Day-Labor, Light Denied


There seems to be a kind of unwritten rule that uncles are supposed to be fun. Dad’s two brothers, the uncles who lived close enough that we could see them regularly when I was growing up, certainly fit the bill. They were smart-alecks who always had something funny to say. They told great stories. They were the sort who might suddenly grab a little niece or nephew and give her or him a sudden whirl through the air. My brother and I liked seeing them.

The other set of uncles, Mom’s three brothers, lived scattered across the western part of the country so that we hardly ever had a chance to see any of them. I heard a lot about them, though. They sounded like interesting guys, especially the one who competed in the Iron Man Triathlon, was an inventor, and once mailed us a Christmas card from Bethlehem while working in Israel.

Then there was the uncle whom some called The Rabbi.

This uncle was an uncle by virtue of marrying Dad’s sister. He’s a Baptist minister, not a rabbi. The nickname was apparently inspired by his affinity for Old Testament Hebrew during his divinity school days. Where my father and grandfather were bi-vocational ministers, working full-time at other occupations to support their families, The Rabbi has spent most of his life as a full-time church pastor.

For a few years when I was a child, the family lived in Michigan while The Rabbi pastored a church there. I recall asking my mother when I was five or six where this Michigan place they lived was. Mom simply said that it was “way up north.” Up near where Santa Claus lived, I wondered? No, not that far, but far enough that we could only see them once or twice a year when they came down for the holidays. When they moved back to Arkansas we saw them more often, though they still lived in another part of the state.

The Rabbi’s four children helped to make family gatherings livelier. I have to admit, though, that he made much less of an impression on me than the other uncles did. He was nice, but also quiet, without the extraverted stories and shenanigans that made the others so fun. It took many years for me to realize how much I had missed the fact that The Rabbi had remarkable qualities of his own. In fairness to my childhood self, the most remarkable part of his life had not yet happened.

When I was in my teens, and The Rabbi was in his forties, he had a severe bout of heart trouble. He underwent surgeries and spent time in the hospital. He almost died. There was a point where the doctors said that they could do no more for him. Family and friends spent a lot of time praying for him. We were all very thankful when he recovered most of his health. He was even able to continue serving as a church pastor.

When he was in his early sixties The Rabbi’s sight began to decline due to macular degeneration. One evening, as he and his wife sat in a restaurant, he saw the lights gradually dimming. It was, he said later, as if somebody had operated a dimmer switch.

For him the lights never came back on.

The doctors told him that he would never be left completely in the dark. He wasn’t, but he could no longer see enough to read, drive, or do many other ordinary and necessary things. It was a devastating blow for anybody, especially someone who loved his work as much as The Rabbi loved preaching. How could anybody preach who could not read sermon notes, or commentaries, or even the scriptures themselves? The Rabbi must have felt like the poet John Milton did when he lost his sight, and found “that one talent which is death to hide lodged with me useless.”

Then an interesting thing happened. The Rabbi’s church congregation insisted that they wanted him to continue to pastor them. His youngest daughter, who still lived at home at the time, began reading to him all of his correspondence and other reading that he needed, and became his scribe. His wife also began to help him with the work, became his chauffeur, and handled many other things. Pastors and their wives are expected to function as a team. They became a team as never before.

After a few years The Rabbi was old enough to retire, and did. Soon he found himself much in demand to fill in at pulpits all over the region. His wife has spent many a Sunday driving him to towns as far as ninety miles, one-way, from home. At one point he served as interim pastor for a church for five or six years. Since his “retirement” he has preached an estimated 1,400 sermons.

I’ve heard him preach. Any minister’s sermon usually begins, after opening remarks, with the principal scripture reading on which the message will be based. The Rabbi can’t read in the pulpit, so he asks the congregation to turn to the scripture and then proceeds to recite it. If need be he will recite other passages as needed during the message. He gets them very nearly dead-on. In a sense he harkens back to the real rabbis of old, who learned great stretches of scripture by heart.

A few weeks ago the church where The Rabbi once served as interim pastor hosted a big celebration for his eightieth birthday. There I saw cousins I hadn’t seen in years, and their children. Well-wishers came from as far away as Michigan. We all had a great time. The Rabbi took it all in his usual quiet, polite way. I learned that still another church has now taken him on as their regular pastor.

The apostle Paul once wrote “When I am weak, then am I strong.” He meant that the weaker or more hard-pressed he himself became, the more God took the opportunity to manifest his power in Paul’s life and service. So it has been with The Rabbi—a man who should have been dead from a failed heart three decades ago, who has been considered handicapped for nearly two decades, and is still going strong.