My wife and I arrived on the campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in late June of 1964.  A couple of days later, after we set up the apartment at 4412-C Seminary Place, Margaret’s mother arrived with our one-year-old son Neil and our little English Ford automobile. We were in our third year of marriage and I was moving my bride nearly 400 miles away from her mama and daddy.

Our  marriage got better immediately. (smiley-face here)

We had chosen this seminary from the other five SBC schools rather easily, and it had nothing to do with reputation.  New Orleans is a mission field.  A rather exotic one, I thought. Historic, too. So, that was it.  We would go where we could make a difference for the Lord’s sake.

We lived on campus the first year.  Margaret took a job at the campus Baptist Book Store and I worked afternoons for the Louisiana Coca-Cola Bottling Company.  A few times that fall, student pastors invited me to preach for their churches.  (I had pastored little Unity Baptist Church, Kimberly, Alabama, for 14 months, and served in an unpaid staff position at Central Baptist in Tarrant for 6 months before coming to seminary. That was the sum total of my pastoral experience.)

We joined Pontchartrain Baptist Church on Robert E. Lee Boulevard in New Orleans where classmate Vaughan Pruitt pastored.  Soon he had me teaching a young couples class and leading worship music.  (To this day, my heart goes out to small churches that have to put up with such inept leadership!)

That first summer, I took classes on missions with Dr. Malcolm Tolbert and Old Testament with Dr. George Harrison and loved both.  Because I’d not done my best in college, with grades hardly more than average, I threw myself into seminary studies to make the most of this. Dr. Harrison and I bonded and remain great friends to this day. (He’s in his 80s now, living in the Mobile, Alabama area. I had him guest-preach/teach in every church I pastored except one. I am eternally grateful to the Lord for giving me such a friend and mentor.)

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“What shall I render to the Lord for all HIs benefits toward me?…. I shall pay my vows to the Lord…in the presence of all His people” (Psalm 116:12-18)

Scripture says it’s better not to vow anything to the Lord than to make a vow and not keep it (see Deuteronomy 23:21 and Ecclesiastes 5:4).

This happened some 25 years ago….

My wife and I were captivated by the words in Psalm 66 which described the awful time we were enduring in the church where the Lord had sent us to pastor only a couple of years earlier. “You brought us into the net; You laid an oppressive burden upon us. You let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water.” And then, we spotted the promise and began claiming it. “Yet You did bring us out into a place of abundance.” (Psalm 66:10-12)

All of that quickly proved to be dead on. We have written on these pages how our reassignment to serve in New Orleans drove us to ask, “Is this the place of abundance?”  It seemed anything but. Then we found Romans 5:20, “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”  We had our answer: abundant sin and abundant grace.

From time to time over the next year or so, I would return to Psalm 66 to be refreshed on its contents, to consider the larger context, and to ask whether I had missed anything.

Then one day I noticed something.

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The only reason that plane ride in the T-38 was so much fun is that I survived it, then looked back and remembered it with pleasure. Columbus AFB Wing Commander Chet Griffin arranged it. He said, “You’ve been ministering to these student pilots all these years; you ought to learn something of what they go through.”  As I say, it was great fun–in retrospect. (smiley-face goes here)

The 1977 trip to Singapore (via Chicago, Anchorage, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and finally my destination) and back was part of a long, long process of drawing an evangelistic comic book for the missionaries there, then coloring each of the many pages (with acrylic and tiny brushes!), and printing up 10,000 copies for their use. It was a job! And fun mainly in retrospect because we did it, it was most unusual, we would never be doing anything like that again, and we survived it.

That deacons meeting that went on for four hours with me as its subject (“to fire or not to fire, that is the question”) was exhilarating only in looking back after we saw how God used it and what He did with it. At the time, no fun.

In fact, I have an admission to make.

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I’m not sure exactly when this was, perhaps sometime around the late 1970s.  I would have been in my late 30s.  I’d recently been to Singapore to draw a full-length comic book for the missionaries and was doing a regular cartoon feature for our foreign mission magazine out of Richmond, Virginia.  Cartooning was getting to be a big thing in my life, even if it didn’t always fit in with my work as pastor of a Southern Baptist church in a county seat town in Mississippi.

At some point, it began mattering too much.

That’s when I quit.

I recall giving it back to the Lord–literally laying it on His altar–and saying, “This is yours, Father. If I never draw again, it’s fine. Thy will be done.”

Now, I had started drawing as a preschooler.  Mom put my little sister Carolyn and me at the kitchen table with pencil and paper and told us to sit there and “Draw!”  Her intent was not to teach us to do anything other than stay out of her way as she cleaned the house.  But I made the discovery that day.

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