At the age of 86 (and counting; still doing good! walked my mile early this morning), I’m reflecting on how life works. From time to time I’ll be posting these little memoir-essays on my FB page.  The plan right now is not to leave them up very long before posting a more typical piece.  The point is to keep the essay.)

I was thinking how little things matter.

ONE DAY IN 1945, my mama made me a cartoonist by one small act.

Mom had three children in school and three at home. When I was 5, Carolyn was 3, and Charlie was 1.  Mom was always working hard and furiously–cleaning, cooking, washing clothes, everything.  And I recall the day she put Carolyn and me at the kitchen table, gave us a tablet and a pencil each, and said, “Now, sit there and draw!”

I learned that day that I loved to draw. And never stopped.

People ask if mom knew what she was doing.  My answer is: All she was doing was getting us out of her way, trying to find a little peace and quiet.

The Lord took it from there.  Next year when I went to first grade, the other children would gather and watch me draw.  Could I draw well, people ask?  Of course not. I was six years old.  But the point is I could draw better than the rest of them.

For reasons unknown, the single most asked question when I’m sketching large numbers of people is this: “How long have you been drawing?” When I say, “81 years,” they are stunned into silence. So, then I explain what Mom did.

When I was 8 and we were living in the mining camp of West Virginia, Dad would sometimes sit in front of the radio at night in his easy chair. Before he drifted off, he would say, “Get your paper and draw me.”  He would wake up after a while and ask to see what I had.  He would say, “Need to move the ear up.” Or, “That eye is not right.”  Dad was not an artist but he had a good eye.

Same year, 1948, the principal of our school recognized my drawing of President Truman.

When I was 16–1956–my sister Patricia paid for me to take a correspondence course in art from Art Instruction Company out of Minneapolis.

So, my drawing is a family project.

THE SUMMER OF 1959.  I had finished the freshman year of college and was working on the family farm in north Alabama.  Two things happened…

I decided that majoring in physics was not right for me.  My greatest love at school was history.  So, I would change my major to history with a goal of someday teaching history in college.  Once that decision was made, I honestly felt like I’d been released from prison. This was so right.

Then, my sister Patricia called from Montgomery. Her husband James was being transferred to Birmingham and they would be moving.  As he would be required to travel on his job, Patricia asked if I would consider transferring to a Birmingham college. I could live with them and their baby Jamey, and she would have me there while James was traveling.

I had done okay at Berry College. I’d not made the dean’s list or anything, but my grades were acceptable.  And I’d been elected treasurer of the student body.  But I was bored at Berry and relocating to Birmingham sounded good.

Birmingham’s choices were either Howard College (later changed to Samford University) and Birmingham-Southern College.  One Baptist, one Methodist. I called my cousin Nelda Chadwick. We were the same age, but she was a year ahead of me and already “Miss Everything” at Howard.

She said, “It just depends on whether you want to go to a school run by the Baptists or by the Greeks” (meaning fraternities and sororities).  I said, “Which has the best history department?” She suggested Southern. I picked up the phone and asked for an application.

We moved a few blocks from the campus.  Two things happened soon.

One, a few months into this living arrangement, James was transferred again.  So, they were moving away. But before they moved, we all joined West End Baptist Church.  The three of us joined the choir.  And I met friends who would change my life forever.

Two, each day on my walk to school, between our apartment and the college I passed a small boarding house.  The sign out front said “Rooms for Men.”  Mrs. Pope –she sometimes called herself Mrs. Holleman, depending on which ex-husband she was angry at that day–may have had five or six boarders.  Two meals a day and share a room (twin beds) for fifteen dollars a week.  (Hey, this was late 1959, it was a different world then.)  I became a boarder.

September of 1959. I joined a Southern Baptist church.

Patricia and James had been members of a Baptist church in Montgomery, but she and I had been raised in the rural Free Will Baptist Church where mom and her family had belonged for generations.  So, when we began visiting churches in Birmingham, in my mind, we were looking for a country church in town.  Good luck with that, right?

One Wednesday James said, “Tonight I thought we would go to West End Baptist.” I said, “Not me.”  “Oh? Why not?”

I said, “Man, have you seen that thing? It’s huge.”

James said, “What’s wrong with that?”

I said, “Big city churches are cold, dead, worldly, formal, and rich.”

He said, “Well, we have the car. If you go, you go with us.”

I said, “I’ll go once.”

There were a couple hundred people in the huge sanctuary that Wednesday night.  Pastor John L. Smith was doing a Bible study.  He was good.  I sat there thinking, “Okay, they teach the Word. But I know they’re not friendly.”

This is called prejudice.

After a bit, the pastor called on someone for the benediction and while they were praying, he walked back to where the three of us were sitting. He introduced himself and introduced us to members around us. When he found out that Patricia and James belonged to the choir in Montgomery, Pastor Smith called across the auditorium for Larry Andrews the minister of music.  He took us on a tour of the music suite that night.  And if memory serves me correctly, the next night the three of us were seated in choir rehearsal.

On Sunday I fell in with the finest bunch of young people I had ever been around. Now, I grew up with Christian youth but these kids spoke freely about Jesus like they had been with Him just last night.  The lady I would be married to for fifty-two years was a high school freshman in that group.

I joined in September 1959 and we left when I began pastoring a small church north of the city in late 1962.  In those three years, I was baptized, met my wife, was called into the ministry, was married and ordained.  Life-changing and more, to be sure!

You never know. Life can change in a moment. On a dime, as we say.  And, as a rule, we are not aware of it at the moment.  Only later do we look back and say, “Whoa! God was in that!”

Which is why we need to live every moment in faithfulness.  Because we never know what He’s going to do. Or when. Or with whom.

He knows.  And His way is always best.