This is my journal entry dated October 1980.

I was 40 years old and Margaret was 38. We were in our 19th year of marriage, and pastoring the First Baptist Church of Columbus, Mississippi.  Our children were 17, 14, and 11.

Here’s my journal entry for October 9.

The month of October got off to a poor start around the McKeever household.  I announced to Margaret that until October 27th, there were no open days or nights.  The month was filled with church meetings, committees, banquets, associational meetings, speaking engagements at three colleges, a weekend retreat in Alabama, and a few football games. She cried.  Once again, I had let others plan my schedule in the sense that I’d failed to mark out days reserved for family time.

Years later–long after she had transitioned to Heaven–I read that and wept.

The irony of this is that a year or two earlier, we had come through months of marital counseling and felt that we finally had a healthy marriage.  In fact, one Sunday night six months after this journal entry, Margaret and I would take the entire worship service to tell the congregation of our marital woes, of our attempts to make this relationship work, of our extraordinary efforts to get counseling, which involved driving 180 miles round trip twice monthly for two-hour sessions with a professional therapist, and of the Lord healing our marriage.

We were supposed to have a healthy marriage, and here I am putting everyone and every thing ahead of my own family.

What’s wrong with this picture?

That is my greatest regret from over half a century of ministry: I failed to take care of my family.

I write this now for the benefit of my children and grandchildren.  I write it for the benefit of pastors and ministers in the Lord’s work of whatever kind.  Take care of your family!!

Now, I am not groveling in self-pity. While I grieve, I share it hoping to help someone.

Don’t do what I did.

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The following piece was posted on my website exactly 20 years ago, in May of 2004.  Since we’ve just returned from our 2025 reunion–in the same location and with many of the same family members!–I thought it would be fun to repost it.  I’ll call my “Kilgore cousins” attention to it.  

Nearly twenty years ago, some of my siblings started worrying about our larger family. “The old folks are leaving,” they said, “and pretty soon, there will be no one left except our generation—the ‘cousins.’” Our mother came from a family of nine brothers and sisters, while our dad had eleven, so we were blessed with plenty of fun cousins and doting uncles and aunts. It was a great situation with all of us kids growing up together, visiting one another in the summers, and getting into trouble together. Now, with our parent’s generation aging, we all decided we needed to see each other on a regular basis. (Note:  This was in 2004.  Dad died in 2007 and Mom in 2012.  None of their generation is still living.  My brother Ron is the eldest of the clan as he turns 90 in August.)

Family reunion. The very term conjures up all kinds of crazy images-weird uncles, rambunctious kids, silly cousins. We sent out letters to everyone and for a couple of years tried holding reunions at various city parks and lake homes. Nothing really ‘took’, however, until we got smart and decided to hold the get-together at the only logical site-the old family homeplace. That was the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, 1994.

Our maternal grandparents,Virge and Sarah Kilgore, bought several hundreds of acres of woodland and farmland just inside Winston County, Alabama, right after the turn of the 20th century and cleared land for a house. It was an old-fashioned breezeway-down-the-center home, unpainted, with two bedrooms on each side and a kitchen in the back. Most of their children were born there, including my mother Lois in 1916. Grandpa built a barn and a blacksmith shop and later a garage to house his car, a 1948 Packard. He died in 1949, Granny died in 1963, and no one has lived there since. But all the buildings still stand just as they left them. So, every two years, my Uncle Cecil-who owns the property now-and some of the men get out the tractors and bush-hog the surrounding fields and open up the house and we have a reunion on the Saturday before Memorial Day. (Cousin Johnny Kilgore, age 80, owns the place now and takes the lead in the reunion planning.)

I will never forget the first reunion, that Memorial Day weekend of 1994, because my wife almost did not let me come. Our daughter-in-law Julie–she and Neil live a mile from us in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie–was due to give birth to their first-born at that very time. I assured Margaret I would make the reunion and not miss the birth. On Friday, I made the seven-hour drive northward and on Saturday we held the reunion. They had brought in tables and chairs from the church and union hall so we could spread lunch together and get reacquainted with each other. That night, we built a bonfire and pulled the chairs into a circle and reminisced and sang and got silly.

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