As Long as I've Got King Jesus

Music boomed from a nearby white compact car as I exited my truck before 8:00 a.m. at Gulistan Carpet, the carpet manufacturing company I work for in Aberdeen, N.C.

That small vehicle almost rocked. I heard melodic phrases I couldn’t quite understand and then “be-bop, be-bop” percussion accents. When that musical pattern stopped, a young African-American lady with her head covered by a do-rag stepped from the white car.

“That’ll get me motivated to go in there,” she said, smiling and nodding toward the large manufacturing building located across the parking lot from us.

“What’s the name of that song?” I called to her, as she headed toward the brick structure housing our company’s yarn preparation and tufting departments.

“‘As Long as I’ve Got King Jesus!’” she called back.

“All right!” I said. “I’ve got Him, too!”

“That’s what it’s all about,” she said. “A lot of people don’t have him.”

I walked toward our company’s product development building, located on the opposite side of the parking lot from the manufacturing plant.

I wondered if that young woman worked in “tufting” and might face a day of “creeling,” a process that involves lifting and positioning 12-pound cones of yarn onto metal “limbs” welded onto vertical posts. Each cone of yarn feeds into a plastic tube that runs to a needle. There are about 144 needles placed side-by-side across each tufting machine, and those needles punch yarn into a “backing” during the manufacture of 12-ft. wide “greige” (pronounced “greyzh”). Greige goods, or “gray goods” (a term for un-dyed textiles) are then dyed, latex-backed, sheared and inspected before they’re shipped as carpets to retail flooring stores.

Tufting workers wear earplugs because noisy tufting machines can ruin eardrums. Perhaps a worker might experience loneliness by wearing earplugs during most of an 8-hour shift. I’ve worn them a few times, and they seem to isolate me and cause me to “hear” my own thoughts more keenly.

If that young woman worked in our company’s yarn department, she’d also need earplugs. The roar of twisting-and-winding machines can deafen, too. And she’d need a good spine, as “doffing” (taking 12-pound cones from machines and replacing them with empties) while making rounds on cement can take a toll on a back and a body.

I suspect that hours of standing on cement, lifting heavy cones and hearing the steady hum-roar of machinery – earplugs can’t totally block noise – could drive a person to seek consolation from King Jesus.

Sometimes a crisis event challenges one’s faith in God, but daily routines, toilsome environments and backside-of-the-desert duties can also sap one’s soul. Faith-threatening thunderclouds may pour gully-washers into our lives, but the steady, monotonous, drip-drip drizzle of daily difficulties can just as surely erode our fields of faith.

I recall seeing this sign in a shoe repair shop: “It’s not the mountain ahead that gets you – it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.”

During a difficult trial or even a run-of-the-mill life experience, I often determine to pace myself and cross the finish line with enough reserve left to smile and pose for pictures. But all too soon I find myself huffing and puffing on some lonely backstretch of my “race,” and tedium lays heavy hands on the shoulders of my soul. I feel strength drain from my spirit and, in my tired mind, hear these words spoken by a despair-filled voice: “What’s it all worth?”

But then I remember these words penned by St. Paul: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?...Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us” (Romans 8:35, 37). And I recall that Jesus said, “I’ll never leave you nor forsake you.” And then I know, deep down, that I can face all of life’s challenges, as long as I’ve got King Jesus.

Finding Meaning in Suffering

“Suffering can cause a person to become better or bitter,” someone said. That statement causes me to think of Joni Eareckson Tada, whom I met years ago.

Tada, a quadriplegic, once thanked God for her wheelchair, saying, “By tasting hell in this life, I’ve been driven to think seriously about what faces me in the next. This paralysis is my greatest mercy.”

Some time ago, I saw Tada’s smiling face photo-featured with a “Christianity Today” (CT) magazine article titled “A Heaven-Made Activist,” a story about Tada by CT senior writer Tim Stafford.

As an athletic, horse-loving 17 year-old in July 1967, Tada experienced a Chesapeake Bay diving accident injury that left her paralyzed from the neck down.

“I felt my head hit something hard and unyielding,” she wrote in “Joni,” her 1976 biography. “My body sprawled out of control. I heard or felt a loud electric buzzing, an unexplainable inner sensation.”

During Tada’s two years in a hospital she asked friends to help her commit suicide, but they declined. During that time, Tada met Steve Estes, a Christian teenager three years her junior, who helped her study the Bible and arrive at the classic Reform belief that her injury wasn’t “just an accident.”

“Scripture taught Tada that her soul was infinitely more important than her body,” Stafford says.

A quadriplegic for 40 years, Tada, who married Ken Tada 25 years ago, has inspired many through her “Joni and Friends” organization headquartered in Agoura Hills, Calif. She speaks publicly and produces a daily radio program, books and graphic art. She draws and signs her autograph by manipulating a pen held between her teeth.

I met Tada in the early 1980s when she autographed some copies of “Joni” at a Greenville, S.C. bookstore. Days later, my wife and I took Peyton Hines, a now-deceased paraplegic friend of ours who lived in Greer, S.C., to hear Tada speak at an evening meeting at Greenville’s Furman University.

As a young man, Hines, using a textile mill lift truck that lacked an operator protection bar, was hoisting a large “bolt” of cloth when that roll of fabric fell on him, crushed his back and left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Hines, who often led devotional meetings for his fellow nursing home residents, said he believed his accident brought him into a better relationship with God.

While introducing Hines to Tada after her Furman meeting, I, towering above their wheelchairs, felt a momentary sense of isolation. I realized, as their eyes met, that I knew little about their “fellowship of suffering.”

Tada says she was headed down a self-destructive path before her accident; she proposes that God often permits suffering to enter our lives to drive us to him.

“I was checking out a birth-control clinic to get some pills, because I knew I’d be sleeping with my boyfriend in college,” Tada says. “Somewhere in that mess of emotions and regrets and falterings and failings, while making a sham of my Christian faith, somewhere in the desperation I said, ‘God, rescue me.’ And he did. I believe my accident was a direct answer.”

In her book “The God I Love,” she says, “There are more important things in life than walking.”

Tada is dependent on assistants and has bones “about as dense as an 85-year-old’s,” but she avoids bitterness, chooses a better path and inspires others as she moves forward in life.

Someone said, “The same sun that melts wax hardens clay.”

I like these words from an old hymn: “Spirit of the living God, fall fresh on me / Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me / Spirit of the Living God, fall fresh on me.” And the Psalmist tells us: “He heals the broken in heart and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3).

Father, make us moldable and adaptable and cause your love to shine through us, no matter what happens to us. Amen.

Remembering a Young Neighbor

This photo shows Steve Crain (front left, eyes closed) and the late Doug Dill (dressed in a blazer), sitting to Steve’s right, on Easter Sunday 1954 at Gum Springs PH Church in rural Greenville, S.C.


Some time ago I attended a meeting at the carpet company I work for and saw “Doug.”

No, the man I observed wasn’t Doug – my childhood friend Doug died years ago – but the blond-headed stranger sitting at a long, polished-wood table appeared as I imagined Doug would have as a mid-thirties man, if his life had not ended at a place called “The Devil Catcher.”

“It’s not only the blond, crew-cut hair; it’s the high cheek bones and his slightly turned-up nose that remind me of my long-ago friend,” I thought.

The well-built man at the table had traveled from the Netherlands – or as he called his home, “der Nederlands” – to present textile design software (Ned Graphics, he called it) to our company executives. Two of his coworkers accompanied him and listened as he led the business conversation. My mind drifted from his words as my eyes traced his face. I wondered if Doug’s ancestors had migrated from der Nederlands.

Doug and his family, which included his father, mother and pretty older sister, were our closest neighbors when I was eight years old on Groce Meadow Road in rural Greenville County, South Carolina. Only two plowed acres separated my family’s white-shingled one-story abode from Doug’s two-story weathered old house.

Doug, perhaps five years my senior, served as my role model. Tanned, athletic and usually shirtless in summertime, Doug rode his minus-fenders bike with abandon. My father wouldn’t let me remove fenders from my bike. Doug showed me how to attach a clothespin and a piece of cardboard to my bike so that the cardboard flapped against my tire spokes and sounded like a motorcycle, almost.

Sometimes I’d walk to Doug’s house and wait for our school bus. One rainy morning Doug took me inside his house and squirted some kind of liquid into his palm. He set fire to what he held, and though flames rose, he was not burned. I was amazed, and he offered to let me try, but I chickened out. I probably made the right decision – someone told me Doug extinguished the fire before it burned all the liter fluid he used to perform his trick; he might not have let me in on his secret before I felt the flames.

Mama said Doug was “all boy.” When a teacher read to my elementary school class, “Blessings on thee, little man, barefoot boy with cheeks of tan…,” that classic poem “The Barefoot Boy” by John Greenleaf Whittier, I thought of Doug.

Doug’s family didn’t seem to attend church much, but sometimes my family took Doug to our Pentecostal church’s summer vacation Bible school classes.

A teenage boy named Don – maybe he was a year older than Doug – moved to our neighborhood, and he and Doug fished in a backwoods pond named “The Devil Catcher.”

My father never took me to The Devil Catcher, which lay deep in the woods behind a house further down Groce Meadow Road. As our school bus passed that house, I’d peer into the forest, but the pond stayed out of sight.

Its name intrigued me, and I imagined that wilderness place as overgrown with briars. I envisioned the Devil himself down there, caught in thorns much like the ones he caused Jesus to wear during crucifixion. I could picture Lucifer standing waist-deep, eternally entangled in a watery natural net called The Devil Catcher.

One year, Doug, Don and one of their friends put a johnboat on The Devil Catcher during a duck-hunting excursion. Someone said it was dark when the teenagers headed for shore and that after Doug jumped out of the boat to help guide it to land, a shotgun dislodged from its resting place in the craft, struck against the body of the boat and discharged. The blast caught Doug in the back of his head.

Doug’s parents wanted his funeral conducted at our church. During his eulogy, our young pastor, the Rev. James H. Thompson, mentioned that Doug had raised his hand to receive Jesus as his savior during one of our church’s vacation Bible school meetings. I recall hoping Doug’s parents drew comfort from that thought.

Soon after Doug’s passing, our family moved from Groce Meadow Road to a nearby town called Greer.

One summer afternoon during my college years, I drove to Groce Meadow Road and walked to The Devil Catcher, the mystery pond I’d never seen. Briars laced its banks, but that small, shallow body of water appeared powerless to me. It seemed an unworthy opponent for Doug, a young man full of life during my childhood.

Growing Old and Trusting God

She’s thin, white-haired and shuffling along in the grocery store where I shop. She used to lead the ladies’ group at a church my wife and I attended.

“How are you?” I ask, pushing my cart alongside her as she makes her way to checkout, where her husband, a World War II veteran who worked as an executive for a large corporation, waits.

They’re originally from the North, and both are longtime retired. Her voice is cheerful as she greets me by name and says, “Oh, pretty well.”

“You’re looking sharp,” I say. Her black blouse and slacks accentuate her fair skin and white hair. Her dark clothing seems New York-ish, classic.

“You know what Restless Leg Syndrome is?” she asks.

“I’ve heard about it,” I say. “What are its effects?”

“Oh, it makes you want to go…,” she says, swiftly moving both arms from her sides to 45-degree angles. She can’t seem to think of an appropriate word. I want to finish her sentence with “zoom,” but I don’t.

“I know that’s tough,” I say, recalling that she, a lady known for her Christian faith, also wrestled for years with back problems.

“Sometimes I get a couple of hours of sleep,” she says. “The days are long, and the nights are longer.”

I wonder how getting only snatches of sleep for months might affect a person. I make a few consoling comments, and my friend moves on to join her husband. I process through checkout and catch up with them before they reach their car. We exchange more pleasantries, and as I watch them drive away, I recall that a minister once told me, “Those years they call ‘The Golden Years’? Well, there’s a lot of brass in those years.”

Last year, I attended a Greer High School Class of 1965 reunion in Greer, S.C., and collected some e-mail addresses. I recently sent one of my articles, “Grace Comes When Needed,” to a few former classmates and received this note from one of those friends, Martha Satterfield Brown, a nurse:

“Dear Steve, I just wanted to thank you…I sent this (article) to my college roommate who has just finished her first week of six (weeks of treatments) of chemo…I know she will enjoy this because her faith is so strong and she already realizes that she is truly blessed to have found this cancer early. Her treatment will change her life and body image forever, but we are hopeful that her life will be spared…

“I have 37 days left till retirement and I am so excited…I am so ready to be home to do things with my husband. He retired 10 years ago with heart problems, and we want to do things besides go to the doctor and stay places other than the hospital.”

A minister friend, the father of three adult children, recently e-mailed, thanking my wife Carol for some cards and letters she sent to his wife who will soon begin radiation treatments. “Thank you for your prayers and support,” he added.

Getting older may not be a walk in the park or a Sunday school picnic, to use “old” expressions.

Jesus said to Peter, “When you were young, you girded (clothed) yourself and walked where you wished; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go” (John 21: 18).

Someone said, “In addition to referring to the death that Peter would die, that statement has an eerie application to the life of many older people and the passivity or passion that they embrace in their later years.”

The Psalmist writes in Psalm 71: “In Thee, O Lord, do I take refuge…Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent…I will hope continually and will yet praise Thee more and more…I will go in the strength of the Lord…O God, thou has taught me from my youth…Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not.”

“For he (the Lord) said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you’” (Hebrews 13:5).

What Are We to Judge?

David sports a blue-ink artist’s conception of “Jesus on the cross” tattooed on his inside left forearm and works at the Aberdeen, N.C. carpet manufacturing mill where I work.

David’s “etching on epidermis” extends almost from wrist to elbow. Above his on-arm image of a suffering Savior loom the arched words “Only God,” and beneath that depicted crucifix are the words “can judge me.”

A “fixer,” David works on machines that needle-punch (tuft) yarn into backings to produce 12-foot-wide carpets. He’s thin, white with a bit of a tan and has a slightly beaked nose. Probably in his early twenties, David usually wears an oversized baseball cap that covers the tops of his ears. I seldom see him but think often about his “Only God can judge me” tattoo.

I’ve considered asking David about his arm-borne communiqué. “Is that a message to your parents?” I want to ask. “Did you attend church during your childhood? Did you wander from ‘the straight and narrow’ during your teen years? Did you wander or were you pushed? Are you a Christian? Is your arm a billboard for your faith? What motivated you to endure the pain involved in getting ‘Only God can judge me’ tattooed onto such a visible body part?”

Perhaps if I asked David those questions, he might think (make his own “judgment”) that I was judging him. He might raise his left arm, point to his tattoo and say, “Here’s your sign.”

Discussions often stop, if a person feels cornered and plays the “You’re judging” card.

Someone said that one of the most misunderstood Bible verses is Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

Jesus made that statement during his 3-chapters-long Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), and it means “Do not pass judgment, so you won’t be judged.” A paraphrase is “Don’t criticize, and then you won’t be criticized.” The verse following that pronouncement indicates that whatever judgment you declare for someone will be the same judgment you’ll answer to. You’ll be measured by the same yardstick you use to measure others. Someone interpreted Matt. 7:1 to mean that “Others will probably treat you the way you treat them.” I’ve often heard, “What goes around comes around.” Perhaps that’s some king of “law of nature.” Jesus was talking about common-sense stuff.

According to Romans 14:12, “every one of us shall give account of himself to God.” That statement cautions us to get our own lives in order, so we truly can help others and lovingly inform them of God’s law and grace. (“Christians need to clean up their own backyards,” a friend once told me.)

Here’s a dictionary definition of “judge”: “The presiding official in a court having power to decide.” A second meaning is “to determine.”

Many of us back off, if friends hint that we’re judging them. But is there a “time to judge”? And what are we to “judge”? The Bible contains guidelines about wise and foolish behaviors, labeling some actions and attitudes as sinful. If we talk about those behaviors, are we “judging”?

Some may interpret Matthew 7:1 to mean that we’re not supposed to judge between right and wrong. However, in 1 Corinthians 5, the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, “It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you.” Paul didn’t tell the Corinthians to remember Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Paul didn’t hesitate to “judge.”

Though we should take care to judge actions rather than people – “Love the sinner; hate the sin,” someone said – Christians should declare (“declare” is a stronger word than “share”) the Word of God and speak out about Bible-described “right” and “wrong” behaviors. Christians should expose and judge error by the Bible.

David’s tattoo declares “Only God can judge me,” and I believe that is correct. But a right-with-God Christian need not be silenced by an accusation of “You’re judging.” An in-touch-with-grace Christian is no judge – simply a messenger who’s trying to let the Davids of this world know that Jesus has already taken God’s judgment for them.

MEMORIES OF FATHER STIRRED BY 'SAVING PRIVATE RYAN'

Pictured are Eva and J.B. Crain, parents of Steve Crain. This photo was made while J.B. served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He is wearing the "Railsplitters" patch on his shoulder.

(The below column by Larry Steve Crain was printed in “The Pilot,” a newspaper in Southern Pines, N.C., on August 24, 1998)

The Steven Spielberg film “Saving Private Ryan” gives a glimpse of what some World War II combatants experienced. I received something from the film, though I agree with writer Dennis Rogers that Spielberg brings a shipload of ’60s values to a time and a struggle that took place before he was born.

Having spent a year as a non-combat soldier in a drug-infested “safe” area of Vietnam, I believe I know what Rogers means when he also writes: “It seems beyond the comprehension of Spielberg and so many who came of age during the Vietnam era that sometimes ordinary men do extraordinary things in war for the purest and noblest of reasons.”

I was drawn to “Saving Private Ryan,” not because of any Vietnam experience, but because my father, who died in 1989, was an American infantryman in Germany from November 1944 through May 1945.

As my wife and I viewed the movie, I was overwhelmed by Spielberg’s portrayal of D-Day at Omaha Beach. Watching the drama unfold on the screen, I thought of the day my grandmother, in rural South Carolina, opened the door of the small barn we called “the grainery.” I was seven years old.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the olive-drab backpack hanging on one of the barn’s interior walls.

“That’s your Daddy’s…from the war,” she replied soberly. She handed me the rucksack, and it added reality when my friends and I played soldiers. I still have it today.

The movie continued as I recalled another day from childhood when I opened a drawer and saw my father’s combat infantryman badge thrown in with some nuts and bolts. The silver rifle on the pretty blue background seemed to deserve better company. Also in the drawer was a round shoulder patch showing a white ax splitting a white rail silhouetted on a red background. It was the insignia of the U.S. Army’s 84th Infantry Division, the “Railsplitters.” Known as the Lincoln Division in World War I., it was activated on Oct. 15, 1942, at Camp Howze, Texas, about 60 miles north of Dallas.

My father was a quiet man who said little about the war. He did relate that once he lay all night in the snow, pinned down by machinegun fire. Another time, he told of going for medical attention and then returning to find that some of his friends had been killed. Of the photos he gave me, one is my favorite: My father is smiling as he exits a war zone poultry shed with an egg in his hand.

As the film saga of Private Ryan progressed, I thought about what war does to some of its participants. My father was nervous and negative about life, and I’ve wondered if he would have been that way despite the war. My uncle, his younger brother, says he “Wasn’t like that before he went overseas.”

My mother, now deceased, said the same. Growing up, I felt that he was distant, and I was often unsure of our relationship.

Shattered city buildings appeared in Spielberg’s film, and I thought of a book I had at home. The book’s cover shows a watercolor soldier in front of a decimated town. On the soldier’s uniform is a round shoulder patch showing a white ax splitting a white rail silhouetted on a red background. The book is “The Battle of Germany” by Lt. Theodore Draper, and it chronicles exploits of the 84th Infantry in World War II. The book has come with my family through two corporate moves, and for over 20 years I’ve intended to read it.

A few nights after seeing the film, I found my father’s book in a cupboard in my workroom. Besides the hardcover history, there was an insert summarizing the division’s actions, and there was a lengthy roster of soldiers. I scanned the roster’s pages until I found “Crain, Jesse B., Sgt….Taylors, S.C.” listed under Company E, 335th Infantry.

As I thumbed through the tattered and yellow pages of the booklet, I found a paragraph: “After cleaning up Krefeld, the 335th took Moers and swept on to the Rhine. Co. E was the first division unit to reach the river bank.”

Most of the paragraph was underlined in blue ink, and I felt sure that my father had done it. That was the only inscription I found in any of the three documents. I felt glad that my father’s few blue ink lines indicated a pride I seldom saw.

-------------------------

"Railsplitters" - the shoulder insignia of the 84th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. I photographed my father's should patch, shown above. I still have it. --Larry Steve Crain