March 4, 2019 - In 1947 Daddy moved his family of eight children to the Jim Boothe rent house across the tracks in East Center, Texas. I was fourteen years old and had heard that revival services were being held in a “Blue-topped “tent across from the Grammar School downtown. We hadn’t been raised in church, but our parents read the Bible to us and taught us strict morality. So when we asked if we could “go to the revival,” Mother told us we could but to come right home.
So the night came and my brother John and I hurriedly made our mile trip across the RR tracks and the Center square. We stopped for a few minutes to listen to Milton Wilkinson electioneering for State Representative, then rushed to the tent. To the pulpit walked 34 year-old old John Rawlings, pastor of Tyler’s Central Baptist Church ---handsome and dynamic. He preached as if he was preaching only to me and while the choir sang “Just As I Am,” I felt a tug in my heart that I’d never felt before. Since I was too timid to walk down the aisle, someone touched me on the shoulder and whispered, “Do you want to know Jesus?” I immediately stepped out, trembling and praying in my heart, “God be merciful to me a sinner—and save me.”
In 1951 I came home from Panola Junior College in Carthage, Texas one day and tearfully told Mother ---“Mother, I’m going to be a preacher”--- and we wept together. I later enrolled in the Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri. My first pastorate was the Patroon Baptist Church and since then I got a B.A. from ETBU in Marshall, Texas and later pastored churches both large and small in several states.
Last week Pam and I were converting some of our VCRs to DVDs and watched a four hour tape of my building her rifle---(I have built almost a hundred of them over the years) and am proud (in an humble way) of the reputation my custom rifles have received. But watching that tape left me with mixed emotions. I’m almost 86 now, have neuropathy in my hands and feet and can no longer build stocks, fit barrels, etc. But about the time I was lamenting to Pam about it, she played one of my sermons from yesteryear and I suddenly realized something. I am in my 27th year as pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, I preach every week, still perform weddings and funerals, write for five newspapers and am completing my second book. I sit while preaching now, but “thank you, Lord…. for my calling …thank you for something more precious than all my guns, cameras and hobbies combined. Thanks for that night in Center. Thanks for the most wonderful night in my life….the night I found Jesus…..
……..and Jesus found me.”
