..new objectives and goals..

How the rededication of my life to Christ changed all my plans

June 29, 2007 (Friday) – I started off this week with Monday’s blog on how certain people have come into our lives at the right moment to effect changes that result in blessings. I then set out to show how I was influenced to accept Christ as Savior and follow Him as Lord. In yesterday’s blog, I went on to say that my rededication to Christ made me a happier person than I had been before that decision. I can date the adoption of new objectives and goals for life from that experience.
The events of that summer resulted in adjusting my plans for college. I had been planning on pursuing an education that would prepare me for a career in architecture. Now it would be the ministry. I enrolled with my friends in the college they attended, but circumstances changed and I soon found myself a student at Baylor in Waco.
Herb Zimmerman was a Baylor student and one of the preacher boys from our Houston church. He was pastoring the Prairie Point Baptist Church, about 30 miles east of Baylor in Limestone County. I was working with him at that church, when Olen Waldrip, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Groesbeck asked me to serve on his staff. In the fall of 1951, the Oletha Baptist Church, 15 miles southeast of Groesbeck, asked me to become their pastor and ordained me to the ministry. It was there that I got to know Wanda. We were married in October, 1953.
Wanda and I worked side by side in the Lord’s churches until her death in 2002. God gave us five children and nine grandchildren. She was always my companion and counselor, but she also was music director at church for many years. She was everything a pastor could desire in a wife and more. Life cannot possibly be the same without her.
Our marriage took place after I had become a student in the seminary at Fort Worth. We lived just south of there, in Cleburne, where Wanda was teaching public school music.
At the end of the year, 1953, we moved to Lampasas, where I pastored a mission church. In 1955, we moved back to Fort Worth and the seminary, and in 1956 to Briar, north of Azle, where Wanda resumed teaching, and I continued my studies, while working at a series of full-time and part-time jobs. In 1957, I became pastor at Briar, and in 1959, graduated from the seminary and became the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Kosse, Texas. In 1961, we moved to the Vickery Baptist Church of Dallas. We moved from there to Rockport in November, 1964, where we remained until February, 1996, when we retired.
In retirement, the Lord has seen fit to allow me to continue preaching as a supply preacher in various churches, as interim twice at FBC Refugio, and once at Bethel Baptist, Ingleside, where Wanda was also music director, and to serve as pastor of the Timbergrove Baptist Church of Houston for two years. I have been interim pastor at Rockport First Baptist since June 18, 2006. God has been so good to me I cannot thank Him enough. I will have more to say in future blogs about the others without whom I could never have been able to look back upon a life of ministry.