The Scattering Thomas M Parsons

14. The Scattering

Life, as many, including myself, have observed, is full of beginnings and endings, of comings and goings, of things new and things old, of hellos and goodbyes. And life is not a tortoise slowly plodding along taking one slow, ponderous step after another. Life moves.

The hare which was my life sped on as my WSU days began drawing to a close. Janet was seeing her new beau, a young man named Dave who also was a member of FBC, and a music student at Wayne. He would eventually become Janet’s husband.

Beth was soon to leave for a Christian college in Indiana where she would meet the young man who would become her husband. Bob and his new wife, Nicky, would begin their married lives together. The old gang with whom I had grown as a young Christian was growing still, but now away from each other as new stages of life were encountered and time, interests, and, yes, the Lord began to separate us and send us hither and yon. I think God does that, separates us from each other, I mean. I think He does it for a purpose.

The New Testament church got separated and scattered. God sent persecution to them in Jerusalem, that ancient, holy and often troubled city whose history seems to mock its name which means “Jehovah is Peace.” The persecution caused them to flee in different directions. The result: the good news of Christ’s salvation was spread into new areas for new hearers to receive and trust the One Who died for their sins. God separated the little group of young people at First Baptist Church. He sent us everywhere. He had a purpose in doing that.

One of us He sent to Vietnam.

Vietnam in the 1960's was not the place very many people wanted to be. Especially young American men. The “popularity” of this very unpopular war was certainly waning. Many were demonstrating against our involvement in Vietnam. It was an “immoral war” many were saying. We had no right to interfere with the internal problems of one southeastern Asian nation.

Some of today’s readers might not understand the reason we were in Vietnam in the first place. Communism was the perceived enemy of Christianity and of America. It had been a serious threat since the end of World War II. The Soviet Union had been part of the Allied forces in that war, but soon after the end of the war in 1945, the U.S.S.R. began seeking to expand into other people’s countries. Communism must be stopped. Far better, the argument was, to fight and oppose Communism in some distant land than to wait until the Communists were on America’s doorstep to resist their expansion. Of course, they had already been to America’s doorstep and were deeply entrenched in the American education system by the mid-1960's.

In the Christian community of the 1960's there was large-scale support of America’s efforts to stop Communism in Vietnam. There was no question in the minds of believers that this godless, atheistic force must be stopped. There was just too much at stake to ignore the threat of expanding Marxism. No cost was too great.

The draft still existed when I was in my early twenties and a student at WSU, as you learned in the last chapter. And President John F. Kennedy was involved in a dangerous duel with Soviet chief Nikita Kruschev that certainly could easily have led to World War III.

Block 18E Line 99. That's where you'll find my friend's name today.

Ron was my friend. He had come to know the Lord at our church’s summer camping program while still in high school. He was three years younger than I, and still in high school when I was at Wayne.

He lived on the same street Beth did, and sometimes I would drive them both home from church activities and we would sit in the car in front of Ron’s house (I was not totally dumb; I took Ron home before I took Beth home) and laugh and talk and pray. One time we even prayed with Beth in her pajamas. That night Beth had not been with us in our after-service excursion to a nearby restaurant. When I took Ron home, we had a very important circumstance to pray about. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but Ron suggested we go by Beth’s house and get her to pray with us.

When Beth came to the door, she was already in her pajamas. She had a robe on, and was certainly sufficiently covered. So she came out to the car and prayed with us. That became a joke between the three of us, how we had prayed when Beth was in her pajamas.

Ron, like most new Christians who come to know the Lord in their teens, had some struggles with the old nature. I remember Ron was in a play at high school. By this time, LPHS was housed in its new building which included a huge and beautiful auditorium for plays and musical productions. Ron’s character in the play at one point was supposed to use an oath. Ron shared with Beth and me that he was not entirely comfortable with that line, but did not know what to do about it.

Beth and I, the older and wiser Christians that we were, suggested he talk to the director about the line. After all, we argued, the director was a teacher, and a teacher would be sensitive to the needs of her students. Ron confessed that part of him wasn’t convinced it would be wrong for him

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to say the line. After all, it wasn’t he, that is, Ron, saying the line. It was the character he was portraying.

We told him to pray about it, and we prayed with him; in fact, that may have been the “praying in my pajamas” incident referred to earlier. We encouraged Ron to seek the Lord’s will in the matter.

On the night of the play, many of the young people from First Baptist were in the audience. We all knew where the line occurred in the play, and we all waited to hear how Ron would render the line. The line came, and the line went, but the questionable words were not heard. A simple rephrasing of the line removed the offensive words.

When Ron graduated from high school, he gave me a wallet-size graduation picture. On the back he wrote, “See you in Heaven in seventy years.”

After high school he married a young lady from the church, and shortly after their marriage he was sent to Vietnam. Cpl-E4 Marine Regular Ronald Lee Beckett.

It was hostile action, April 27, 1967, but I do not know the details. In Quang Tri, South Vietnam on that day, my friend from Lincoln Park, Michigan, my brother in the Lord, was killed and went home to be with the Lord. His name is now inscribed on a black granite monument in Washington, D.C. on Block 18 East, Line 99.

God separated our little close-knit group. He sent us in many directions to do many things for Him. But Ron He decided to take home to be with Him before he had a chance to make much of a home here on earth.

A. E. Housman in his poem To an Athlete Dying Young, commented that the young man who had died while still a hero was a “smart lad.” He would not live to see his fame fade with time, to see someone else “chaired . . . through the market place” in victory. He would not “swell the rout of lads that wore their honors out.”

Was Ron more fortunate than I for being taken home to be with the Lord in his early twenties? All the years I have been working, serving, ministering and, yes, suffering, Ron has been in the presence of the Lord. Which one of us was the “smart lad?”

At his funeral service, Dr. Mac commented that he did not understand why “one so young” should be taken while “one so old” (himself) should be left behind. But God has His purposes, always. He did what was best for Ron. He did what was best for me.

It has now been more than forty-five years since Ron wrote his message to me on the back of his graduation photo. The time I will meet him again in Heaven is drawing nearer. If reminiscing about the things of earth is possible in Heaven, and I do not know that it is, but if it is, we will sit down somewhere in the Celestial City and reminisce, and one of us is certain to say, “Remember the time we prayed with Beth and she was in her pajamas!”

There was another Ron in that youth group, who also went into the military, the Navy, to be exact, and survived. He also became a close friend, especially after Beth went away to school. Ron and I often talked and prayed together. After the scattering of our youth group, Ron was in my wedding. He himself married, and my wife and I saw him once when we lived in Flint, MI. Then I heard from Ron no more.

Dave and Anne were a couple in high school and college who eventually married. God has used them as missionaries in Brazil for forty years. They recently retired and now make their home in Arizona.

And Beth? Beth and I helped each other through some difficult times. We encouraged each other and prayed for and with each other. But when she went to Indiana to school, she left my life. I recently discovered that she and her husband have lived the majority of their married life in southern California. God worked things out for her as He did for me.

And what of the other young people in that group, the ones I have not included in this writing for whatever reasons, the ones who did not even warrant a fake name in these columns? How did God work things out in their lives? Where did they all go when God scattered us?

I may never know until I reach Heaven’s shore what God did in each of the lives of those young people with whom I was so close in the first half of the sixties. I may not even know then, because the things of earth have little value in Heaven. I am just glad they will be there. I am just glad that someday the scattering will become the gathering of all God's people in Heaven.

The Internet has been a blessing to me. It has helped me locate and contact some of the people who played an important part in my life in Lincoln Park's First Baptist Church. I now have email contact with twelve of my friends from FBC. Praise God.