This Little Life Of Mine - Chapter 30 Where Buicks Come From Thomas M Parsons

30. Buicks, Ministry and Pearl Clusters

Linda, let me see your pearl clusters!

Of course, as every one knows, Buicks come from Flint, Michigan. Flint is a General Motors city, and many of the members of Emmanuel Baptist Church were employees in one way or another of that company.

But we were not. We were servants of God serving at EBC for whatever time He wanted us to be there.

I began as the Assistant on Sunday, November 1, 1970, but Linda and I did not actually move to Flint until Saturday, November 14. I’m not certain why it worked out that way, but I believe it had to do with the day the couple that had been renting the apartment on Crapo (that is pronounced CRAY-po, by the way) would move out. The church secretary and her husband were gone on an extended vacation, so they kindly offered us the use of their house for the two weeks until we could move into our apartment. Not only did this give us a place to stay for two weeks, but it also gave Linda the opportunity to be hired as temporary church secretary until the regular secretary returned.

The work began for me on that first day of November, and for Linda on the second day, a Monday. In that first month, I taught Sunday School four times, preached twice and made a total of twenty-eight calls, eight of them in the hospital. I also began a work that I continued to be involved in for more than thirty years.

One division of the annual Talents For Christ contest was Bible Knowledge. Each year the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches assigned a portion of the Bible for a test that was given to participants first at the state level, and then, if they won that, at the national level. To prepare its young people for this competition, Emmanuel had quiz teams. One of my duties was to coach the teams.

The first competition I was involved in took place in Lapeer on Saturday, November 21.

During that first month in Flint, we were entertained in the homes of several families, including the home of a young couple named Eric and Cloma. We went forward for membership that month, and I had my first funeral.

Cloma, let me see your opal pairs!

December was also a busy month. In addition to all the things I had started doing in November, we added a weekly Bible Study for young couples to our agenda. We met at various homes after the evening service, starting at our apartment. This was a great opportunity to fellowship with couples our age. Eric and Cloma were part of that group, as were Larry and Val, the couple who had formerly lived in what was now our apartment.

We quickly came to love the people, especially the young couples, and the work. Pastor and Mrs. Bowen treated us well, also. Well, most of the time, at least.

One day, Pastor Bowen was at our house, and he had brought in his mail with him. When no one was looking he stuffed the junk mail under the chair he was sitting in. Later he asked us how long it took us to find the junk mail. That is why he had put it there, to see how long it would take us to find it!

In that winter of 1970 and 1971, over the New Year’s weekend, Linda and I accompanied the youth group on a retreat to a campground northeast of Flint. Snow covered everything as we made our way down the narrow dirt road that led into the campground. In the summer it was probably a pleasant drive, the way the narrow road descended into a valley, turned right and then ascended to the campground. In the winter, that descent, right turn and ascent were anything but pleasant. If it had not been for a group of high school boys running down to the bottom of the hill and pushing our car up, we might not have made it to the retreat.

The subject for the retreat was the wiles of Satan. A dangerous topic indeed. It has been my experience, and I hope this is not simply a superstition, that whenever Satan is the subject of a teaching ministry, things can go wrong. I know that things can go wrong anytime, but it seems that there is often trouble when the devil is exposed. During that week, we had a sledding accident, requiring one of the youth leaders to drive down the hill, turn left, and up the hill to get out to take a young man who had broken his leg to the hospital.

Tom, let me see your red diamonds!

My involvement in quizzing led me to meet some of the other assistant pastors in the area. We had lunch together often as we planned the program of Gen-O-Shi-La, our youth ministry. The name comes from the four counties we covered, Genesee, Oakland, Shiawassee and Lapeer. Our lunches were held in the different areas we served. Sometimes we met at Ortonville. Other times lunch would take us to Lapeer, or to Grand Blanc. But most of our lunches were right there in Flint, at the Bill Knapps on Miller Road.

In February, our fourth month at Emmanuel, Pastor and Mrs. Bowen went to the Holy Land. On President Washington’s birthday, I drove the Bowens to the airport at ten in the morning and sent them off on their trip. The next day I had a funeral. Then we went to Grand Rapids for the final two days of the annual Bible conference at the school.

Pastor Bowen owned some properties, and one of my assignments during his absence was to collect the rents from his tenants. I drove all over Flint collecting those rents and holding them for Pastor.

The Bowens were gone for a full three weeks. In addition to collecting rents for pastor, I also got to preach for him, once each of the four Sundays he was gone. Guest preachers, and our song leader filled in the other services.

I really enjoyed the ministry at Emmanuel. Linda seemed to thrive, too. She was active in Sunday School and in various ladies ministries. We had little time to fret or to despair. Indeed, there was not anything to fret or despair over.

Eric, let me see your blue opals!

Eric and Cloma were a couple we became close friends with during our Emmanuel days. When they lived in Flint, they had two small boys, Steve and Benjamin. Eric and Cloma had both grown up in southeastern Michigan, as had I.

The four of us formed a bond around a game called Sleuth. This is an intense game, at least the way we played it. We would start the game by shuffling a deck of cards which contained various gems in four colors and three numbers. The dealer would then deal the cards to the other players, and four cards to be placed into a small envelope and set aside.

Nearly forty years later, we are still friends with Eric and Cloma. They live about two hours from us in the Cincinatti, Ohio area. We get together several a year, enjoying our friendship every bit as much as we did when we all lived in Flint. And, yes, we still are asking each other to show our pearl pairs!

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The object of the game was to figure out which four cards were in the envelope by asking other players to show their pearl clusters, for example, or their red opals. The player had to show the other player the cards asked for if he or she had them. By a process of elimination and deduction, it was possible to figure out who had which cards and which four were in the envelope. To make it a little more challenging, four cards from another deck were dealt to each player. These determine what areas the player can ask about. For instance, if I had a card that said pearl clusters, then I could ask a player to show me those cards. But if I needed to know about pearl pairs, I had to wait until I got a card that allowed me to ask that.

Of course, a good player can also pick up information when other players are shown cards they have asked for, even though the cards are only shown to the player who asks for them. If I know where three of the four cards for a particular gem is, and somebody asks someone else to show them a card which obviously includes that gem, then I have discovered the fourth card’s location.

Eric went so far as to make and copy a tracking sheet each of us could use to remember the location of gems we have already found. By placing the first letters of each of our names in the box where gems, colors and numbers met, we could remember who had what.

Many evenings were spent in pursuit of those four mystery cards in the envelope. How much Coke did we consume playing Sleuth? How many potato chips? How much of the weight I now carry on my body came from those nights sitting in Eric and Cloma’s home (we met there because they had kids and we did not) asking each other to reveal clusters and opals, marking down information on our sheets and then finally declaring victoriously that we knew the cards in the envelope?

Of course, when one of us found the answer, we were not supposed to say it out loud. We were supposed to say we knew the answer, then look at the cards in the envelope. If we were correct, then we could end the game. If we were not correct, and we sometimes were not, then we put the cards back in the envelope and the game continued. The player who had declared a wrong answer continued to answer questions and show cards to the other players, but had no further turns of his own.

It usually was not me who had no further turns of his own. It was usually either Linda or Cloma who first figured out which cards were in the little envelope.

I mentioned that we played Sleuth usually at Eric and Cloma’s house because they had children (two boys, several years later they had a girl) and we did not. We celebrated our second, third, fourth and fifth wedding anniversaries in Flint, all without children. There was no reason for this that we knew of; we were not doing anything to prevent children from being conceived.

For awhile we simply figured it was not God’s time yet to give us children and it didn’t concern us too much. In fact, we took advantage of it. Without children we were free to travel, and travel we did. Whenever we had a break in our busy schedule at Emmanuel, we went somewhere. We made many little day trips on days off, to various state parks nearby. We each had our hobbies to pursue outdoors; for Linda that is birdwatching and for me photography. Everywhere we went Linda carried her binoculars and I carried my cameras.

We also made some major trips from Flint. One of the biggest was one we paid very little for. That one comes later. One of the most pleasant was one we made with Eric and Cloma. We spent a week sharing a cottage with them in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, home of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Their children stayed with friends in the church and we spent the week enjoying what I came to call the mountains that smoke.

I recall that we had pooled our resources to make the trip, and had agreed that most of our meals would be prepared in the cottage or taken at fast food restaurants, especially going and coming. But we had also agreed on one splurge meal during the week, to be eaten in a fancy restaurant, of which Gatlinburg, being the mecca for tourism that it is, had plenty.

One day while hiking in the park, Eric decided to taste the water flowing in a small stream nearby. Just a taste, that is all he had.

“Aw, that is a good and refreshing drink,” Eric said. “You wouldn’t dare drink water like that from a stream back home.” Eric, the city boy, figured that water in a mountain stream must certainly be pure enough to drink.

“I’m not so sure you should have done that,” I said, a city boy married to a city girl who had a lot of country in her. “With all the tourists around here, I don’t think that water is all that pure.”

“It tastes good, though,” Eric said. “Try some.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t think it’s safe.”

The next evening was our last night in Gatlinburg, and the night we had set aside for our splurge dinner. We had agreed on the restaurant and were getting ready to go when Eric said, “I don’t feel so good,” and headed for the bathroom where the sounds emanating from within told us exactly what Eric was doing as the day’s intake of food left his body through the major orifice on his face.

“I told you not to drink that water,” I said when he emerged from the bathroom.

The rest of us who had not consumed water from the stream, left Eric to ponder the error of his ways while we went out to the fancy restaurant without him.

Eric, please don’t let me see what you had for lunch today.

Photos left column: Linda, Eric and Cloma at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1974.
Photos this column, top: Tom and Linda at an Emmanuel Baptist Church youth activity in Sarnia, Ontario in the summer of 1972. Bottom: Eric and Cloma today.

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