Preacher man

For some reason I dreamed about going fishing last night. It’s strange, because I haven’t thought about fishing lately. I should, I guess because it used to be my Daddy’s favorite pastime….as well as all of my Uncles. I can understand how fishing was a skill which was perfected by a lot of kids and adults too who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930’s. A good fisherman could help feed their family, and food was not easy to come by back in those days.

I remember one day when I was about four years old…maybe closer to five, my Daddy took me with him down on the Chattooga river to go fishing. I was still too little to fish, but I liked to play around on the shore with the rocks, and splash in the water. We went up by the dam to a spot where Daddy usually had good luck. There was another man fishing there at the time, a man with dark, curly hair. Daddy put a lead head on his line and started casting.

After a while the man with the dark hair walked over and said:

“My name’s Roy Huston and I’m pastor at the Trion First Baptist church, and I was wondering if you are going to church anywhere?” “Nope” my Daddy said.

“Well,” said the preacher “I’d like to invite you to come and visit on Sunday”

“I’ll think about it” said my Daddy

I don’t think we went that week, but that preacher was persistent and came to our house up on the end of Simmons street and visited us a couple of times after that. In a few weeks, Dad and Mom gave in and went to the visit that church. They kept on going, and in a few weeks, joined the church and Daddy got baptized. A few years later, when I was eight or nine years old, I got baptized too. I continued to go to that church for many years after that, and took my own children there.

I guess that the pastor was fishing for more than fish the day that we met him on that river. He was doing what Jesus commanded him to do, and become a “fisher of men” Preacher Huston loved to fish though. He was once bass fishing on a little lake on highway 100 just out of Summerville and was catching Bass like mad. You could hear him holler “Praise God” as he was reeling in a seven pounder! Pastor Huston never got to see me get baptized though, as he died at a young age from a heart attack a couple of years after he and Daddy had met on that river. My Mom got a phone call one day from someone while we were at home and went to her knees in shock when she found out that he had died.

Pastor Huston was a man who was doing something that doesn’t seem to be going on as much nowadays as it has in the past. He was a witness. He not only witnessed by his words, but by his example. He grew the attendance of the church in which he pastored by just asking that simple question to everyone he saw that he didn’t know. “are you going to church, anywhere?”

I guess the dream about fishing last night, triggered that memory and I just wanted to write about it. I have gradually shifted my beliefs over the past ten years or so, and I don’t expect I will be changing too much. I am happy to have met that one man way back then though. If nothing else, he taught me at a very young age that your actions speak louder than your words. My Dad attended that church pretty much for the rest of his life, and I certainly also learned that lesson from him to. If you say you are going to do something, then do it. If you say you are going to do something, then do it. Don’t lie. I’ll tell you….that was one of Daddy’s cardinal rules. I got the worst whupping I ever got for lying to my Daddy. He told me that he might be mad at me for doing something I shouldn’t have done, but if I told the truth about it, then I would be in a WHOLE lot less trouble than if I told a lie and got caught in it. It only took me that one time to learn that lesson.

A lot of things have changed since those days in the early 1950’s. This country as a whole has changed, and in my opinion not really for the better in many ways. Maybe we need to look backwards just this once, at this point in history and remember how we were.