Wilmington, NC. We came back to the Bluegrass with our cups runneth-ing over with gratitude for friendships formed in Christ that have abided all these years (We left 28 years ago). Blest be the tie that binds!
On the way home, we stopped in Cary, NC, west of Raleigh, for lunch with yet more dear people from our past:
Mike, as affable a man as you’ll ever meet whose thick eastern NC accent, slow and sweet as molasses, was among the first voices to greet me almost 40 years ago when I first interviewed with the church. He hosted us for lunch with his equally precious wife Katie. Miracle Mike, as the doctors at Duke call him, came through a liver transplant five or so years ago and by sheer force of will, spirit… and Katie…keeps on keepin’ on.
Phil, native North Carolinian and classmate at Vanderbilt Divinity School in the early 80s, whose phone call to me in St. Louis in 1989 asking if he could suggest my name to the search committee at FCC led to my call to serve there.
Christopher, whose parents Chris (Dewey) and Pam remain dear friends, was ten years old when Jennie and I arrived. I took him out for lunch when he graduated from high school and wondered aloud if he might be called to ministry. He was. He is now Senior Minister at Covenant Christian Church in Cary.
Will was also but a child when Jennie and I arrived but like Chris is now in his fifth decade. His parents Harry and Millie, like Chris’ parents, are among God’s finest. Will recently returned to his Carolina home after years in the television/motion picture industry in Los Angeles.
Rick and his wife Mona, lifelong Disciples of Christ who have served our church with competence, intelligence, graciousness and selflessness – Rick as a history professor, seminary president, dean of students, and pastor, and Mona in every position imaginable.
Katie quietly arranged for a birthday cake to be brought out in celebration of Rick’s 80th birthday which he and we received with delight. As we wielded our forks in anticipation of the chocolate cake, Mona shared a memory of Rick’s influence on my ministry that I gladly confirmed.
Mona recalled how when Rick accepted the call to be Dean of the Disciples Divinity House at Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1985, the academic year after I graduated and began my first full-time ministry in St. Louis, Rick brought home church newsletters periodically from a recent Vandy grad named David Shirey. He commended them to her as pretty good. Worth reading. Rick in turn sent handwritten notes complimenting my writing, encouraging what became a lifetime avocation and joy.
When I began at Compton Heights at age 25, I learned one of my responsibilities was to write a weekly newsletter column. Printed on the front and back of a sheet of colored legal paper (one week green, one week pink, the next week marigold, the next week yellow), my secretary, June, would type my column along with the week’s news onto a stencil, cut out a few doodles to accompany the posts (it wasn’t called clip art for nothing), and glue them to the stencil. She’d then fire up the mimeograph machine and churn out one hundred fifty copies of The Compton Heights Christian (thrum, thrum, thrum), its masthead a hand drawn sketch of an urban skyline with a steeple in its midst. I can still smell the inky fragrance of our makeshift printing press.
Those newsletters began with A WORD FROM DAVID. Catchy title, huh? My column was due first thing every Monday morning. Every Sunday, a sermon; every Monday, a newsletter article. When I whined one Monday about being on a deadline two days in a row, June said, “Do you really think people read these?” Rather than receiving her retort as permission to not write, I received it as a challenge.
“I don’t know if these are read or not,” I said, “but I’m going to try to offer something worth reading.”
There began forty years of writing newsletter columns, a practice I never begrudged. I owe a debt of gratitude to June (who died fifteen years ago) and Rick, thankfully still with us, for challenging me to write (June) and encouraging me when I did (Rick).
My first order of business upon retiring was to set up a place in which to do business, whatever that business would turn out to be. Though its contours were blurry (but I’d figure it out), I knew that business would include writing. My mentor and friend Don Schutt is wont to ask, “What makes your heart sing?” For the forty years of my ministry, rarely a day went by that I did not write something – a newsletter column, sermon, blog post, letter, email, Bible study, or my morning journal entry. The time I spent writing, though work, wasn’t work at all. It was a pleasure.
I told my friend Gary, also a retired pastor who continues to write, “I can’t not write.” After fifty years of running, I’m addicted to the “runner’s high” that follows miles of physical exertion, pickin’ ‘em up and puttin’ ‘em down. I’m convinced there’s also some sort of endorphin-charged release that is the fruit of picking out words and putting them down for as long as it takes to make meaning or sense of something, tell a story, or record something I heard or saw that delighted me. If only for the personal gratification that accompanies putting slivers of my life into words for safekeeping and future savoring – the composition of a verbal scrapbook – I’m going to continue to write. This newsletter is but the latest installment of what began over forty years ago with June’s challenge and Rick’s encouragement.
There is one precious detail about last week’s lunch I am still pondering. How shall I say this? I’m not sure how much Rick remembers of what Mona remembered at the dining room table and I confirmed. I ached to witness an esteemed historian – mentor, colleague, and friend – struggling to remember his own history. I write these words with profound respect and affection.
And yet I exulted in witnessing Mona’s remembering for her beloved and for us – prompting my speaking aloud to Rick a thank you note long overdue: Thank you, Mona.
And I exulted in witnessing Katie’s remembering Rick’s 80th with a cake and remembering Phil, Will, and Chris’ history with Jennie and me, all the while quietly remembering her beloved Miracle Mike’s meds and necessary ministrations. Thank you, Katie.
To Katie, to Mona, to Rick, to Mike, to Phil, to Chris and Will and their parents and everybody in Wilmington (some of whose names Jennie and I struggled to remember as they greeted us with open arms two weekends ago):
I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, thankful for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to feel thus about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace… For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:3-8).
To my beloved, Jennie, who stirs (and increasingly corrects) my flagging memory. Thank you.
Last but not least, Thank you to the couple hundred of you in this digital congregation who read these biweekly columns.
See June, some people read these newsletters after all! :-)
