Green as a Cabbage Patch!

I came across a great article by Dr. Bill Leonard from Wake Forest who wrote about his first pastorate in a rural New England church.  It reminded me a lot of Lone Oak Baptist.  Enjoy!

What a Woman Taught Me

The SBC brouhaha over Dr. Sheri Klouda reminded me of the following:


Verna Miller looks like a grandmother.

She has short grey hair, blue eyes and glasses with frames from the 1970’s. She was always one of the dependable folks at Lone Oak Baptist. Mrs. Verna’s home was a good 20 minutes from the church and we would often see her little blue Ford make its way through the Hill Country and out to the church. Her family came from the country and had moved “into town” some thirty years before. But she was loyal to that little church and drove the opposite way of most folks, heading from the town out to the country every Sunday morning and Sunday night.

We had been there a few weeks when I heard someone mention her husband. I was surprised and had assumed that she was a widow. Her husband suffered from back pain and he could never come with her to church. (Although tongues often wagged that he could go out and play a game of dominoes or talk to friends at the local feed store.) But Verna said only positive words about him. She did encourage me to visit them at home which I was honored to do on many occasions.

To be completely honest, the visits were more for her than for him. She asked me to come, but he really didn’t care if I did or not. He wasn’t the most pleasant person around. He was gruff and often told her to get him this or that rather than asked her to do so. But she never failed to show him anything but honor and respect. She simply adored him and I always left their house shaking my head. Frankly I, wondered how he was fortunate enough to marry her???? [Something I’m sure Kadie’s friends often wonder about me too, by the way!]

After we left the church in 2000, I heard that Verna’s husband, never in the best of health, took a turn for the worse. Alzheimer’s began its slow ravaging attack on his personality and his memory. Verna could no longer take care of him at home, but did see that he moved into a comfortable assisted living facility. Some of her fellow church members whispered to me that Verna would be better off after her husband moved out of the house.

But something amazing happened.

Despite the fact that the staff at the nursing home was well equipped to feed and care for her husband, Verna began to go to the home every morning, every afternoon, and every evening. At the cafeteria, she would patiently feed her husband each and every one of his meals. She did this as the Alzheimer’s worsened to the point where he did not even realize who she was anymore. Although she had been a fixture in Lone Oak worship services for decades, she stopped coming to church on Sunday evenings because she was spending the dinner hour with her husband.

She went to the nursing home every day for the next five years of his life.

I have shared Verna’s story on two occasions prior to this post. First, I shared it in a church service at my home church while going through the book of 1 Timothy. When we got to the passage of 1 Timothy 2:11-12 I told Verna’s story. I shared that I was certain, even though we were a state away, that at that same instant on Sunday evening, I knew that Verna was at her husband’s side, feeding him and honoring her vow to him and to God. Verna taught us all something that day.

The second time I shared her story was this last summer when I was asked to return to Lone Oak and conduct her husband’s funeral. I shared her story with her church family and as we lamented her husband’s passing, we celebrated her faithfulness to him. And we also celebrated her faithfulness to Him. Because her husband’s illness lingered, we saw Christ through her life of grace.

I know more of Christ and of His love for us through her sacrificial actions. I know more about what it means to be with someone through sickness and through health because of her actions.

This old woman taught this man a lot.

Water and Dust (II)

Dust is the other bare component of life in Lone Oak. During the long dry spells, dust would swirl and blow across the hill country. Many of the back roads in the county are unpaved. Going out to visit a member of the congregations, it was routine for your Michelins to trade asphalt for dirt and rocks. A fine layer of dust rests on most everything. Whenever the wind moved hard over the landscape, dust would get into your eyes and hair. It is strange to run your fingers through your hair and it feels coarse and desiccated.
Initially we didn’t like the idea of our children playing outside on the farms because clothes and kids became so dirty. But as the years went by, both ourselves and our girls went more and more native. By the time we left, they were often playing among the cows and goats and running around barefoot.
On a typical weekend we would arrive early on Sunday morning from Waco and spend the day. Occasionally we would spend a Saturday or a Sunday night out in Lone Oak. But I was always struck by how our minivan looked when we returned. It would be completely covered in dust. We would have to wash Lone Oak off the car almost every week.
I went through a phase when I began to pray for God to take us elsewhere; for us to move on. During this time, the dust symbolized the things I liked least about Lone Oak and I would work hard to keep our car (and ourselves) clean. As soon as we returned to Waco I wanted to remove every last vestige of the dust. But God began to soften my heart and the last year we were there was a wondrous time. I will eternally be thankful that God did not answer my prayers in years three and four. Year five was an immense blessing.
It has now been six years since we pastored Lone Oak Baptist Church. During last weekend's visit, our first in many years, one member with whom I tangled on occasion looked at me bemusedly and said “Do you realize you’ve become our beloved former pastor?” I laughed and said that I was sure many wished I had become a former pastor even sooner. But at the end of the weekend, we were sad when we left Lone Oak. Skeeter was two years old when we moved out of Lone Oak. But this last weekend as we pulled out she said “Daddy, are these people our relatives?” Even she felt the affection they graced us with.

I am finding out now that Lone Oak dust can be hard to leave behind.

Dust and Water (Part I)

[This post has been delayed because of events I will mention over the next few days.]

This last weekend, the clan and I went back to Lone Oak Baptist Church. Lone Oak is a small community (population around 250) around an hour west of Waco, right on the edge of the beautiful Texas Hill Country.* It has been over three years since we had visited.

It was/is a small church. On high attendance Sunday we ran around 60. I served there as pastor for five years while I worked through the graduate program at Baylor University. It was my first (and so far, only) experience as pastor of a church. Kadie and I were richly blessed in our time there.

Water and dust and sum up my feelings about Lone Oak. Water and dust formed the raw materials of Adam and also formed the essential elements of life in Lone Oak. Water is the sustainer of life everywhere, but its presence and absence particularly marks life in a rural, agricultural environment. One of my predecessors made the mistake of lamenting a thunderstorm one Sunday morning. One of the farmers scolded him saying “Look here young man, one thing you don’t do in this church is complain about rain!” I learned quickly that as the water runs, so does farming life.

I can remember the ground incredibly parched while farmers wondered whether it would be best to send their cows to the slaughterhouse rather than to ship in hay to feed them. Dry weather also meant that the tanks (for some reason, that’s what they call ponds in Central Texas) would run low and even the horses and goats would suffer from lack of water.

And when the water came, it could be imposing. Thunderstorms beat down upon a landscape that was only “protected” by 10 foot high, gnarled mesquite trees. There is barely enough grass to cover the ground, so often thunderstorms would carve gullies through the dirt and sand and beat upon any edifice that humans have deigned to scratch together.

I recall visiting a new member of the community. He and his wife lived in a 12 by 20 foot shed while they built their home. We went by and exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes while a thunderstorm rolled in. Then the sky opened up and rain began to pelt the tin roof of the shed. We had to scream at each other to be heard. One of my enduring memories of Lone Oak was me yelling things at John like “So how long have you worked at the plant!” and him screaming back “Oh, about 23 years!!!!”

But water was not always pleasant or humorous. It could also break death as well as life. As William Brown has said, sometimes in ancient Israel, the only thing more dangerous than the absence of water was the presence of water. That was true in Lone Oak too.


*Lone Oak is not the real name, and is not on the map. At least, I don’t think it is. Let me hit mapquest and look. Ummm OK, apparently there are SIX Lone Oaks in Texas. Well, this isn’t any of them!