June 26, 2021 (Saturday)
When Paul and Silas were in Antioch of Pisidia, they planned to head east to Bithynia, but were forbidden by the Holy Spirit, who changed their direction to the west, where Paul had a vision that took the gospel to Macedonia, Greece, and eventually to Rome and beyond. Who knows? You and I might never have heard the gospel if it had not spread in our direction. No, I take that back. It was in God’s plan all along. In all likelihood, the events transpired as they did because of Paul’s illness (his “thorn in the flesh”), and his meeting Luke, the physician, in Antioch. Luke accompanied Paul throughout the rest of his ministry. In other words, the Bible records the decision to go west with the gospel as the work of the Holy Spirit, but underneath that mighty reason, on a purely human level, important decisions were made by the mission team. But their decisions were really God’s decisions. An old proverb declares, “We plan, but God decides.”
The paragraph above was brought to my mind as I sit here recuperating from a couple of trips to the hospital and as I approach my 90th birthday in September. The situation has prompted me to think back over my life as my plans and God’s decisions.
My plan in high school was to become an architect. I took high school courses to prepare me for a college education that would prepare me for that vocation. I still have the very nice drawing set of instruments bought way back then, along with the drawing board and the T-Square. But in the summer before my senior year, my plans changed as I determined that God was calling me into the gospel ministry. I tried going to East Texas Baptist College (now University) in Marshall, Texas, with my friends, and was even awarded a scholarship in music, and on Sundays had gone with a student pastor, Merle Brooks, to the small community of Morton each Sunday, leading the singing and helping out. But my asthma got so bad I was unable to attend classes, and so at mid-term I withdrew and started over at Baylor University in Waco, where I no longer had asthma. On Sundays, I went to church with Herb Zimmerman, who was from the same church of which I was a member in Houston. I went with him on Sundays to Prairie Point Baptist Church, where he was pastor. I led the singing and taught a Bible class and did whatever he asked me to do. While serving voluntarily there, Olen Waldrip, the pastor of nearby First Baptist Church, Groesbeck, asked me to become his associate pastor (in charge of music and youth). I was paid $12.50 every two weeks. That does not sound like very much, but that was in 1950, and that money covered all my meals and my bus trip each weekend. In the fall of 1951, Bro. Waldrip recommended me as pastor of the Oletha Baptist Church, 15 miles southeast of Groesbeck. That church called me to become their pastor and ordained two deacons and me on the second or third Sunday of November, 1951. I was 20 years old, single and a Junior in college.
Wanda was born and raised in Oletha, and she commuted to Waco each week on the same bus that I had taken as I commuted for each weekend during my service in Groesbeck. I had no car and asked a classmate, Dwight Dudley, if he would like to take me to Oletha in his Model A, which he did for a number of weeks. I finally got my own car, and Dwight, along with Bill Webb, another classmate, went with me to Oletha each Sunday. We soon began going on Saturday for a Saturday night worship service, which was very well attended. We spent the night with church members. Dwight became a missionary to Japan and Okinawa, and Bill pastored churches in Ohio and Mississippi. Dwight is with the Lord and Bill is still active in the Lord’s work.
That’s all the room we have for today’s blog. But you can see already how God was leading from one step to the next.
“He leadeth me, O blessed thought!
O words with heav’nly comfort fraught!
Whate’er I do, where’er I be
Still ’tis God’s hand that leadeth me.”
..to be contnued tomorrow..