Christian Living
The Journal On Thanksgiving 2006
Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving; Colossians 4:2
The Monacan Indian part of me has quite a bit of trouble with the American concept of Thanksgiving. Yet, I have even more trouble with the emphasis on the material, rather than the spiritual. The material blessings associated with The First Thanksgiving pale in significance to the spiritual freedom the Pilgrims esteemed higher than life itself.
I set to thinking about the many folks who have helped me along the way. This mind set came upon me the other day as I read an email from my sister in Florida whom Mom always loved the best. The email informed me that Iva Russell had departed this life at the age of 83, and that her husband Roland survived her. They had been married for 63 years!
Having known the Russell’s and their children over most of the span of my life, I recalled many incidents when they, as good friends of the family had intervened in my older brother, Danny’s, life and later in mine. Roland, better known as Bo, was a logger, truck driver, and general all around hard working man. I lived with Bo and Ivy, as we called her, for about a year when they were in California. This is a story, of which I will tell only the tip.
One night during my younger teen years, four of us boys decided to go to California. We ‘borrowed’ a relative’s car and with little more than change in our pockets set out for the then promised land. The car soon broke down, our money ran out and we divided up and hitchhiked the rest of the way to the land where people from Oklahoma and Mexico lived. We knew the Russell’s lived in California, but had no idea where. We supposed we would get to California and look in the phone book and voila, get the number and call. If brains were black powder we wouldn’t have had enough to blow our nose! At least that’s what Bo told us when finally arrived. I was all of 15.
I distinctly remember one couple who picked Dave and me up outside of Salt Lake City. They could tell we were hungry and they bought us the biggest hamburger I had ever seen, with coke and fries, the whole ball of wax. They talked to us about the Lord, but of course, while being nice about it, I was not at all interested. Still, they let us ride with them for several hundred miles. I will always remember the torpedo style Plymouth they were driving and the kindness they showed to two teenage strangers. And I am thankful for there were a few nights when we could not catch a ride. We slept under bridges and spent one night in a crate on a golf course in Tonapah, Nevada, or maybe it was Winnemucca. What a life.
We got as far as Burbank when the police finally picked us up and took us the police station. We told our story, okay, part of our story and who we were looking for. As the Lord, though I didn’t know Him at that time, would have it we were within 10 miles of Pacoima, which fifty years ago was a nice bedroom community inhabited for the most part by employees of Lockheed. Bo Russell worked at Lockheed! He came and picked up David and me. David stayed for about a month; I hung on for a little past a year, helping in the family business of removing wallpaper from the walls of some very nice homes in Beverly Hills and other posh addresses. I have since had a tugging at my heart to be a missionary to such rarified places.
How do you ever say, “Thanks” to such folks as Bo and Ivy Russell?
My older brother, Danny, took the time and risk of teaching me to drive semi’s, even before I was old enough! In those days we had never heard of driving schools, so one driver would teach someone else and that’s how you became a truck driver. Danny and I rode double for a while and then I was off on my own, teaching someone else. I had received the Lord as Savior and so I studied in the sleeper cab and took tests when home from the road. I owe more than words can ever say to my brother Danny. And I am thankful for the risk he took in helping me.
My wife’s grandmother a Gold Star mother of World War 2 took me under her wing while Joyce and I were still going together. She had received the Lord as her Savior when her husband, Frank, passed on with cancer. She went right to work on Joyce and me and it wasn’t long before we went to a revival with her, mostly to placate her, and wouldn’t you know it, the Lord saved both of us that night. Grandmom, as we all called her, did more for me than any person I can think of and I am eternally thankful for her love and trust in me. I was 20 when the Lord saved me.
As I write these ‘musings’ for Thanksgiving, of course I am thankful for my material blessing, but I am much more thankful for the people who have made a difference in my life. I cannot list all of them, that would be impossible, but two come to mind that are dear to my heart and have remained so for the last 45 years.
My first pastor, the man under whose ministry I was saved was Al Dickerson. He took me under his wing and put up with me and taught me much about the word of God, about reaching people in the jails and other outreach ministry. Al or Dr. Dickerson is into his eighties I’m sure, but still going at it for Jesus at the same church he started out in over 50 years ago. Pastor Al understood the kind of rough outrageous life I came from and gently but firmly helped me up.
My second Pastor, Tom Wallace also took me under his wing and taught many of the finer points of reaching people to me. He helped me to polish up a little and thereby open doors that led to vistas of service of which I formerly had only fond dreams.
The people of these churches and of the churches I have pastored over the years are the images I have in my mind of Thanksgiving. Were it not for them, where would I be? I shudder to think.
A few weeks ago the wife of my youth came home from the GYN and said, “Dr. Floyd thinks I have a growth in my pelvic area and that it could be my remaining ovary.” In my great faith, I hit the panic button and literally went to pieces. We had a long week until the next test with the doctor. The test came back perfect or in the words of Dr. Floyd to the Great Blonde, “Your ovary is in great condition, considering your age.” Joyce really thinks he should have stopped at ‘condition.’
Am I thankful for the report? Overjoyed with thanksgiving would be a good way to put it. No chemo, no surgery, no carrying the mortal remains of my little wife of 42 years down to a grave to await the trumpet of the Lord. Thankful? Who wouldn’t be?
It really is strange how a name in the obit column can set you to thinking. And not only about your own mortality, but of the tremendous kindness of ordinary, hard working people who just stick their neck out and help people. They are fast becoming a dying breed, but I’m glad I lived to know many such folks.
I am thankful for the myriad of friends Jesus has given to me over the years. As I think of them I recall the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero: “The shifts of Fortune test the reliability of friends.” I thank Christ for true friends, for after all Jesus is the friend that sticks closer than a brother.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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“Don’t drown the man who taught you to swim.”
English Proverb
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“In ordinary life we hardly realize that receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich. It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“Our favorite attitude should be gratitude.”
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