The pastor was much younger than our pastor in the Sandusky church, who had never seemed to like me, and had always confused me with my brothers. This pastor greeted me with a smile and welcomed me as a friend. He was my height, and my approximate weight, but with wavy sand-colored hair, and pale gray eyes of unusual frankness and warmth. He might have been thirty-five years old. Warmly he asked me to call him “Dennis”—not “Reverend Dennis.” As soon as Reverend Dennis mentioned the work needing to be done on the church, insulation and shingle-laying, I told him that I would like to help him; and when he said, he was not sure that the church could afford a professional roofer, I told him I did not expect to be paid, it was for the sake of the church and for the sake of Jesus.
These words came from me without preparation. At once I felt my heart suffused with joy, and the look in Edna Mae’s face was one of astonishment and adoration.
When we were alone together Edna Mae wept with me, in sheer happiness. She said how she loved me, and had forgiven me the hurt I had done her, and would not give it another thought. By then, without either of us knowing, she was six weeks pregnant with our first son, Luke.
Soon then, within a few weeks, both Edna Mae and I were baptized in the St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus. And soon after that, we were married.
THE CALLING
You must follow your heart, Luther. If you are absolutely certain that this is what you want.”
It was a curious mannerism of our pastor that, when he smiled, his face seemed to contract for just an instant, as if in pain; and when he laughed, his laughter was silent, and seemed to wrack his body with a kind of pain also.
Stiffly I said, “It is not what I want, Reverend Dennis, but what the Lord has called me to.”
“Has He! Well.”
I had hoped that Reverend Dennis would clasp my hand in a brotherly gesture as often he did, with Edna Mae and me, and other members of the congregation, in greeting us at the church door, and saying good-bye to us, at the end of services. But he did not seem so friendly now. The childish eagerness I had brought to him was like a warm patch of sunshine with no place to fall upon. It was not like our beloved pastor, to seem so awkward with a fellow Christian who had come to him with a joyous expectation.
I had been excited to reveal to Reverend Dennis the news of my hopes for a career in the church, which I had been discussing with Edna Mae for months, and about which we had prayed together for guidance; but Reverend Dennis did not greet this revelation as I had anticipated. Instead, after I spoke for some minutes, telling him of my plan to become a minister in the Missionary Church, like him, as I was inspired by his sermons and by his example, Reverend Dennis deflected the subject by asking me about my family, and my work, and where we were living in Muskegee Falls, in a voice that did not indicate enthusiasm but with only a common sort of friendly inquiry, as if he had hardly been listening to my words at all.
For some perplexing minutes Reverend Dennis even inquired after my parents, who lived in Sandusky, whom he had met only once, at my wedding three years before.
It was hard for me to reply. I could not think of the right words. My parents were not happy with me, for converting to the St. Paul Missionary Church, though my mother was eager to see her grandchildren, and deeply hurt, that Edna Mae and I did not seem to have time to visit Sandusky as my mother wished, and that we did not invite them to visit us often. (This was not Edna Mae’s wish of course. For Edna Mae declared that she “loved” my parents—all of my family. But I did not care to visit with my father, as my father did not care to visit with us. In this way, there was a stalemate as it is called, I think—for neither my father nor I would give in. As I was a husband and a father now, embarked upon my own life, I did not intend to give in to the old man.)
“You might begin with missionary work, Luther. You don’t need to be an ordained minister to ‘minister’ to our brethren in Africa.”
Missionary! I had not expected this.
Reverend Dennis went on to tell me, much of what I already knew from his sermons, that he had been a missionary in West Africa for six years, in his early twenties; he was fond of saying, with one of his quick, pained smiles, that some of the “most joyous” days of his life were spent there, despite many difficulties including illness (malaria, dengue fever).
“The challenges of a Christian in such a place are—well, almost overwhelming! Africans don’t seem so impressed with a ‘savior’ as you would think, considering how they live—how poor, and uneducated. They didn’t seem to take Hell seriously—they’d smile, and shake their heads. Heaven was very hard to explain to them as a spiritual place. They seemed confused about Jesus, if He was a man or a ‘god,’ and it was clear that they had no concept of ‘immortality.’ Half the time I didn’t know how much they understood of our teachings, and how much they were just pretending to understand, as children will do. We’d established a little school there, teaching English and arithmetic as well as instruction in the Gospels. We had many converts, or at least it had seemed so . . . as I say, it was difficult to tell how serious they were when they welcomed Jesus into their hearts, and how deep our teachings went. They were very somber sometimes, and then at other times they laughed uproariously—we never knew why! Our mission ended tragically when a civil war broke out and we had to flee. Eventually, half the population was slaughtered by the other half.”