This Little Life Of Mine - 23. What I Learned in the Library Thomas M Parsons

23. What I Learned in the Library

I assume God had lessons for me to learn. That would explain why I did not meet the girl of my dreams until I was 26 years old. Or perhaps I simply had to wait for her to grow up. When I turned 20 in 1961, that girl was only 13. But at the end of 1967, when she finally came into my life, and I was 26, she was about one month short of her twentieth birthday.

Seminary involves study. That is what I was in Grand Rapids to do. Study theology. God had called me to His service, and I needed to be equipped to serve Him. And that certainly involved study. Lots of it. I needed to know the major doctrines of the Bible. Soteriology. Bibliology. Eschatology. Lots of ologies to study and learn.

I needed to know homiletics, too. And Greek. And Hebrew. I had to learn to read from right to left, from back to front for Hebrew. But I must confess, it was all Greek to me.

I had to know church history. The church has more than 2,000 years of history now, but it only had 1,960 back when I was in seminary. There was the Apostolic church of the first century. The church persecuted under the Roman Empire of the second century. The church wedded to the state under Constantine. Now, that was bad news for the church! The rise of the Roman church and its doctrine of salvation by works and faith instead of by faith alone. The Reformation which sought to restore the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, but which eventually produced a dead church. The Great Awakening of the nineteenth century when thousands across America, Canada and England were saved and scores of churches, hospitals and schools were established. And the modern church. Lukewarm. Laconic. Laodiceaic.

There was a lot to learn. I had to know how to counsel people. How to witness to people. How to exegete the Word of God properly. I had to know people’s hearts and I had to know God’s heart and find ways to bring the two together. This was not an easy task then. It is not an easy task today.

Needless to say, I spent a lot of time in the library. What better place to study than the library? For a short time I shared an apartment with a young man named Tim. He was older than I, by about two years and from West Virginia. He loved to talk. He loved to talk about West Virginia. He loved to take pictures. He loved to talk about the pictures he had taken. Of West Virginia. He loved the Lord. And he loved to talk about the Lord. He loved to talk about what the Lord was doing in West Virginia.

Tim and I hit it off right away. I liked to listen to Tim talk about West Virginia, about photography, about the Lord. He always made sense in what he said. He was very down-to-earth and practical. Although Tim was headed for the pastorate, he had a great interest in missions. For most of his adult life, Tim’s dad had been a missionary pastor in a little church hidden away in a hallow in West Virginia. The church never was able to support a pastor full-time. The people did not have much money. Okay, the people did not have any money. Growing up in a missionary’s home had given Tim a deep respect for missions.

Tim and I shared an apartment on campus the semester prior to his marriage to Connie. An upstairs apartment. In the apartment below us lived four college girls. And for some reason they enjoyed slamming the handle of their broom into their ceiling, which was our floor. They said we were playing our music too loudly. I think they just wanted to meet us. Which they did. We talked to them outside the apartment building, and joked with them and, perhaps flirted just a little. Well, maybe not Tim, since he was engaged, although it has been my experience that engaged young men can flirt just as well as the other kind. But one of us might have done a little flirting. And one of them was a pretty blond girl whose name I did not catch that evening. In fact, I cannot say that I even noticed her then. Maybe I was more of a dummy than I thought.

Tim was involved in a missions’ group on campus. It included both seminarians and college students. One of the young men in that group was also from the mountains, but not of West Virginia. I believe it was next door, Virginia, that Randy was from. Randy had a girlfriend, a pretty blonde who often was seen with Randy on campus, the same pretty blond who, with her roommates, slammed a broom handle into their ceiling to get the attention of the two seminarians who lived in the apartment above them.

One Sunday in the spring of 1967, before Angie had made her brief appearance in my life, the missions group was going to a local church to make a presentation. Although I was not in the group, Tim invited me to go along. He and his fiancé Connie would be going, and Tim would be doing the driving. I agreed.

In Tim’s car I sat in the front with Tim and Connie. Not between them, of course, but next to Connie. Randy and his girlfriend sat in the back seat. I think someone else was also back there in the back seat. I remember precious little about the trip or about the presentation the group made at the church. But I remember the comments Randy made on the way to the church. The odors of nearby pastures wafted into the car as we sped along the highway. “Pig,” Randy would say as a distinct odor came in. “Cow,” he would say a little later as we passed a different field. Randy knew his odors well.

And that is about all I remember of that trip. I don’t remember Randy’s girlfriend saying anything, although I am sure she did. I don’t remember anything but the odor identification expert in the back seat.

To my surprise, although it really didn’t matter to me at the time, in the fall when we came back to school, Randy and his girlfriend broke up. I think it was Tim who mentioned it to me, nonchalantly one afternoon in the course of a conversation about West Virginia. “I think the Lord is calling me back to minister in West Virginia. It is such a beautiful state. I love the mountains. Randy is from the mountains. Oh, did I tell you, Randy and Linda broke up?”

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So one day in the late fall of 1967, I sat in the library of Grand Rapids Baptist College and Seminary studying how many angels can stand on the head of the Apostle Paul, or laboring through a Hebrew phrase I had to translate for Dr. Hebrew Professor for the next day, even though King James and his crew had already correctly translated it centuries before, and in walked a lovely blonde girl. I must confess, the very first thing I noticed about her was her blonde hair. I had always had a thing for blondes, and even though I had made excursions out of blondeness, Lunch-Line Girl, for example, all my other interests had been blondes.

But the second thing I noticed about this girl was her legs. I’m sorry if that offends any reader. I’m sorry if that makes me out to be some kind of perverted person. But I noticed her legs. She had two of them. That was good. And they looked nice. That was good, too.

But that was it. I finished translating my Hebrew phrase, something about what lovely legs Moses had as near as I could figure, and went back to my apartment. The blonde girl with the legs went back to wherever blonde girls with nice legs go. It was nothing more than a casual observation, a pleasant diversion from studying, as far as I could tell. I gave the incident no further thought.

When school began again in the fall, I was sharing an apartment with Del, who liked a girl in another apartment nearby named Cora. The girl’s name was Cora; I don’t know what the apartment’s name was. Anyway, he wanted to take Cora out, but she was hesitant because she did not care for Del, who was a bit of a fussbudget. Del lived on a schedule, I mean strictly minute by minute. On Saturdays, for example, when I did not have to get up for work or for classes, and wanted to sleep in, Del was up at seven sharp. His schedule said it was time to go and get his supply of groceries for the week. Del was not quiet when he got up. He stumbled about banging this and slamming that. It was not that he was mad. It was just that he was in his own world, and not aware that someone else in the apartment might want to sleep.

Cora told her roommate that Del wanted to ask her out, but she did not want to go with him alone. Would she go with Del’s roommate if he asked her so they could double date and then Cora would have someone to talk to that did not have a schedule in his hand. “Okay, it is seven-oh-two, we are two minutes late for the restaurant. Oh, time to go now. What, you haven’t finished your meal? Too bad. My schedule puts us at your front door sharply at nine so that I can get back to my apartment on time for my weekly bathroom cleaning.”

I exaggerate, of course. I do not mean to put Del down; he eventually married and served as a pastor. And I do not mean to put down those who schedule things. Sometimes it is the only way to get things accomplished. But sometimes Del did go overboard on things. “Stay loose, Del,” one of the seminarians was fond of saying.

Cora’s roommate said she would go out on a double date with her and Del if Del’s roommate asked her out. I was Del’s roommate. When Del asked me if I would do this favor for him, I said sure. Why not?

Linda was Cora’s roommate. I thought she was cute, but I really did not have any interest in her at the time. But I asked her out, and, of course, she said yes. What else could she say? She had already promised Cora she would go out if I asked her. It was for Del’s sake I would ask Linda out. It was for Cora’s sake Linda would say yes.

The date was set for Saturday night. It was December 2. We went to the Pizza Hut. It was snowing. It always snowed in Grand Rapids in December. And in January, February, March and sometimes April, too, for that matter. I drove. I’m not sure Del could find his way to the Pizza Hut. It was not on his regular schedule of places to go.

I was in the process of writing my first novel at the time. It was called On My Journey Home, and I took it with me that night for some reason. It was the story of a young guy named Jerry who fell for a girl named Patti. She was a Christian. He was not. But because of her testimony, he eventually got saved. Then, after she led him to the Lord, Patti broke up with him. That was as far as I had gotten. In fact, that is as far as I have ever gotten in writing that novel. It is still unfinished nearly forty years later.

For some reason, I was the clown of the evening. I was very entertaining. This was not my normal personality, or, perhaps that was my normal personality and it only showed for a couple of hours on a snowy night in December of 1967. I kept everyone laughing with my comments and jokes. I really do not remember what I said. I just remember everyone laughing. Perhaps Del did not laugh much. After all, the idea was to get him and Cora together so he could impress her. All I was doing was stealing the show from him. I was not trying to impress anyone. I was just having a good time and wanted the other three to have a good time as well. I had no romantic feelings for Cora or for Linda, or for Del, for that matter! I was rather fond of the pizza, though.

The evening ended and we went back to our respective apartments and called it a day. Del went to bed on schedule, and I did not have any further thoughts about girls, blonde or otherwise, that evening. Well, okay. I probably did.

However, when Cora and Linda got back to their apartment, Cora said, “What do you think of Tom?” Linda said, “Well, I don’t think he can be serious for a minute. But I think I’m going to marry him.”

It is amazing what you can learn in the library. That’s where I heard about this conversation several weeks after it took place from one of the ladies who was present. And the lady’s name was not Cora.

I took the picture of Linda washing a friend's car from the window of my apartment before I actually met her. The picture was taken in the spring of 1967. Note there is still snow on the ground.