The other day, Freddie Arnold was telling the pastors about the iron bell his wife had bought at an antiques store years ago and how it was the only thing he had salvaged from his flooded East New Orleans home. When he finished, I told my “bell” story.

My parents used to have this large cast iron bell mounted on a post behind their farmhouse. About 15 minutes before time for lunch, someone would go outside and pull the rope and ring it. The sound carried a mile in every direction, so my mule and I could hear it way down in the bottomland we were plowing. Now Toby, my mule, knew what the bell meant. His ears perked up and he wasn’t worth shooting after that. As long as he was pulling the plow toward the exit, he made double time. But if I was trying to complete this section and still had a few rows to go before knocking off for lunch, he resisted all attempts to turn him.

Finally, when I pulled his harness off and whopped him across the backside, he literally ran up the long hill toward home, displaying more energy in a few minutes than he had expended all morning. By the time I arrived at the house, Toby would have eaten the nubbins in the trough which someone had laid for him and was rolling in the dust.

In Isaiah 1, God said, “The ox knows his owner, and the donkey knows his master’s crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand.”

Some people are dumber than a mule. They’ve gotten themselves lost and do not know how to get to the Father. It’s our job to find them and show them the way. The Lord Jesus said, “I have come to seek and to save those who are lost.” And, “As the Father hath sent me, so send I you.”

After the meeting, Tobey Pitman approached me. “So you had a mule named Toby.” I laughed and said, “Yes, but you spell yours T-o-b-e-y and my mule spelled his T-o-b-y.”

Tobey Pitman is a career NAMB missionary who has directed the work of the Brantley Center–sheltering, feeding, and discipling the homeless of this city–for several decades. These days with so few homeless in the city and due to the low water pressure downtown, the center is closed and Tobey is overseeing Operation NOAH Rebuild for the North American Mission Board. And for the Lord, of course. And for us. He’s a great guy and we are all so indebted to him.

Last night my phone rang. “Hi Joe. This is Toby.” I paused. “Toby?” “Yep.” “Toby Wood?” I thought I recognized that voice. “Of course, how many Toby’s do you know?” I said, “Oh, three or four.”

Toby Wood. Now 70 years old and retired. One of God’s characters. We first met in the late 1960s when I moved from New Orleans to pastor Greenville, Mississippi’s Emmanuel Baptist Church and Toby was a detective on the local police force. He belonged to the First Baptist Church and had a genuine burden for the youth of the city. That’s how the Lord put us together. At first we just met and talked. Gradually, a vision began to form. We could have a city-wide evangelistic crusade at the high school football stadium and bring in some evangelist and reach people for Christ. Toby would be the general chairman, the “out front” guy, and I would be the inside man, the one who met with committees and handled the details.

I’d seen Bill Glass preaching at New Orleans’ Tad Gormley Stadium just before moving to Mississippi and felt he would be ideal. We called him. For the next 12 months, the “Greater Delta Crusade for Christ with Bill Glass” took over our lives. Doug Oldham came from Indiana as our singer. Former Miss America Vonda Kay Van Dyke and other special guests appeared for testimonies. Along the way, the Lord worked a few minor miracles taking care of obstacles, getting us past the school board’s restrictions on the use of the stadium, meeting our financial needs, etc.

June 22-29, 1969, was one great week. The meeting ran from Sunday to Sunday. Both Sundays, we put 5,000 people in the stands and averaged 2500 each weeknight. Several hundred people came to Christ that week. Bill Glass said of all the crusades he had conducted to that point–he had just retired from the Cleveland Browns NFL team–this one was the most heavily integrated. Something like 10 percent of the attendance was African-American. Keep in mind, this was the Mississippi Delta one year after the assassination of Martin Luther King and just a few miles from the site of the formation of the White Citizens Council. Looking back, even that high a percentage of Black involvement was more a tribute to their courage and kindnesses than of anything on our part.

Fifteen years later, our second son Marty–the keeper of this website–told me he was dropping out of the University of Southern Mississippi. He was playing at school, he said, and had lined up a job on the Mississippi River working for a towboat company as a deckhand. But there was something special about the job: he would also be working undercover for a detective agency, reporting on drug usage, safety violations, that sort of thing. One job with two paychecks. I said, “I’m not so sure. That sounds dangerous.” He said, “Dad, the detective agency is out of Gulfport and the head man is your friend Toby Wood.” Oh.

For the next 18 months, that was Marty’s job. Until they called one day to tell him someone had blown his cover and they had just fished one of his counterparts out of the river. It was time to seek other employment.

Our old friend Toby. He reappears in our lives every 10 years or so, and we tell each other how much the other has meant to us and how we wish we could get together. Before he signed off, I said, “Now, do me a favor.” “Okay. What?” “Next time you call, say ‘This is Toby Wood.'” He laughed. He won’t.

My son Neil came over today, Saturday, with his children to cut the grass. I gave him a couple of books I thought he would be interested in, and then remembered the Bible I presented him the other day. It was my preaching Bible through much of the 1980s and 1990s, a New American Standard translation–my favorite–and was identical to another one which I was giving to Marty. “There’s one difference between them,” I told him.

I turned to Luke’s Gospel and showed him the stripped and frayed pages. “Sometime back in the early 80’s I was sitting on the floor reading the Bible when I got up to answer the telephone. While I was gone, the fan was whipping the pages around and your cat started swatting at them. You can see here where he tore off a half of page containing Luke 7 and messed up several pages after that.” He laughed. That cat was a major part of his life for some 10 years or more, the only pet he ever bonded with that strongly. And now he has an unusual keepsake from him.

The cat was named Toby, incidentally. I don’t remember why. Or how he spelled it.