Livin' Small

First off let me preface this with some facts about my family.  Well, the whole community I grew up in.

My mom, Peggy, was a singer.  Even though totally deaf in her left ear she could sing like a bird.  She was requested to sing for about anything church related.  Funerals, weddings, homecomings, and events of most kinds where she met quite a few bigger named gospel singers.

My brother Danny, played with Dwight and me in the very beginning.  These two taught themselves how to play guitar.  I lost track of Dwight after I married, but I know Danny went on to eventually play in a Country band, till his health got too bad to continue.  He eventually played bass most of the time on a fret-less version.  He sang as well.

Timmy, next to youngest, was a percussionist and singer, who is the only one I know of us that actually went into a recording studio with a group from New Bern called the Gabriel’s and cut an album, which I still have a copy of on vinyl.  He played with the band Danny was in for a bit, but had health issues as well being primarily why he stopped.

Jamie, the youngest, was just learning to walk when I left for the Army, so I didn’t know a whole lot about him till our later years, but by the time he was in high school, the school had a band.  He learned wood-winds and keyboards.  I got to hear him play once in Edward Christian Church in the 80’s, when I led our churches worship team in an evening service there.

My dad played the auto harp.  I still have it in my possession, but it is in very bad shape.

I have to throw in this on tidbit.  Way back when, a cousin of mine was lead singer for the well known east coast shag, beach band, The Embers.  Jackie Gore.  I never have met him, but a couple of my brothers and mom met up with him on occasion after I went off to the military.  Jackie is still singing and has always done well with his talent.

I had a brush with a famous musician and singer, Wayne Cochran some years ago.  He played in a group called the C.C. Riders.  Look him up.  I enjoyed playing behind him in a church service.  You can only imagine what that was like unless you were there.

This leads to me.  I taught myself to play drums.  I played for over 30 years, 25 of which were in a church worship team at Praise Tabernacle and a couple of years in First Christian.   About three years Danny, Dwight and myself played garage parties and a couple of club dates, and just plain jam sessions with other groups.

In all those years I was always open to the idea of playing another instrument of some kind.  I watch guys and girls who are so talented in music play one instrument and jump up and pick up something else and play that.  I am amazed at such talent.  I wanted to be versatile like that.  I live in music.  It’s playing a large portion of my day.  It plays on a small bluetooth speaker next to my pillow all night.  Contemporary Christian music is the staple music I listen to and if any of these musician’s are in the area Lib and I try to attend.

So, what am I getting at?  I was in the worship service in our new home church one Sunday and for some reason I could hear a saxophone hitting riffs in my head.  Then God spoke to me.  He asked would I be interested in learning.  I said most definitely.  He then told me to get a saxophone and I would be gifted to play.  I went like, how?  Just do it and you’ll learn to play.  I take God at His Word, so this past week I rented an Alto saxophone and I’m walking through that open door.  Two days in, this being the third and I’m am actually excited about it.  You have to know me, to know I don’t get excited about much of anything.  The task has proven daunting when I hit the lesson on where ALL the notes are on an Alto saxophone.  I want to get proficient on all of them like. . . today, but I figure this will be an extended time frame, since there are a lot of them and it will be a slow process at first.

Even so, it doesn’t deter me from the desire to learn.  Mouthing the reed end and fingering the right keys are all a part of the learning process.  The instructor I’m listening to is my kind of guy.  He’s more into learning how to meld the person to the instrument so the two become one in a way that the instrument performs to the wishes of the person.  If reading music is to be done, basics only.  The more intricate knowledge of playing by sheet music is more like something down the road somewhere.  Pardon me if I sound crazy, but the instrument becomes like a partner more than an object to be tackled and brought into submission.  You have to learn to woo the instrument with the knowledge that it will do what you want, so long as you learn how it likes to be treated and it will deliver the sounds from the soul of the person as the two get to know each other.  Music is a true sound from the soul of people in tune with themselves.  What’s inside of them will tell others a lot about what is inside.  Music doesn’t lie.  It expresses the core nature of a person.  The instrument becomes the expression of that soul.  Learning how to play it involves this part of the process more so than reading music.

I express myself through the music I listen to and play.  The most free that I’ve ever felt in life involved, on many occasions, was when I was playing drums.  I could let myself go and forget the world around me.  Now with this new instrument, I hope to find a new avenue of release.  That’s why God has given me this nudge to play.  He has something for me in it.  That’s the “why” in it all.

Hello.

From my earliest days as a child I remember making A’s in school.  Anything less was a disaster.  At least that was the case through the fourth grade.  I had my issues during that time.  Time.  That was one of them.  I couldn’t tell you the time.  It wasn’t till the fourth grade that I finally caught on.  I remember Mrs. Beatrice Bonner standing in front of the clock on the wall behind her desk over the blackboard.  She faced it with her head turned to us with her right arm in the air.  With her right arm she swept downward to her hip while saying everything in the area is “after” the hour.  With the left arm she swept from hip to straight up and said this side is “before” the hour.  It was like a light went on in my head.  Oh yeah!  I had it.

The problems started in the fifth grade.  It was like I’d lost my ability to think.  I couldn’t concentrate.  C’s and D’s where my best grades.  I couldn’t understand what happened.  Had I chewed the lead paint off of something?  Seems paint had damaged some kid’s brain.  Yeah, maybe that’s it.  One thing I do know.  My vision was failing.  I didn’t realize the problem.  I just knew when I would read I’d have a pounding headache after about fifteen or twenty minutes and I would put down what I was reading.  I gradually lost interest.

That was not me.  By this age I’d read all of the Hardy Boys mystery books and started in on Nancy Drew mysteries.  My most favorite book, though, was Sabre Jet Ace.  It was about a pilot who flew a Sabre jet during the Korean war.  I loved that book so much I took it home and hid it away.  So much for a young boy.

The sixth grade was no better, but I heard Mrs. Dorothy Bonner, my fifth grade teacher, had told my parents I needed an eye exam.  Apparently she’d noticed I would squint to see the board.  I would be sitting in the middle to back of the room.  So, in the sixth grade I sat on the front seat middle row where I could better see the board.  It was an uneventful year.  The only big thing that year I remember was when Dana Hollowell was hanging upside down on the hand bars and fell off onto his head.  He must have really hurt himself, because when we came in from recess we all settle into our seats when I heard a commotion and Dana, who was sitting two seats behind me, ran by all the while throwing up.  Oh, and one day when Mrs. Sadler was writing on the board she said for us to read what she was writing on it and someone muttered “Can’t see through muddy water”.  She heard it.  Evil does have a look.

The summer between the sixth and seventh grade was a life-changing time.  Not only had puberty hit and run, but my parents finally got me to an Optometrist, who found that I was extremely farsighted.  No wonder I couldn’t read.  My mom and I had also finally talked my dad into letting my hair grow out, but I don’t think that made me smarter.  It may have helped my self-esteem a good bit, but the glasses had given me my ability to read again.  By this time though I had adapted to a “not doing my homework” lifestyle and my grades still suffered.

I’d just lost interest in studying or reading by the eighth grade.  I was barely making the grades I needed to continue on, although my teachers and my mom especially constantly told me I could do anything I put my mind to, but that was just it.  I was. . . to not do anything.  I’d lost the will to face challenges.  I was content by this time to float through life with a catch as catch can philosophy.

High School was a challenge.  To cut this short, I flunked Algebra my Freshman year and Geometry my Sophomore year.  This held me back a year while everyone else went on as Juniors.  There’s a lot to say about my classmates here.  They still kept me going.  I was asked to the Junior/Senior prom by one of my classmates that year.  She was a darling for doing that.  But what would have been my Junior year I flunked U.S. History and English.  Why?  I’m glad you asked.  I had this deathly fear of public speaking and I knew most of the assignments in U.S. History was oral reports, so I wouldn’t do them.  That was an automatic zero, but don’t stop there.  The written part of the oral report was graded for content and then passed along to the English teacher where it was graded for composition.  Ah!  Another zero.  It looked as though I was lost to a fifth year in high school.

At the end of the year I found out there was going to be summer school.  Never heard of it before, but I was willing to endeavor through this and pick up U.S. History and English during this.  It would boost me to the Senior class the following year and I would graduate with my classmates that I’d spent eleven years with.  I wasn’t alone.  There were others, but I remember Debbie Willis was in class with me and Mrs. Peele taught.  I passed with A’s in both classes and made it to the Senior class.

About this same time I’d given my heart to the Lord and there was change in me, although I was also hormonally challenged as most male teens were.  There was such a battle inside me, yet I’d be in church, but down at the pavilion at Minnesott Beach on the previous evening with a girl.  The battle between hearing God say I’d be a minister and the wiles of a girl formed a real battleground for my soul.  School on the other hand wasn’t hurting me.  I was making A’s and B’s my last year in high school and I graduated on time.

The work-a-day world was a real eye-opener.  I remember standing on the rim of a waste water treatment pond under construction that following September thinking about all my younger friends going back to school and here I was standing here with a hard hat and tool belt still working in the hot sun.

Flash forward when I went into the Army, but not by choice.  After trying to get into a particular school in the Army I was caught in the draft during Vietnam.  Going to Ft Polk was not my idea of a party.  It was the hottest most detestable place I’d ever found on earth at that time.  The thing I remember though is the all day testing at the Reception Center.  All of us piled into one huge classroom.  After each test the instructors would call names and ask them to leave.  This went on for hours and I was still there.  In the afternoon the instructor announced that there was one final test and it was qualification for OCS.  I knew what that was.  I’d taken it in high school and passed it, but I wasn’t really interested, so I threw the test.  That day I realized was for finding out who was most capable.  I didn’t know until later that that was what got me into missile school at Ft Sill, OK.  It kept me out of Vietnam.

So after school was done, all of my class and I headed for Germany.  We spent a year and a half there.  The world, I found, was a much bigger place than the east coast of North Carolina.  My mind was being exercised with new boundaries.

I could go on but I’ll skip to now.  If you want to know about the in between, let me just say it was a long road of learning and unlearning, too.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is I have a very open-minded way of thinking and it’s not conventional at all.  I don’t think like other people.  How do I know?  I am the one that sees that dumbfounded look on their faces when I speak about some things like I’m an alien or something.  I think like everyone else, only my path to getting there is much, much different.

I know self-diagnosis is a dangerously slippery slope, but I contend that I am CDO.  That’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder only I have to put the letters in order.  I figure I also have a learning disability, probably due to my habits I formed early in my youth.  Maybe that’s even the reason I had no learning habits.  I don’t know.

I’m not trying to make excuses.  It’s just an observation on my part.  I do know I have hearing loss and if someone asks me a question and I answer I may likely have thought you said something else, which will also get me a crazy look.

I don’t like being called on quickly to explain something I know the answer to, but I have to analyze it in my head sometimes and a quick answer from me becomes an impossibility.  I was asked once what God was speaking to me and I’m thinking to myself that isn’t something I answer immediately.  I hear stuff all the time and it isn’t necessarily anything pointed.  So which do I go with?  I don’t know and I’ll blurt out a response that rambles about.  I eventually leave the conversation and find myself feeling a bit self-conscious and feeling like people wonder where I’m coming from.  It bothers me.  Perhaps I’ll dig into this some more.  But for now, I think I’ll stop here.  There’s so much swirling in my head right now I don’t know what direction to take this and I’ll just ramble on.

Job 1:21 states . . . Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

Typically this verse is a sentiment commonly expressed at funerals.  God gives us a time in this world and then there is death that takes us away.

But, let me express this in a different facet.  Has little or no bearing on the verse or its usual connotations.

As I sat in church on Easter morning, which was today, I told God I present myself for His Words to be spoken into my life concerning this auspicious day.  He immediately says to me, I have something for you.  I don’t usually find Him giving me something so immediate.  Just the phrase “the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away;”.  In my heart I heard it more directly as “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away”.

So, you ask, what is this facet of the phrase that you heard?  Simple.  John 3:16 says it in a much quoted way, but here I heard something like this.

God gave us his Son.  This is the “giveth” part.  God gave us His Son that he may be sacrificed as a propitiation for the sins of the world.

In the act of crucifixion, the shedding of blood, death and resurrection, the sins of the world were taken away.  This is the “taketh” part of the phrase.  In the giving of His son, He took away our sin.  No more are we accountable to sin in acceptance of this “giving”.

So without going into a lot of detail, it’s simple to say that God “gave” in order to “take” away.  He gave His Son for our sin.

Hope this speaks to someone that needs it.

One thing I’ve found to possibly change the paradigm of popular thought.  When Jesus cried out from the cross “It is finished” I sensed the completion of redemption of mankind.  In that completion every name of all men and women was written in the Book of Life.  It stays there until a person fails to acknowledge this gift by the end of their life.  If a person willingly denies or dies without this acknowledgement then their name is blotted out of the Book of Life.  After all, it’s a gift.  God wrapped a gift for you at the cross.  That gift is life eternal.  It’s yours.  Why not “open” your gift by receiving it, opening it and accepting it.  The loss of the body at “death” is not the end of life, but a projection of one into an eternal state of life.

All you have now to do is acknowledge that God has you already.  The only way around that is to not acknowledge it.  Seems a bit senseless to not claim your gift from God who wants you to re-establish a relationship with Him that was lost in the first Adam and regained in the second Adam.  God wants relationship.  Just do it.  Simple, eh?

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A typical redneck weekend in the sixties was unique.  Even though we created a bit of a stir at night, we did have a respect for most everyone around the neighborhood.  I’m not talking a subdivision.  A neighborhood included several square miles of which were mostly farm and pasture land if it wasn’t enveloped by timberland.

Our neighborhood consisted of a “gang” of several of us white teenagers.  I’ll name them.  There was my brother Danny, then Dwight Williams, Donald Ray and Danny Lee Johnson (brothers).  There was Billy Hardy, A.B. and his brother Levi Hardy.  The latter two were brothers.  Larry and Tommy Hopkins, brothers as well hung with us.  Billy Holiday out on the east end of the neighborhood.  There was Hal, or H.D. Walker as he was more commonly called.  Charles Fulcher, who had a brother named Ted, who didn’t hang with us.  He was friends with Tommy Tunstall.  Ray and Fay Cratch and Betty Bell Howerin comes to mind as well.    At one time we had another of us named Little Bud Leary, but he moved to Washington at some point.  The girls around this neighborhood were Katy and Nellie, H.D.’s sisters, Shirley and Brenda Hopkins.  Sue and Vickie Cayton, sisters of which I was a steady to the latter.  There were others like Gloria Cayton, Diane Tunstall, Bob Cayton. Dickie Walker, Terry and Jimmy Jones.  Taffy and Bootsie Hollowell didn’t normally hang with us, but when there was a 4H Club we attended the meeting together.  The 4H club usually met at Avonne and Yvonne Walker’s home in the Backwoods.  They had a younger sister named Patty Jo.  There was also some cousins of mine Linda and Jo Hodges.    Al Stilley would congregate with us on occasion from the Edward area.  I believe Donald Lewis lived in our neighborhood, but he hung more with Johnny Barnes, Harold Lewis and perhaps Gary Lewis.

I have no intention of leaving anyone out.  If you read this and ask what’s wrong with my memory to forget someone don’t fret.  Comment on this and I’ll add you.  Back in the sixties Small was a bigger place.  At least with teens, near teens and older teens.

During those years we rough housed, pulled pranks, ran loud motorcycles and cars, drag raced, played follow the leader at night in our rattle trap cars.

We lost some of our friends during those times due to our need for speed or teenage judgments.

Charles Fulcher died not long after I left for the Army in a car wreck.  I understand he was killed when the car he was in hit a bridge rail.  Donald Ray was in the car with him, but he was okay.  Terry Jones died in a high speed single car wreck after being out all night.  Dickie Walker barely survived having to undergo several hours of surgery.

Charles’ mother died in a fire in Aurora at the local Esso Station when the guy delivering gasoline to the station let the underground tank overflow and it ran into the office where she worked.  She and Curtis Potter were smokers and a lit cigarette ignited the gasoline and they burned to death.  That was a big tragedy.  That’s the story as best I know.  If you know more or different, please say so.

Our core group of guys would occasionally get together with the black teens in the neighborhood and rough house and do stuff together.  Pit or Pik (don’t remember which) Grimes had his own harem of women with enough off-spring to comprise a small army of black teens.  We didn’t do a lot together, though, since the KKK was a big thing back then as Civil Rights was coming into the scene.  The last year of school segregation was 1968.  That’s when the black school, S.W. Snowden and the white school Aurora High School consolidated in 1969 after three years previously as freedom of choice where you could choose which school you could go to.

A Friday night would find most of us core members meeting at Tiny Walker’s store.  She was Hobert Walker’s wife.  Most of us core guys worked for Hobert in tobacco if our parents didn’t use us on our individual farms.  A lot of our tobacco money that didn’t go to school clothes was spent hoopin’ n hollerin’ out at her place.  We also had found an old two story house down what is now called Rowe Road not far from the West Road.  We were told we could have power put to it as long as we paid the bill, so it became our club house.  Danny, Dwight and myself had formed a trio with guitars and drums and we’d play there or at some garage party like Shirley Hopkins home.  I perfected playing Wipeout and wore out doing so.  It’s pretty much how I learned to play by simply doing.

Saturday nights were pretty much the same.  A.B. and Levi’s dad Audrey built a building out behind their house next door to our clubhouse and he put a pool table in there.  We’d spend time over there as well shooting pool and playing music.  A.B. and Levi had motorcycles.  Back then they started with Honda 150’s and then 175’s.  Me?  I had a sewing machine Honda.  All of 90cc’s.  Bought it from Gloria Cayton’s dad, Ward, since her brother Ward Jr. wouldn’t ride it much.  We’d take the mufflers off and ride those bikes after midnight and wake the neighborhood up.  We were hard at it one night when someone came out of their house and fired a shotgun into the air.  We went back to the club house and hid away for the rest of the night.

There is actually too much to tell in one story.  But this one I will share.  We used to go down the West Road to where an old dilapidated building was and pull boards from it.  We’d light a fire out of it in the middle of the road.  One night we lit a fire and off in the distance back towards Hwy 306 we saw the Sheriff with lights on coming our way.  We all jumped into my truck and we took off.  I thought I had everyone till we got way on down the road.  When I finally stopped someone said we forgot a couple of the guys.

When the coast had cleared we went back and found them.  The had jumped into the canal that ran along side the road and clung to the grass to keep from going into neck deep water and snakes.  The Sheriff and Deputy pulled up to the still burning fire in the middle of the road, got out and extinguished it, all the while vowing to catch us in the act and punish us in some form or other I will not mention.

This is just an introduction to “The Gang” and redneck weekends.  When I started writing I didn’t know where to take this.  Now I have too many things to tell, so I’ll have to make it in installments.

Ya’ll come on and let’s go to Small and do stuff.  It’s the weekend!

The end of an era. That’s what yesterday was. My Aunt Marion Rowe Lee was laid to rest. Her daughter, Teresa has had the unenviable task of seeing her younger brother, Darrell, her dad and now her mom go on before her. Left with none of her own family to make memories with is indeed a solemn thought. She does, however, have the support of her good husband, Mike, and her sons and their wives and of course her grand daughters. She has the love of a good family she and her husband have created over the years to support her.

As for me, it’s the end of an era where Aunt Marion was the lasts of my dad’s family. My granddad John Colie and grandmother Elsie Grey, son’s James and Daryl, daughters Gerald and Marion are all gone now. More directly, I am the oldest of my dad’s, James, family with himself, Peggy, and all younger than me to include Danny, Mike, Timmy and Jamie. All of my family is gone except Jamie, who lives in Hawaii and is a mere 47 years old. A young man still in my book.

The memory I share here today is of my aunt. I was a young lad with a few memories that still remain. I remember her as being a young woman who was fresh out of high school and still living at home. At some point she went to work at the A&P grocery store in New Bern where she met this gangly tall man few years older, who worked there. He lived in Reelsboro, between New Bern and Bayboro. They hit it off and in my little mind were getting married in short order.

Being about five years old at the time I was ripe for being included in their wedding. I

There I am as the ring bearer

was assigned the duties of ring bearer, so I was dressed up, given a pillow with their two rings on it and given the duty to bring them to the alter during the procession to seal their vows with.

I remember that after they married they would always come for Sunday dinner at grandmother’s house. I don’t remember the order of their off-spring, but Teresa and Darrell came along in that order. But there were twins that were born to the Lee family that passed away at birth named Garry and Barry.

I have a vivid memory of something that occurred and I hope it doesn’t upset those of you who read this. Grandmother came home late one evening behind Aunt Marion and Uncle James when Aunt Marion was pregnant with the twins, just behind them into to the yard at grandmother’s house. As they stopped she said she saw the tail lights of the car come on, but the looked like two coffins. It was the omen of the demise of the twins. They both died at full-term birth. I don’t know why, but grandmother’s vision was never forgotten to me.

Teresa was the second of my cousins I remember after Marsha, who is the daughter of the other of my dad’s sisters. Both Aunt Gerald and Aunt Marion had a girl each first and then a boy each that grew up with me and my four brothers. I remember before my granddad died that when Christmas rolled around it got busy in the house on Christmas eve with family and us kids running around. It was finally decided we would draw names for gifting instead of the previous everybody buys everybody something.

Aunt Marion and Uncle James lived in a little box of a house in Reelsboro for a while and we would occasionally visit with them. Uncle James’ mom lived just down the road from them. Their home was approximately across the road from the Reelsboro Christian Church, where a fellow high school graduate of mine, Bob Cayton came to pastor in years following his college graduation.

My problem with family history is my ex-wife kept me busy with her family during our marriage and I lost track of mine to a large degree. It became evident as time went on that she didn’t like my family and they have expressed that to me since the divorce. But that aside I did have the opportunity to visit with my Aunt Marion after they had moved to Morehead City, where Uncle James became the manager of the A&P grocery on Arendall Street. Later when A&P closed up he bought into the IGA franchise and ran it in the same location till the late eighties I understand.

The story goes on that my aunt worked on with the church she helped establish in various positions. My uncle later on went to work in the men’s department at Belks and worked there until shortly before his death in his mid 80’s.

My uncle loved Aunt Marion for 61 years of marriage. He was an astute business man, but still a gentle man to his family and wife. He gave much more than he was required to do. Aunt Marion never lacked.

After my separation and divorce I would visit with her because by that time she was in Crystal Bluff Rehab more than she was at home. She was a determined woman with a sort of chromudgen sort of way in expressing her opinion. She never liked my beard and to be honest it was her last comment to me before I left from visiting her the last time I saw her before her death. Her grandson was sitting in the room at the hospice told me not to worry about that. She didn’t like his either.

In all reality Aunt Marion had a solid faith in God. The last day I saw her before her death I walked into her hospital room and she was sitting up partially in her bed watching a Gaither Family video of gospel music. Teresa said she’d been singing along with them.

I feel certain, and can likely be attested by her family, she was prepared to go home to once again be with the love of her life. It was a bit ironic that she was taken from the hospital to the hospice where she was placed in the same room where Uncle James had passed a year earlier. It was as if it was meant to be. She went on to her Lord there with her family around her, peacefully and quietly.

I’ve led a life of ups and downs, but there have been moments that stick with me as good memories in spite of circumstances. She and Uncle James chose me to be their ring bearer at their wedding. Before her death she made it known to Teresa that she wanted

I’m the pall bearer on the left with the hat.

 

me to be a pall bearer at her funeral. I accepted this request with honor to her.

From ring bearer to pall bearer and all the in between. Many years and many memories were created. Not only in my life, but I’m sure in hers as well. We do carry a connection as blood family, but also in life in it’s whole expanse. I’m honored to have known her and that which she created in life. She was an excellent example of a wife, mother and aunt.

Save

I would suppose one of the hardest things to do in life is nothing at all.  Tough lesson to say the least even at my age.

But even with that said, I have to look back at several times in my life I reached a breaking point and gave up and God stepped in and took over.  I used to own The ReCycle Shop Bicycle Repair and Sales store in Richlands back in the early 80’s.  I was making as much a go at it as possible.  The store had been open for about six months (it was March) and I went on a ministry trip with Pastor Kelley Varner to Rustburg and Lynchburg VA for a week.  While I was gone my ex-wife watched the business.  One evening I called and she said the woman who owned the building had sent workers on the roof to put a new one on.  I thought that was okay, except when I got back they had not put a new roof on and it had begun to rain.  It rained solid for two or three days and I stood in the business the second day back after the trip with water dripping on me and I was standing in water a quarter inch deep on the floor.  I was devastated.  I cried when I called my ex-wife and said I was closing the store and giving up.  I couldn’t do it any longer.

What happened next was when God stepped in.  Almost as soon as I hung up a friend of mine called me.  He had a business a couple of blocks away.  He came over and helped me squeegee the water off the floor out the door.  The Venter’s Insurance office next door offered their back office room at storage for my stock.  The Nautilus fitness center down near the Scotchman offered to allow me to store my bicycles in their backroom.  That was Gary Canady, who is a land surveyor now.  People came out of no where.  Another man, Bryant Lewis, came driving up to the store and told me he had a place he’d rent me out on the main highway.  It was a newly renovated store space.  I was  closed a couple of weeks, but we reopened in a new location and seemed like things went on like usual until September and business seemed to completely die.  I was at a total loss of what to do and about that time I got a phone call.

It was the owner of the Schwinn dealership in Jacksonville.  He wanted me to manage his store part time, but a month after starting he asked me to manage it full time.  I said only if he’d buy my store.  He wrote me a check to make it short.  I worked there for a little over five years.  It was probably one of the biggest tests of my life to date for me to work there, but God provided.

Another memorable time was when we were told we had to move.  We had bought and paid for a 14×70 mobile home and moved it on a lot in the countryside of Richlands on Cox Road next to Billy and Margie Cox.  Ronnie, their son, came to us after five years there and said he was building a brood house for raising doves and was going to house migrant workers next to us in the old home place.  So we scoured the area for a new place, but we wanted a new large place to live.  We had to sell our mobile home, purchase land and have a modular home build by our specs.  I’m trying to shorten this.  Well, we found what came to be 2 acres of land for ten thousand and we had Star Homes headed by Sue Simpson and her husband order up the house.  It seemed to run on and on.  Elmer Futrell was the land owner and he was in a bind to get rid of it and he had been on my doorstep wanting to know when we’d close on this deal.  I was about to lose my mind over it.  The mobile home had not sold.

I gave up when it looked as though we’d failed to seal the deal and I went to take a nap one afternoon and when I awoke I found two different buyers for the mobile home.  I got what I wanted for the mobile home and the construction of the house was finished and we moved in shortly afterward.  Giving up let God take over and it fell together like clock work.

I told Libby once that when God acts to be ready.  My house on “the loop” was experiencing a large insurance burden because I simply didn’t have a fire hydrant withing a 1000 ft of the house in either direction.  It would have meant a huge increase in my house payment I couldn’t afford.  Libby had been asking me to look at our present home for some time.

When we looked at our present home on Trott Road it was the right size for us and the price was right, but the agent said someone else was wanting it and she’d been dealing with them for several months.  It had a garage.  You have to know I have not had a garage in decades and loved the place, so I told the agent in spite of someone else wanting it I would give the seller what they wanted for the house.  That was a Saturday.  We were to go back the next morning after early church to see the inside of the garage since it was still locked on Saturday when we toured the house.

Well, Saturday evening the agent called and said they would consider us if we were preapproved, so after church the next morning we went to a guy who approved us for the loan and we drove back to view the garage.  When we got here the agent said she had the strangest thing happen.  The people she’d been dealing with about the house for those several months had backed out.  It left us to buy the house without competition.

Monday morning I was led by God to ask Jeff Smith, who owned the property behind me if he wanted to buy my property.  He looked at me with unbelief and asked me was I serious.  I said yes and to make a long story short, he bought the house with the stipulation we had to be out immediately.  Our agent contacted the family that owned the house we wanted and told them we’d like to move in and pay them rent till closing.  They agreed, so Tuesday and Wednesday we moved in.  So, Saturday, we looked at the house, Sunday were approved without a competitive buyer and sold my house Monday and moved into the new home on Tuesday.  It was that quick.

It came by allowing God to move.  I was learning a lesson in giving it to God.

Those illustrations are not the only ones I have to share.  It’s happened many times.  These are just the monumental ones.

This comes to today.  Even though I haven’t yet seen a check for my retirement and it’s going on three months I’ve found myself in yet another one of these kinds of situations.  When I asked God what to do about it, He said “I got this”.  What else can I say?  He’s never left me without.  I’ve always had a roof over my head, vehicles to drive, money enough to live by.  I’ve quit worrying about tomorrow.  I enjoy life much more today by doing so.

I hope if you’ve made it so far into this writing you’ve understood this one thing.  God is first.  Giving yourself to Him first will create an abundance of provision just in time as you need it.  It may not be when you “want” it, but it will be there when you “need” it.

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