Setting High-Water Marks In Life
The 10 years we spent at Sylvan Hills First Baptist Church were a mark-setting era. Now gone from there 20 years, we've recently enjoyed reliving a bit of history with some fellow sojourners. And despite its effectiveness in eroding our once-youthful appearances, time has permitted many simple but significant recollections to endure:
- The popcorn after church, cooked in bacon grease--and relished by Hardy Bell.
- The evangelist we discovered on all fours, waiting to bark like a dog when the prayer was finished. And the visiting pastor who sat too near a huge stalk of pampas grass in our dining room and had to be unceremoniously vacuumed head to toe.
- Our pastor, Don Moseley, who instantly volunteered his wife Margaret to keep our retarded daughter Jenny for a week.
- The snowy morning we played like children in front of Linda Hammett's house, and Harold Walden tore up his knee.
- Mike Preston's Italian cream birthday cake from which Old Puddy Tat had licked a huge chunk of icing--and Tanya Preston's instructions to furtively patch the hole and serve the cake.
- The sprawling yard at the Kerr home where children could gallop with the wind, waiting for the grownups to grill hamburgers and crank homemade ice cream.
- The Sunday afternoons Paul LeCrone would pound my door, hollering, "I feel a ping coming on!" because he couldn't endure the sight of the unused ping-pong table on our carport.
- Secretly watching David and Jeffery Graham sit cross-legged near the softball backstop, alternately pouring cupfuls of dirt on each other's head.
-The inky night my wife--bundled beyond recognition in ski mask, gloves and scarf, and brandishing a butcher knife for protection--tapped at the LeCrone's door to ask a wary husband if his wife could go for a walk.
- The vision of little gunslinger David Crowe donning western garb and effecting a molasses-like drawl to inform his mom that he was a r-o-o-tin, t-o-o-tin cowboy.
- The anxiety of snatching 11-year-old Christa Walden up into my arms moments before she was rushed to emergency surgery.
- The audacity of asking God to solve insurmountable problems--and not being surprised when He did.
Our everyday struggles of child rearing and careers were frequently punctuated with moments like these, all shared by friends on the same side of life's struggles.
But these seemingly unremarkable memories hold the key to the high-water marks of our lives: they do not come by individual effort. Rather, multiple rivulets of shared experience converge and mingle, slowly inching up together to create a flow powerful enough to overwhelm the common valleys of life. Such moments are never forgotten--and probably never duplicated.
Copyright 2002 James McAlister
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