Sunday School Antics

For several years I taught the Junior Boys Sunday School class comprised of 4th, 5th and 6th grade boys. As you can imagine, there were Sundays when I would scratch my head to try and figure out the purpose for putting myself through that kind of torture. I usually ended up with a headache on Sunday afternoons after trying to instill the simplest of Bible knowledge into the heads of those hyper-active boys. Don’t get me wrong, there were many good Sundays too when I could go home with the satisfaction these boys were going to grow up with so much wisdom they would all look back and accredit me the depth of their spiritual discernment. Yeah, right!
Brice was one of those kids you could look at and know he was thinking of some way to disrupt the class. He wasn’t mean; he just loved attention and the notoriety he got from being the class clown. Unfortunately, at that age, the class clown can wield more influence than the teacher. One particular Sunday, Brice was determined he was going to rule the class that day. As I was imparting my vast wisdom to their young, pliable minds, Brice began drawing funny pictures. The funny pictures escalated into caricatures. Before I knew it, nearly the entire class was drawing funny faces of people in the church while I was trying to teach the Ten Commandments or some other worthy Biblical topic. Between sentences I would have to raise my voice and say, “Guys!” or “Ok guys, listen up.” much to no avail.
Finally, I had all I could take and I gave Brice a stern look and told him if I heard one more peep out of him I would send him to his mother. He knew I meant business and I’m not sure if he was more afraid of getting sent to his mother or if he was horrified at the thought of me being mad at him….maybe both.
The very next Sunday as I was in the classroom preparing visual aids, Brice was the first one to the room and he sheepishly came up to me and slowly handed me a 3”x5” index card with something hand written on it. I thanked him and he turned to take a seat and folded his hands on his lap with his back straight against the chair. I sat in my chair and read the card he had handed me:

“Dear Mr. Taylor,

I am sorry I am bad at Sunday school. I will be good for now on. You are a good teacher.

Love,
Brice”

I choked back the tears (because it’s not manly for the teacher to cry in front of his students) and I realized I was there for a reason; if for nothing else than to be a beacon to guide Brice’s wandering ship.
Brice has since moved away, but I still carry that index card in my Bible to remind me that God does use each of us to impact the lives of others. Even though Brice is now grown and headed off to college, whenever he is in town I can count on a firm handshake and a hug around the neck.

--"What matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What matters is helping others win, even if it means slowing down and changing our course."

Joker of the Day

I worked with Jack for a couple of years. We hired him as a maintenance man, but soon found out his talents and abilities were amazingly broad. He could wire an electrical circuit, change a tire on a road tractor and rebuild a pump dispenser in the amount of time it would take anyone else to decide where they were going to eat lunch.
Jack was a huge man…not obese or husky…Jack stood about 6’ 6” and had a size 14 foot; he was just a giant of a man. He was swarthy looking especially when he would let his beard grow out and not get a haircut for awhile. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody and his sheer size would make most people afraid of him. Not that everyone backed away from him. Jack had seen his share of bar fights. When he was several years younger he got into a fight and a guy smacked him across the face with a 2”x4” and knocked most of his teeth out. I can promise you, the guy swinging the lumber got the worse end of the deal.
Behind the toughness, though, Jack was a kind-hearted and generous person and he loved to laugh. One sure way to make him laugh was a good practical joke. One day I stepped out of my office just in time to look down the hall and see Jack roll a lighted firecracker underneath the men’s room door. He didn’t run, he stood there with a huge grin on his face with his hands over his ears. I wondered who in the world was about to be blown off the toilet. All you could hear was, “Oh, Jeesh!....” and the scuffling of feet. Suddenly, there was a blast…at least the initial blast of the firecracker, but then you heard the expletives rolling out of that tiny room louder than any pyrotechnic you could imagine. Next thing I knew, the owner of the company came running out of the restroom still zipping up his pants and he railed on Jack for doing such a stupid thing. Jack stood there enduring the barrage and when the boss was finished, Jack just patted him on the back and said, “have a nice day, Chief.”
There was another time when the boss was away on vacation and Jack contrived an April Fool’s joke to play on the Vice President. Jack called all of the truck drivers on their two-way radios and told some of them to call in sick and some of them to out-and-out “quit” before noon. The Vice President was late getting to the office that morning, so Jack had plenty of time to plot his scam. As soon as the acting boss made it to the office, the dispatcher showed him a stack of orders which had not been filled and proceeded to tell him things were beginning to back up. The first phone call came less than 10 minutes into his morning; a driver called in and said he wasn’t feeling well and was going home. Ok, that’s not so bad…we can just divvy up the rest of his order with the remaining drivers. But then, Jack’s plan began firing on all cylinders. Within 30 minutes the boss had 4 drivers quit and 6 drivers with some kind of illness or another, leaving him with a handful of dispatch orders and no way to deliver.
I was standing in the warehouse talking with Jack and a couple of other fellows when the door burst open and the Vice President stood there with a look of dismay on his face. Almost in a panic he began asking for suggestions and advice. Jack stood quietly, letting the man suffer for several minutes and then put both of his big hands on the boss’ shoulders, looked him square in the eyes and said, “April Fools.” If it weren’t for the rest of us in the room, Jack would have been fired that day.
Still, Jack had a serious side about him as well and I would often find him sitting across the desk from me talking about spiritual matters. Jack had had a triple by-pass surgery about 10 years previously and it seemed like he was preoccupied with dying and constantly worrying about when his heart would give out, but that never slowed the ox down…he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and enjoyed his beer to wind down after work. He could work circles around most of the younger men around him.
Jack respected and trusted me and would talk about things with me he wouldn’t even imagine saying to other guys. It gave me plenty of opportunity to share my faith with him. He would call me Brother Dave and often promised me that he was going to take his family to church.
One day, Jack’s heart did finally give out on him. He was driving his service truck home after a typical day of work. Just a few miles short of his driveway, a massive heart attack took his life; he never even felt the impact when the truck dove off the road and hit a tree.
I don’t know how much good those talks in my office did for Jack, but I do know his death shook up a lot of the other guys around the shop and caused them to wonder about their own mortality and their spiritual status.

Suicide Isn't Painless

Bill was a long-haul truck driver for the company where I was working. He was a fairly quiet sort of guy who did his job and waited until the next run came along...just your average Joe trying to make a living in the dog-eat-dog world of the trucking industry. I was constantly putting in those 12+ hour days and was often in the office when Bill would come in from one of his runs late in the evening. We talked on occasion, mostly just small talk about the weather or a recent stock car event (Bill loved NASCAR), but every once in a while our talks would turn to more personal issues like family and faith. Turns out Bill was quite the rounder in his younger days and growing up in the 70's had seen his share of hard drugs, hard music and hard women. Clearly that was his past, but sometimes our past has a way of catching up with us.

Bill had settled down in the mid 80's and married a local girl. It wasn't long before he became a dad to a beautiful little toe-headed girl who was all her daddy's joy. Unfortunately, Bill's carousing in the 80's left little time for education and life skills development which put him at the bottom of the ladder struggling to raise a family on a trucker's pay. Please don't misunderstand me, trucking is an honorable profession and necessary for our society, but the fact of the matter is when you step into that industry, the early years will either make you or break you and often the family bears the brunt of trial and error failures. After 10 or 12 years, Bill's wife left him for a more lucrative relationship. Needless to say, Bill was devastated and the only thing holding him together was weekends with his daughter.

One evening I was in the office working against a deadline to produce financial statements when Bill poked his head inside my office door. Believe me, it was the last thing I needed that day, but I did my best to muster a smile and invite Bill to take a seat for a minute. I could immediately tell he was agitated and perhaps just needed to vent for a minute or two.

We exchanged our usual pleasantries and then he launched into a monologue of how his ex-wife was threatening to deny visitation rights, how she badgered him for more child support and continually berated him for being a lousy husband, father and provider. I listened sympathetically for several minutes, but then Bill began speaking of "putting an end to it all" and how he had contemplated putting a bullet in his head to shut her up once and for all. Now, here I am up against a deadline and I have this guy sitting across the desk from me talking about suicide. When Bill's eyes welled up with tears I knew I had to act quickly and I had better come up with the right words to say because this guy was on the brink of eternity!

Calmly, I got up from my chair and sat on the corner of my desk in front of Bill and put my hand firmly on his shoulder. I began witnessing to him and assuring him that Jesus was bigger than any problem he faced. You could physically see the change in his demeanor as he began to relax. The hardness in his voice became soft as we talked about his daughter and how much she needed him in her life. The tears began to spill over as he confessed how he had made a mess of his life and had neglected God for years. After a few minutes I whispered a prayer for Bill. There was no earthquake, no angelic choir, no rainbow in the heavens...Bill simply looked up at me and thanked me. Before he left, he spoke of getting back in church and taking his daughter with him. He even talked of making amends with his ex-wife regardless of how awful she would treat him.

Bill left my office that evening and I really don't know what took place in his heart at that moment. I may never know what happened in his life or the impact those few minutes in my office had. A few days later we got a call through dispatch that one of our tankers was involved in a horrific accident. Bill somehow had lost control of his rig and plowed through a convenience store setting off an inferno. The cab of the truck caught fire from a ruptured fuel tank and Bill died in the flames.

I often think about Bill and the last time I saw him, the last conversation we had and wonder if I made a difference.