Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Friday February 1, 2008

I often get a little repartee going and when this happens it gets a life of its own. And I love it to be so. Many notes in response to yesterday's comment about To Kill A Mockingbird, and then, heaven forbid, Jack Nicholson were so full of vitriol that I had to go to the fire station to read them as even my Super Duper anti-spam filter couldn't handle the language. My critics should have known a mountain preacher by the name of Carl Lackey. Carl was a living legend in a town not far from Mayberry, NC. True. When I speak of him, with a deep reverence to be sure, people up here in Yankee Land do not believe any such person ever existed. He did and his legacy lives on in the changed lives of thousands of men and women in the mountains who would have remained hopeless sots were it not for rough hewn Carl.

A friend, John Thompson, sent a few of Carl's remarks to go along with my "funnin" of stuffed shirts with store bought degrees. I think it might be a good idea to give some of Carl's mountain wisdom a look:

Carl Lackey used to say, "Your degrees only show me that you've been to school. A degree is like a pig's tail. It adds no flavor to the bacon." "Don't show me your degrees. Show me the hides on the wall! They prove what you can DO!"

Carl used the mountain man image in such a way that many thought he was some sort of village idiot, yet many an intellectual graduate of Duke, or Mar's Hill laboring in the hills on an internship found to their dismay that Carl would tie them in knots in a good old fashioned argument on the finer points of religion. His "hides on the wall" were converts to the faith. To say that Carl used the language graphically is understatement to the max. Were I to use some of his more colorful statements my inbox would be flooded with notes begging me to again use Steinbeck, even Nicholson, but never quote that ole Carl Lackey agin.

I was with Carl one time when during the service he preached the paint off the wall about adultery and then afterwards we went to a house, Carl knocked on the door, walked in prior to anyone answering and said to the man setting in the kitchen, "Come on Bill, I'm taking you home to the wife and kids." I thought I was near to being shot, but Bill, a rather large man, started crying, hollered into the bedroom, and told the woman, "I'm going home and I won't be back never again; Preacher Lackey done come to git me." He went to be with Jesus years later true to his statement.

Whether a person has degrees from the most elite schools on earth, or whether the person be taught by the Lord in a cave in a waste howling wilderness, each will come to the knowledge that if any lasting "hides be nailed on the wall" it will be the work of the Spirit and not man's wisdom or man's ignorance. When all is said and done, each of us must give what are and what we have achieved to the Lord for His use as He sees fit.

As for me, knowing Carl Lackey was high spot during a low time in my life. God bless him.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2008 Use with credit.

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