Celebrating Church Homecomings

Though October is “Apple Month,” “National Popcorn Poppin’ Month,” “Positive Attitude Month” and “Squirrel Awareness Month,” it is also “Pastor Appreciation Month” and the time that many churches celebrate “homecoming.”

A church homecoming service may honor founders, charter members and those who contributed to the church’s wellbeing. Such a service can help draw a body of believers closer to God and one another.

Writing about church homecomings, the Rev. Steve Watters posted the following on his blog. (A “blog” is a contraction of the term “weblog,” which is a “log” on the “web.” Some refer to the Internet as “the web.”)

“Homecoming Sunday? It’s something of an odd concept within our contemporary culture,” Watters wrote. “I've never entirely understood the term, even though I attended quite a few growing up in Eastern North Carolina. They were usually in the fall and featured ‘dinner on the grounds’ and special music, but I was never sure what they meant by the name. A co-worker who moved from Alabama said the term implied welcoming back both those who have moved away as well as those the church ran off.”

Watters wrote about his plans to speak at a homecoming service held at the church he attended during his youth: “It’s still unusual for me to head home these days. Dad has died, and our old home has been sold…Just this year, I passed the mark of living away from home longer than I lived in my hometown. A lot happens in that time and it gets harder for me to know what to expect when I return. At a minimum, I know that I was blessed with a Godly heritage rooted in deep soil – and that gives me much to celebrate in my homecoming.”

Watters asked his blog readers, “What does the idea of homecoming mean to you?”

Here are some of their replies:

One man wrote, “Maybe it is a North Carolina thing... I don’t remember hearing of them (church homecomings) anywhere else I lived as a child, and not where I live now, either.”

Another man wrote, “It’s definitely a Southern ‘Bible belt’ sort of thing…Homecoming is basically when people who moved away to another area come back to their old church for a reunion celebration once a year…Where I live, homecoming is an extremely commonplace occurrence, and in many churches, if you don’t make the effort to at least RSVP for your old church’s homecoming celebration, you'll have a lot of elderly church ladies calling you to make sure you’re still alive.”

A lady wrote, “I think it's good to connect with old friends/places again. Reminds me of the journey God has brought me on so far in my life and the things he has used to shape me. A couple of years ago, I moved back to my hometown…I don't attend my church from childhood (it was very strict and I don't really want to raise my kids in that environment), but I enjoy going to weddings or baby showers there. While there is sometimes pain associated with the legalism that I encountered there, it is good to see old friends, Sunday school teachers, etc., realizing they are part of my journey, too.”

I recently told my wife that I would be happy to return for a homecoming service held at any of the churches I’ve been part of over the years. Some of those churches have experienced difficulties and splits, but I fondly recall the good times I enjoyed and wonderful friends I knew in those fellowships. I believe we are blessed when we choose to “remember the best, and forgive the rest.” St. Paul said, “Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace…” (Romans 14:19).

Church homecomings seem symbolic of the final homecoming planned for Christians. Dr. John Fawcett, who pas­tored a small church at Wains­gate, England, in the 1770s, wrote the hymn “Blest Be the Tie.” Here is the first verse of that song: “Blest be the tie that binds / Our hearts in Christian love / The fellowship of kindred minds / Is like to that above.” Fawcett ended that song with this verse: “From sorrow, toil and pain / And sin, we shall be free / And perfect love and friendship reign / Through all eternity.”

Christians aren’t home, yet, but earthly homecoming services can serve to draw us closer to God and to one another as we journey toward our heavenly destination.

REMEMBERING A DEAR TEACHER: MISS NELL THOMPSON ADAMS MONTGOMERY

Mrs. Nell Thompson Adams Montgomery and her husband, the Rev. Bill Montgomery, are pictured. They married after the below article was written.

 

My first-grade teacher introduced me to reading, writing, and arithmetic and impressed me with her Christian character.

We stayed in contact after she labored to illumine my then-young mind. Her daughters, Hope Barbare and Charlotte McClimon (their father and Ms. Nell’s husband was the late Richard Adams), recently asked me to write a “Happy Eightieth Birthday” note to their mother. Here is a copy of that letter:

Congratulations, Ms. Nell Thompson Adams, on your eightieth birthday (2009)!

I first remember you as Miss Nell Thompson, my first-grade teacher at Mountain View Elementary School in upper Greenville County, S.C.

I was six years old when I entered your classroom for my first public school experience in 1953. You must have been then 24 years old. You attended the church my family attended, Gum Springs Pentecostal-Holiness Church. Pastor James H. Thompson, your older brother, ministered there, and I had seen you and some of your family at church meetings. You appeared to me to be a quiet, gentle, smiling, holy lady.

You introduced me to “education” and taught me to read. You taught us the English alphabet and the sounds of syllables. “See Jane run” and “See Spot go” were some of the words we read in first grade. When we finished our first paperback reading books, you gave them to us to take home, and when our bus let me off at my house, I raced to my mother who was hanging laundry in our backyard. I read the whole book to her as she stood at the clothesline. She said, “That’s good.”

You were a very young, pretty teacher and controlled our class with dignity. Most of us were respectful in those days, as I remember. The noise level would rise at times, and you would tell us, “I’m going to have to get firm.” We shaped up when we saw the serious look on your face and heard that line, “I’m going to have to get firm.”

Our classroom was located on the first floor in the center of the schoolhouse, which accommodated 12 grades. Our room stood next to a giant coal bin, which provided fuel for the school heating system (radiator heat). To reach the boys’ restroom, we walked past the coal bin on a sidewalk.

You were patient and wise. We lined up each day at our classroom door to have a blessing before we went to lunch. I recall that a girl one day said, “____ (So-and-So) didn’t have her eyes closed during the prayer.” I thought some kind of judgment – perhaps a paddling – ought to land on the girl who dared open her eyes during our blessing! But you, in your wisdom, said to the tattler, “How did you know?”

Whoa! I saw the light! I felt as if there was probably more to life than I understood. I had condemned a girl and had not seen the guilt of the informer. You demonstrated the “wisdom of Solomon” on that day. I’ve thought many times of that incident.

Steve Babb and I got into a first-grade fight (it started because we were “playing wrestling”) on the school playground. Someone went to get you, and you made us sit in the classroom. I thought you were going to paddle us, but you didn’t.

You have “kept up” with me over the years and have been for me a constant encouragement. Thank you for your Christian life and for every remembrance I have of your influence. You are a rare and precious lady, and I thank God for you and your family.

Happy birthday, Ms. Nell!

With love,

From Steve

I often think about the various public school teachers who instructed me. They usually communicated more than simple subject matter, as students often “picked up on” what those teachers believed about life. I recall one high school history teacher who was tall, thin, dark-haired and fair-skinned. Her husband served as a pastor, but this lady (let’s call her Mrs. “Stern”) appeared to be heavy on law and light on grace. She seemed to tolerate no monkey business. I sat in her classroom one day when a girl asked, “Mrs. Stern, why are you so mean? Isn’t your husband a preacher?” A hush fell over the class, and a serious-faced Mrs. Stern answered, “God called him to preach – not me!”

An unknown author said, “A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.” I believe Mrs. Nell Thompson Adams actually did “preach,” in her own way, as she taught my first-grade class.

“I have taught thee in the way of wisdom; I have led thee in right paths” (Proverbs 4:11).

Grandma's House

Pictured is my late Grandma Fowler's house, which has been demolished.

It didn’t seem right when they tore down my late Grandma Fowler’s house.

Her one-story, white-shingled, “three small bedrooms and one bath” home stood since the early 1950s until 2009 on a corner lot at 2543 Locust Hill Road (Hwy. 290) and McElhaney Road in Taylors, S.C.

My Fowler grandparents had nine children, and I am one of 16 first cousins on “that side.” I loved family gatherings at Grandma’s. Surrounded by a Christmas crowd, Uncle Wyatt would sit in Grandma’s living room and talk politics. Uncle Jim and Uncle Ray often responded in loud voices. The house would be filled with laughter and “good to see you” conversations. The roar would cease while someone asked a blessing on the food, and then the noise would resume.

Grandma was a gentle lady who suffered with rheumatoid arthritis and rarely left her house. She limped and wore a built-up shoe for, as I remember, her right foot. When possible, her three daughters – Louise, Eva (my mother) and Edna – gathered at Grandma’s on Tuesdays. As Grandma grew older and heavier, the three daughters helped her shower during Tuesday visits. I recall seeing Grandma sitting and combing her freshly-washed, long gray-white hair after one of those baths.

My parents both worked during part of my growing up years, and my sister, Shirley, and I spent many summertime hours at Grandma’s “humble abode.” Her home was literally and soulfully a sort of halfway place between Sandy Flat (where I spent childhood years) and Greer (where my family lived while I was a teenager).

The summer after my seventh-grade year, the year I first “took band” at Davenport Junior High, I practiced playing my old trumpet at Grandma’s. She had no air conditioner, so windows were open. Inez Brookshire heard me playing one morning as she worked in her yard across the road. She phoned and asked Grandma if I would play “Amazing Grace” and a couple of other hymns. I was glad to oblige.

The Rev. Ronnie Fleming, a first cousin of mine, and some investors bought Grandma Lilly Nix Fowler’s place after her last surviving child, James A. Fowler, died at age 82 in December 2006. Uncle Jim was the seventh of the nine children born to Lillie and James August “Aug” Fowler. Jim never married, always lived “at home” with his parents and worked in textiles until he retired from Lyman Printing and Finishing mill. After Grandpa died in 1956, Jim looked after Grandma until she died at age 86 in 1978. During his last best years, Jim often parked a used car or two in his front yard and tried to make a sale. If you ever drove by Grandma’s house while he sat on the front porch and watched cars zoom by, you might have seen Jim taking a snooze – head tilted back, mouth open.

Jim stayed at that house until my cousins Raymond and Redmond Fowler (twins) helped him move to an assisted living center about a year before he passed on. He died in his sleep while living at Woodruff Manor.

The investors sold Grandma’s property, and I heard that a dentist office might be built on that site. Earlier this year, I learned from my Uncle Fred Crain that Grandma’s house was no longer “there.”

“Did they move it?” I asked, hoping that it had been located to another property and would serve as a home for someone.

A few of my cousins thought it might have been moved, but my Aunt Frances Crain attended a high school reunion and talked with Palmer Steadman who still lives next door to the property Grandma once owned. Palmer said someone brought a wrecking ball, and Grandma’s house went down. Workers hauled away the rubble.

I visited Greer in July and drove past Grandma’s old property. It had been excavated and prepared for some kind of building. As I moved past the corner lot that once hosted the house where I experienced love and laughter, I thought of the words of Hebrews 13:14: “For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”

Earthly evidences of precious memories may fade or be destroyed, but I thank God for the lasting love of family and friends and for the special eternal love he has expressed to us in Jesus Christ who said, “In my Father's house are many mansions…I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:2-3).

Is America a Christian Nation?

Is America a Christian nation?

All but two of the first 108 universities founded in America were Christian. Of those schools, Harvard was founded first and listed this as Rule Number One in its student handbook: “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, John 17:3; and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments."

U.S. President Harry Truman wrote to Pope Pius XII in 1947, saying, “This is a Christian nation.”

“He certainly did not mean that the United States has an official or legally-preferred religion or church,” said Carl Pearlston, writing in 2001. Pearlston, an attorney, a former professor of Constitutional Law and a Jewish conservative, says Truman didn’t mean to slight adherents of non-Christian religions, “But he certainly did mean to recognize that this nation, its institutions and laws, was founded on Biblical principles basic to Christianity and to Judaism from which it flowed.”

Truman also said, “The fundamental basis of this nation's laws was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and Saint Matthew, from Isaiah and Saint Paul…If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.”

Pearlston offers these quotations:

Woodrow Wilson said, “A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.... America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the tenets of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.”

In 1811, New York Chief Justice James Kent said: “...whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government...We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity...Christianity in its enlarged sense, as a religion revealed and taught in the Bible, is part and parcel of the law of the land....”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story said in 1829, “There never has been a period of history, in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundation.”

Pearlston asked in 2001, “Can America still be called a Christian nation?” He replied, “It is certainly a more religiously pluralistic and diverse society than it was during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. There are increasing numbers of non-Christians immigrating to this country….We live, not under a Christian government, but in a nation where all are free to practice their particular religion, in accommodation with other religions, and in accordance with the basic principles of the nation, which are Christian in origin. It is in that sense that America may properly be referred to as a Christian nation.”

A recent study found a decline in the percentage of Christians in the U.S. Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. In 2008, “Christians” reportedly comprised 76 percent of U.S. adults, compared to about 77 percent in 2001 and about 86 percent in 1990.

President Barack Obama stated during an April 2009 press conference in Turkey, “One of the great strengths of the United States is – although, as I mentioned, we have a very large Christian population – we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, or a Jewish Nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”

President Obama was right, in the sense that, as Pearlston states, America has no “official or legally-preferred religion or church.” But, 76 percent of Americans still identify with “Christian culture,” and America was founded on Christian principles. I believe our Founding Fathers envisioned a government that would promote and encourage Christianity. True Christians know that sin and the worship of false gods will destroy a nation, but “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 33:12).

Father's Day - Not Easy for Everyone

Father’s Day is not an easy occasion for everyone, but it’s an important day – a time to honor living fathers and fathers who have passed on.

My wife, Carol, who was born in Oakland, California, remembers seeing her father only twice. Carol’s mother left her marriage and took Carol, who was then one and one-half years old, to her Pennsylvania homeland. Carol was seven or eight and staying one night at her maternal grandparents’ house when a man knocked on their door.

Carol, sitting at a kitchen table when her grandmother opened that door, saw the man in the darkness but didn’t recognize him. Her grandmother stepped outside to talk. When she reentered, she told Carol, “That was your father.”

Carol didn’t see him again until she was a college student in Greenville, S.C. After graduating from high school, she asked her mother to locate her father. Carol mailed one of her graduation pictures to him (he lived in New Jersey), and they arranged to meet in Greenville in the fall. He arrived with his second wife, their five children and a German Shepherd dog. Carol had mixed feelings about their meeting and never communicated again with her father. She keeps a small, framed picture of him sitting on the mantel in our home. The photo – taken before he and Carol’s mother separated – shows her father in his army uniform.

Though our children (two adult daughters) treat me royally on Father’s Day, and Carol enjoys seeing me in good relationship with our offspring, I am aware on each Father’s Day that Carol knows what it’s like “to grow up without a father in the home.”

The Psalmist comforts “the Carols of this world” and all of us with these words: “Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: extol him that rides upon the heavens by his name JAH (the LORD), and rejoice before him. A father of the fatherless, and a judge (a defender) of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God sets the solitary in families: he brings out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land” (Psalm 68:4-6).

Psalm 27:10 offers these words: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.”

The writer of Hebrews 13:5 tells us that God has promised, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (KJV). A modern version translates that verse this way: “I will not give you up or desert you.”

No matter how well or how poorly our parents fill or filled their roles, we should honor (respect) our parents because God asks us to do so. Respecting parents is tied closely with respecting God and people placed in authority over us.

Augustine asked, “If anyone fails to honor his parents, is there anyone he will spare?”

The fifth of God’s Ten Commandments contains a promise along with its directive: “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee” (Exodus 20:12).

I talked years ago with a teenager whom I’ll call “Dan.” Dan’s parents left him with his maternal grandmother when he was a baby, and she, with small income, was raising him. Dan harbored mixed feelings toward his father, whom he infrequently saw. I pointed out that his father “brought him into the world” and though he might not be a good father, the man Dan knew as his father “was” his father. Dan was an excellent athlete, and I mentioned that he probably inherited his physical coordination from his dad, who participated in sports as a young man. I wanted Dan to find some way – even a small way – to respect his father and avoid self-destructive tendencies spawned from father-child conflict.

Doug, who worked as a personnel director, once told me that his father served as a pastor. One of Doug’s childhood jobs was to polish his dad’s shoes each Saturday night and get them ready for Sunday morning. One week, his dad punished Doug for something Doug had no part in. His dad later realized he’d wrongfully punished Doug, but he said nothing. Saturday night came, and as Doug picked up one of his dad’s shoes, he found an apology note from his dad placed inside that shoe. Doug smiled as he told me that story. I’m sure he would have preferred to hear words from his father’s lips, but the note in the shoe was his father’s “way.”

Father’s Day is not an easy occasion for everyone, but it is an important day.

Fatalism or Free Will?

I believe God gives us “free will,” allowing us to choose many of the paths we take.

For centuries, Christians have debated extreme “predestination” versus “free will.”

A story goes that an older Christian believed all that happened in his life was “predestined” or “meant to be.” He rose from bed one morning, walked to his home’s staircase and fell down a long flight of steps. Hurting, he got up, looked at the staircase and said, “I’m glad that’s over."

Non-Christians also talk about “destiny.” Someone said destiny may be seen either as a fixed sequence of events that is inevitable or that an individual chooses his destiny by selecting various paths throughout his life.

I’ve heard of soldiers who say a man won’t die in battle until a “bullet has his name on it” or “until his number is up.”

Here is an old Arab tale about “destiny”:

A merchant sent his servant to market. The servant returned trembling and said, “Master, just now in the crowded marketplace I was jostled by someone, and I turned and saw it was Death that jostled me. Death looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Please, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Damascus and there Death will not find me.”

The merchant lent him a horse, and the servant rode as fast as the horse could gallop. The merchant then went to the marketplace, saw Death standing in the crowd and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”

“That was not a threatening gesture,” Death said. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him here, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Damascus.”

As a child in 1956, I heard the song “Que Sera, Sera,” meaning (in French and in several “romance languages”) “Whatever Will Be, Will Be.” Singer Doris Day first recorded these lyrics to that song’s first verse:

“When I was just a little girl / I asked my mother what will I be / Will I be pretty, will I be rich / Here’s what she said to me / (chorus): Que sera, sera / Whatever will be, will be / The future’s not ours to see / Que sera, sera / What will be will be.”

The lilting melody of “Que Sera, Sera” seemed comforting to me in 1956. That song’s message seemed to be “Relax; many things – maybe all things – are beyond your control.” While some people may find solace in that song, there is also an inherent fatalism in its message.

French novelist Alphonse Karr (1808-90) is credited with saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Karr’s quote seems to convey that the more we change things, the more we tend to live out patterns that do not change. There seems to be a bit of “rearranging the chairs on the Titanic” flavor in that quotation.

In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1643), God “freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass.”

Someone asked me, “If God knows who will be saved and who won’t, how do people have ‘free will’ to choose their destinies?”

That’s a hard question, but I believe God’s foreknowledge of how things will turn out does not exclude the free will he gives to each of us. We can only partially understand the “mind of God” – “his ways are higher than our ways” – so we trust the character of God, who is good, loving, just and merciful.

The Lord is longsuffering (patient), “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

Christians differ over how much control each person has over his own life. Someone said that if human responsibility is overemphasized, Christianity turns into legalism, without an appreciation for God’s power acting in lives. If God’s responsibility is overemphasized, Christianity turns into fatalism, losing the emphasis on obedience to God and service to others.

I believe God gives us “free will.” Let’s decide to follow Christ, block out worldly, fatalistic thoughts and make daily God-honoring choices.

“But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve...But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord" (Joshua 24:15 (NIV).

John Harper's Last Convert

Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, died Sunday, May 31, 2009.

She was just over two months old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat in the icy North Atlantic, according to AP reporters Meera Selva and Jill Lawless. Dean, 97, died in her sleep “where she had lived – in Southampton, England, the city her family had tried to leave behind when it took the ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage, bound for America.”

The Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank within three hours. Dean was one of 706 people – mostly women and children – who survived. Her 2-year-old brother and her mother also survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.

John Harper also died that night, and Mark Dever tells this awesome story about him in a chapter of “The Gospel and Personal Evangelism” (Reference: Moody Adams, “The Titanic’s Last Hero: Story About John Harper,” Columbia, S.C.: Olive Press, 1997, 24-25):

John Harper was born into a Christian home in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1872. At about 14 years of age, he became a Christian and began to tell others about Christ. At 17, he began to preach, going down streets of his village and pouring out his soul in pleading for men to be reconciled to God.

After five or six years of preaching on street corners and working in a mill during the day, Harper was taken in by the Rev. E. A. Carter of Baptist Pioneer Mission in London. This set Harper free to devote his whole time and energy to evangelism.

In September 1896, Harper started his own church with 25 members. It numbered over 500 when he left 13 years later. During this time, he was both married and widowed. Before he lost his wife, he was blessed with a beautiful daughter named Nana.

Harper almost drowned several times. When he was two-and-a-half years old, he fell into a well but was resuscitated by his mother. At the age of 26, he was swept out to sea by a reverse current and barely survived. And at 32, he faced death on a leaking ship in the Mediterranean.

While pastoring his church in London, Harper continued his fervent evangelism. The Moody Church in Chicago asked him to come to America for meetings. Those meetings went well, and a few years later, Moody Church asked him to return. Harper boarded a ship – the “Titanic” – with a second-class ticket at Southampton, England, for the voyage to America.

Harper’s wife had died just a few years before, and he had with him his only child, Nana, age six. What happened after this is known mainly from two sources. One source is Nana, who died in 1986 at the age of 80. She remembered being woken up by her father a few nights into their journey. It was about midnight, and he said their ship had struck an iceberg. Harper told Nana that another ship was almost there to rescue them, but, as a precaution, he was going to put her in a lifeboat with an older cousin, who had accompanied them. As for Harper, he would wait for the other ship. Nana and her cousin were saved.

An unidentified Scotsman is reportedly the only other source of information concerning Harper’s last earthly actions. Here is that account:

In a prayer meeting in Hamilton, Ontario, some months or years after the Titanic sank, a young Scotsman stood up and in tears told this unusual story of how he was converted.

He said he was on the Titanic the night it struck the iceberg. He had clung to a piece of floating debris in the freezing waters.

“Suddenly,” he said, “a wave brought a man near – John Harper. He, too, was holding a piece of wreckage.

“He called out, ‘Man, are you saved?’

“‘No, I am not,’ I replied.

“He shouted back, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.’

“The waves bore (Harper) away, but a little later, he was washed back beside me again.

“‘Are you saved now?’ he called out.

“‘No,’ I answered.

“‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved,’ Harper said.

“Then losing his hold on the wood, (Harper) sank. And there, alone in the night with two miles of water under me, I trusted Christ as my saviour. I am John Harper’s last convert.”