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29. Where to, Lord?
Linda took a picture of me walking in with my fellow graduates. I am between Dave, who has spent his life in church ministries, and Rich who has spent his life as a missionary in Japan. Also pictured is another Dave, who died on the mission field of a heart attack at a relatively young age. His widow is now involved in a young church here in the Columbus, Ohio area where I now live. But on that spring day in 1969, none of us knew what God would do for us or to us as the years continued their relentless roll. And that was my concern. I did not know where God wanted us to go next. School was finished. I had a bachelor of arts and a master of divinity. Linda had a college education through half her junior year. We thought about staying in Grand Rapids for another year and a half so Linda could graduate from college. I could get a decent paying job to meet expenses while she studied and completed her education. But we thought that might become a problem. What if I got too involved in my job so that I found it difficult to quit to move on when the time came? Could not Linda finish her education anywhere God might lead us? But where would God lead us? How would I make contacts? I found that, at least for me, churches were not lining up at my doorstep for an opportunity to call me to be their pastor. After graduation, it was necessary for us to move out of campus housing. After all, we were no longer students there, and housing was reserved for those who were in regular attendance at classes. We found an apartment on Fulton Street, not far from the downtown bank building where both of us worked, I at the bank and she at the insurance company. Our apartment was located in an old building which had two apartments upstairs, and a popular party store below us. Our landlord and his wife occupied the other apartment, and we occupied the one that faced the corner of Fulton and Diamond. The older couple that owned the building were very nice to us. Rent was certainly reasonable, and the apartment was roomy, and Nikki, our cat, was welcomed. But in the summer, the apartment, not air conditioned, could be stifling. And there was often no place to park Hazel when we came home from work. But it was only temporary. Certainly it would not be long before the Lord would lead us to our first church. We did have some interesting experiences in that apartment, which we had furnished with what little furniture we had. Our bedroom was in the front, so in the summer with the windows open, we could hear the traffic immediately below us on Fulton Street. The whole length of the back of the apartment was an enclosed room like a porch, hot in the summer and cold in the winter. The kitchen had a linoleum floor that did not always reach to the extremities of the room. The bathroom, which opened off the kitchen, had a tub which stood up on four little curved legs. The linoleum which did not quite reach the walls in the kitchen did not reach even half-way under the tub. We had a living room and dining room, which we had trouble filling with our meager furnishings. There was another bedroom, but we used it primarily for storage. Nikki enjoyed sitting in my chair which rested in front of the window of our bedroom. There he could watch birds sitting on the many utility wires that ran just outside our window. And there he could get a bit of a breeze in the heat of the summer months, except, of course, when I made him leave my chair so that I could enjoy those breezes. It was from that chair that Nikki had an experience one warm night. I had gone to bed, wearing only shorts because of the warmth. Linda for some reason decided to toss Nikki from his chair onto me. I was not yet asleep, and I guess she figured I would enjoy having a twenty-some pound cat on my chest. But Nikki dug into my bare skin with his claws, leaving long, red marks across my chest. If I had done that to Linda, there would have been the piper to pay. But it was okay if she did it to me! Why is that? I still do not know. Linda’s folks came for a visit once or twice while we lived there, but we had no place for them to sleep, so they usually either stayed in a motel or made their visit a round trip in one day. We barely had enough furniture for them to sit on let alone sleep on. It was from that apartment that we made excursions out into the churches of Michigan and neighboring states looking for the Lord’s will for us. One such excursion took us to west central Indiana. It was a beautiful facility the church in the small town had. A physician member, who had gone to be with the Lord recently, had donated heavily to the church. In fact, it was his home that now served as the church parsonage. It was mostly farm families in the church, and they were warm and friendly and fed us well. Linda noted that the town was only about one hour’s distance from Indianapolis. I preached on more than one occasion, and met with the church leaders, and answered questions posed by the church membership. On our first visit there, we were put up in the parsonage. It was strange, actually. It was a beautiful home, having been a physician’s home. But it was completely devoid of furniture. The only furniture in the place was a an old bed and mattress that the people had found somewhere and put there for our comfort that night. Now, this was some bed! It was guaranteed to give young people like us bad backs in one night. It consisted of dusty springs over which an even dustier, thin and dirty mattress had been laid. We laughed when our hosts had left us there in that big, beautiful but empty house with just this dirty old bed for furniture. Then, when we realized we had to actually sleep on this bed, we did not laugh any more. The bed brought back memories of my first two nights in Grand Rapids four years earlier when Sid, Frank, Joe and I slept on rusty spring beds in an old empty farmhouse on Leonard Street. But there was one significant difference that made it much better. I was sharing the experience with my wife, not with three other bachelors. The parsonage also had no window furnishings, which meant with the lights on we had no privacy. Not that we needed much privacy. That bed offered little opportunity for sleep. It certainly did not invite any other activity! We were thirsty, and there was nothing in the house to drink. We noticed a laundromat across the street and could see that it had a pop machine in it. We walked there and purchased a couple of bottles of pop and returned to our accommodations. As we were enjoying the pop, a phone began ringing somewhere in the house. Imagine that. No furniture. No food. No beverages. But a phone was ringing. We located it, I think in the kitchen, and a female voice spoke. “So, I see you were thirsty,” the voice said. This was getting a little scary. Someone was apparently watching us. Were we now in some scary Hollywood movie? I’m Mrs. Bates, calling from across the street. My son, Norman, and I would like to have you come up to the house. We have a nice shower you can use. Oh, and don’t tell anyone you are coming. Or maybe it was a spy movie we were in. I’m Agent 396. I want you to leave the house at precisely 8:23 tonight. Walk east for two blocks, then turn north and walk four blocks. There you will find a package taped to the underside of a bench. Retrieve the package and wait there by the bench. You will be contacted about what to do next. Nevertheless, I spoke to the lady on the phone. “Yes,” I said carefully, looking through the window to see who might be watching. The voice turned out to belong to a member of the church who lived across the street from the parsonage. We talked to her a few minutes, and she seemed pleasant enough, but it concerned us just a little.
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“If we come here, are we going to have this lady watching our every move?” Linda asked. “It looks that way,” I said. “But if we do come here, we will have window coverings and she won’t be able to see in.” I tried to reassure my lovely wife. “But she would know when we came and went. Every time we set foot outside the house, she would be watching.” Linda was right. The next day, Sunday, we shared our experience with our contact man, the deacon who would lead the service I would preach at that morning. He explained that the lady, whose name I do not recall, was an old maid and that she was, well, eccentric. He said that he had been in her house once, and she had saved every newspaper that came to her house, stacking them in neat rows in the various rooms of her house. He assured us the lady was harmless, but admitted that she did spend some time keeping track of the comings and goings at the parsonage. I do not remember whether we turned down the offer the church gave us, or whether we did not receive an offer. Maybe our neighbor did not approve of pastors who drank pop, or maybe she was jealous that Linda had such a handsome husband when she had none. I do not remember how it worked out, but we both were glad that the Lord did not call us to that church. I have wondered over the years what would have happened if we had received and accepted a call there. What would it be like living across the street from someone who was constantly watching? I do not know how it would have been. But I know if God had called us there, which I believe He did not, we would have made it work. Every ministry is a mixture of opportunities and annoyances, of service and astonishing situations. It was a nice house, though. Another excursion took us to Terre Haute, also on the west side of my wife’s home state. Here was a church that had just been through a difficult time of conflict. Part of the congregation had left, upset over some issue I have forgotten, and probably they had, too. What was left was not necessarily the part of the congregation that was on the right side of the issue. Again, I do not remember if we were extended a call from that church, or if we turned it down. But we did not go to Terre Haute. A fairly good-sized church in a little community in Michigan was looking for an assistant pastor. The town was not far from the Detroit area where my family lived. It was a Saturday afternoon when we drove there and followed the pastor’s instructions to his home. He was sitting on the front porch waiting for us as we drove down his street and into his driveway. Linda and I hit it off right away with the pastor and his wife. He had a sense of humor similar to mine, dry and corny, perhaps, but nevertheless occasionally funny. As he gave us a tour of the church that evening, he must have noticed some dust residing on the piano or organ or some other piece of furniture. He commented that someone had not dusted yet. There were some feathers in a display of flowers there, and he made the comment that he did not know how one would dust feathers. He gave me a perfect straight line. “With a feather duster!” was my droll reply. I know. It’s not very funny. But it got a laugh that day. The next day I was introduced to the congregation and given an opportunity to preach, in spite of the feather duster joke. It was a good day. We enjoyed the pastor and his family. We enjoyed the people. We enjoyed the church. We enjoyed the community. We were invited back for a second time, to get to know and be known better. Then we were asked if we were willing to be considered for the position. We said we were. A date was set for a vote, a Wednesday night. This was where we wanted to go. We had been seeking the Lord’s will for so many months, nearly a year by this time. This seemed to be the right opportunity the Lord was giving us. Being an assistant would give me the opportunity to learn from an experienced man. And the fellowship between the pastor and the people and us seemed to be a token of the Lord’s will for us. We began to think about life in the town. We asked friends at our church in Grand Rapids, Calvary Baptist, to pray for us, which they did. The date of the vote came. The pastor had agreed to call us after the service that night to tell us the result of the vote, which we were certain we already knew. We hurried home after services at Calvary that night to await the phone call. Excitement was running high when the phone rang. I answered it. Oh? I see. Yes, I understand. Thank you. Goodbye. And that was it. We were not going to the church. I still am not certain exactly what happened. If I remember correctly, the pastor had decided to withdraw his request for an assistant. Linda cried. I held her close. The Lord said, “Don’t worry. I have something else for you to do.” One of the more challenging aspects of the Christian life is waiting on the Lord. I always want things to happen now. Often God says, no, not now, but later. The experience with this church happened in the spring of 1970. It would be September before the Lord began to move us out of Grand Rapids and our little apartment on Fulton Street. Pastor Jack Bowen of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Flint, Michigan had contacted the school which had referred him to me. He was planning to retire from more than twenty years ministry at Emmanuel, and wanted to call an assistant whom he could train to take his place in two years when he retired. Pastor and Mrs. Bowen came to Grand Rapids to meet us. They took us out to dinner. He clearly outlined what he was looking for in an assistant, and he made it clear that his intention was to groom that assistant to take his place. “Of course,” he added, “the church will have to make that decision when I retire. But my intention is to recommend the assistant to the church.” So we were off to Flint to visit the church, to preach an evening service, and to meet with the church leaders. Flint is an industrial town. A large Buick plant is there. Many other companies which make their money from supplying the auto industry with parts and services are also located in Flint. Flint’s economy, like that of not-too-distant Detroit, fluctuates with the ups and downs of the auto industry. The church was located in an older part of town, on Broadway. Many of the members, however, lived further away in the newer neighborhoods. Everything went well. Meetings went well. Services went well. Fellowships went well. And a date was set for a vote. Now, remembering our earlier experience, where everything also went well until the final vote, we decided to be cautious and be ready for whatever response might come. We wanted to avoid getting our hopes up too high, because the disappointment hurt so much when it came. But at the same time we were convinced that this would be the Lord’s will for us. The vote was taken, and a call was given to us to become Mr. and Mrs. Assistant Pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church of Flint, Michigan. Now it was up to us. Would we accept the call? Would we be ready to leave our friends in Grand Rapids, which, after all, had been our home since the day we returned from our honeymoon, to leave our church, to leave our landlord and his wife, to leave our little apartment, all to go to a city in which we had never lived to minister to people whom we had only just recently met and to serve with a pastor we had known for only a few weeks. We were willing. Hey, we were eager! In November of 1970, one and a half years after I graduated from Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary, we put all our furniture, such as it was, and all our belongings, such as they were, into a rented truck loaded by my brother-in-law Bill and myself. Bill drove the truck, since he drove trucks for a living. I drove Hazel with Linda and Nikki and me inside. It was snowing and dark when we arrived in Flint. Bill and I unloaded the truck in the apartment the church had rented for us, on Crapo Street (pronounced CRAY-po, named after some dignitary of the city). A young couple from the church had recently left the apartment because they were purchasing their first house. We would be moving to the church’s parsonage in a year or so, when Pastor and his wife figured out where they would live in retirement. But for the next twelve months or so, we would be residents of Crapo Street, sharing an old house which had been divided into three apartments with other renters and beginning our ministry. We were excited and ready to begin.
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