April 14, 2018 (Saturday)
When I was nine years old and my twin sisters were turning six, our parents divorced and we went to live with our maternal grandparents. It was the end of the school year in June, 1941. The following September we had a hurricane and the house leaked. I recall my grandparents getting out all the pots and pans and putting them in all the rooms, to catch the water falling from the ceiling. Not long after that we moved to a better house down the street, where we lived for a few months before moving to an apartment house in the neighborhood. During the next summer (1942), our mother took us to live with her in an apartment house a couple of blocks from her workplace near downtown.
After that summer, we moved back to our grandparents’ home, a pretty nice rental home not far from our school. By then I was a 6th grader and my sisters were 3rd graders. The Conner family lived a block away and took me to church with them. During a revival meeting I accepted Christ and was baptized. I was eleven years old.
For some reason I don’t remember much about church as a 6th and 7th grader, but when I became an 8th grader and my sisters 5th graders, our father remarried and we moved to his home to live with him and our stepmother. Not long after the move, my stepmother was gloriously and completely saved in the Denver Assembly of God, where we had relatives.
My uncle Hobson was the song leader, and I learned how to sing hymns from my cousin Floyd Skinner that year. He and I sang bass together on the back row. My uncle’s favorite song was “We Shall Rise.” We sang it often. Back then Baptists would not sing that type of song in church. Now we sing all kinds.
The next year, when I was in the 9th grade, I moved to live with my mother and stepfather, because she had remarried. My sisters and I moved back and forth between the two homes for several years after that. After a while, the family grew with more children in both homes. During the summer before my senior year in high school, I went back to church, rededicated my life, and began preaching. The next year I went to college, then got married, then went to the seminary. By the time I finished seminary, we had two sons, David, born in Burnet in 1954 and Dan, born in Fort Worth in 1955 and our third child, Debbie, was about to be born, in 1959, in Marlin. Four years later, in 1963, Dianna was born in Dallas, and three years after that, Dwight was born in Corpus Christi, in 1966, fifty-one years ago last November. Wanda and I have 9 grandchildren and one great grandchild. I’ve lost count of all my nieces and nephews, but I think there are about 14. I’ve gone the long way around just to tell you how I became acquainted with this song when I was 13 years old. Now it’s your turn to hear it.
Click here to listen to “We Shall Rise”
