Through It All in the Hollow of His Hand: The True- Life Story of Samuel M. Smith — Truth Is Sometimes Stranger Than Fiction

By Samuel M. Smith

Through It All, IN THE HOLLOW OF HIS HAND

the real-life story of dangers, great and small, that author Samuel M. Smith faced but through which he was protected by the hand of God.

A Bible college student on summer break in 1955, he was attacked by his father in the middle of the night. His mother was already killed and everyone including Samuel, believed his father had done it because he was being unfaithful. Why did he attack Samuel?

This was the first of five life-threatening personal attacks he suffered. Then, stabbed, 1969, by someone he helped and still has the scar. He was also protected from a teenage gang, with tire irons 1969 for getting a friend to go to church, and gunpoint robberies, 1968, while taxicab driving in Chicago and gunpoint robbery, 1984, while taxicab driving in Honolulu.

He has done short-term missionary work in the Philippines; T'bilisi, Republic of Georgia, and Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia.

He has written over 100 Total Gospel tract titles some translated in up to eleven languages.

Married to Virginia Quilates, from the Philippines, they have four sons, three of whom are preteen. Through it all, he has been in the hollow of Gods hand! It has been a truly exciting adventure learning to lean on Jesus and trust Him completely.

His mission, to publish the gospel, as Jesus Christ and His original Apostles would preach and teach today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781449746797

Samuel M. Smith

Samuel M. Smith’s first magazine article, Honey Bus, was published in September 1953. Graduated Famous Writers School Fiction Writing 1971. Major in Graphic Arts, Minor in Journalism  in 1976, was a News correspondent from 1984 to 1986. He is the Editor and Publisher of Up Way Publications gospel tracts and books since 1969, as well as the Author of: MARRIAGE: Delight or Disaster. © 1969, 1989 and To Be A Minister © 1989. The name Followers of Jesus Christ Ministries was added as a "parent" ministry about the year 2000. Up Way Publications International has been the new name of Up Way Publications since 2007 because ore than seventy (79) pastors in seventeen (17) communicate and several refer to Sam as "Bishop."

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Protected Through My Early Years

When I was born near the little town of Enterprise in Volusia County, Florida, there was no band playing in our country neighborhood even though it was a national holiday, Memorial Day. But even then, as I was being born, I was In the Hollow of Jesus’ Hands. In fact, if you believe my mother’s story, Dad had driven to Sanford to get Mammy Jones, a black midwife, and when I arrived at noon, according to Mom, Dad and Mammy Jones were still several miles away. Dad always insisted that he and Mammy Jones got there just in time, but I tend to believe Mom when she said I was already tied off and resting when they arrived. At least it seems more romantic that way!

And I am sure that nobody would have dreamed of all the deliverances from being killed, and all the other dangers, testings and adventures I would go through during my lifetime. To my parents and neighbors, I was just another baby. But more about that in later chapters.

One of my earliest recollections was of being in my mother’s arms as we traveled in the sky blue 1937 Willys two-door sedan and of seeing us on a dusty road and men in Army uniforms marching along the roads all over the place. Later, I learned that we had been passing near Fort Belvoir, Virginia, on the way to Franconia and Springfield to visit my grandparents and aunts and uncles on both sides of the family. I really don’t remember anything else about that trip, since I was only a month old, I’m told, but Mom used to have some pictures taken of me during that trip.

From the time when I was a small boy, I still can remember a picture of Grandma and Grandpa Deardorff standing by the front door of their home, which they called Cedar Lodge on Route 644 in Franconia, Virginia. Grandma was holding a baby wrapped in blanket. The baby was me. But I cannot ever remember a time of seeing Grandma walking; I can only remember Grandma in a wheelchair, a result of missing her step going down into the cellar and injuring her ankles, then having phlebitis set in. There was also a picture of my then thirteen-year old cousin Roberta holding me as her older brother, Albert, looked on. These pictures were all taken on the front steps of Grandpa’s home.

Somehow I don’t remember ever seeing any pictures of me with Grandad or Grandmother Smith or Aunt Virginia or Uncle Heath or Aunt Alice Golden or any other member of Dad’s family. I guess they weren’t as much into photographs, although they were very big on family trees and genealogy and the like. It seems we Smiths are a part of a much larger family tree of Lewises, which included the famed explorer Meriwether Lewis after whom both my father and I are named. There is, in the archives of the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, a two-foot by three-foot family tree chart with a detailed index book of The Lewis Family of Virginia on which all my Smith and Lewis ancestors from the late 1700’s names appear — all, that is, except the children and wife of our famous Meriwether Lewis, who married an Shoshone Indian woman Sacagawea and because his children were considered breeds. Not one of Meriwether Lewis’s six children appear on the family tree, nor does his wife. That chart can also be seen at the historic site of Herndon House, South of Alexandria. *(In attempting to verify this family tradition, I discovered that Meriwether Lewis, whom I knew had been Governor of the Louisiana Territory at the time of his death allegedly never married and now the family story is in question. Some believe He was murdered. According to archived information I found on MSNBC, he never married and had no children.)

Due to the marriage of a descendant of Robert Lewis and a descendant of Charles Lewis, my father’s lineage for several generations is on both sides of the family tree chart, and my name, as the last-born before the chart was finished, is a dead-end twig on both sides.

Also, from that period of my life, I remember a picture of Grandma and Grandpa Deardorff beside a 1935 Chevrolet two-door sedan with the big door hinged at the back and the latch at the front, which meant that if it came unlatched while driving, the wind would fling it wide open — not a good thing.

I later inherited that Chevy from Mom when I got old enough to drive at about age sixteen — my very first car. After it was mine, I painted a large green rectangle on each door and hand printed Silver Hives Apiary and Nectar Brand HONEY.

I don’t remember much about Grandmother Jennie Lewis Smith. As a pre-school boy I do remember the white painted wood-slat swing with bench seats facing each other across a slatted wooden floor under the big maple tree for which Grandad Smith’s place was named — Maple Hill, and Grandmother Smith and I swinging on it. That is the only memory I have of Grandmother Smith because she died soon afterward from burns. I recall being told that boiling grease spilled over into the flame of a white gasoline pump-up pressure type stove like the one Mom used for years. In fighting that fire, she got badly burned. I think I remember not being allowed to climb into her lap because she had already suffered the burns and that she seemed very sensitive to being touched as though it hurt her. I guess over time, her system was poisoned by her burned flesh. I do not remember her face at all.

I do remember the prim and proper boxwood hedge by the driveway at Grandad Smith’s place, the white gravel rock driveway that bent at the top of the ridge above the paved road and went down to enter on the paved road probably a hundred feet from that bend. I remember the fields of corn and how good it always tasted when Aunt Virginia cooked it. Its distinctive aroma reached all through the old house and even out into the yard. And the bowls of fresh black raspberries with thick sweet cream over them tasted so-o-o good. I always looked forward to the Smithfield real smoked ham that was always baked just to perfection.

Some day when you are just driving around the countryside, if you end up out in Springfield, Virginia, on the main road that goes down from Annandale to Springfield, just as you cross the Southern Railway tracks and are about to go under the outer beltway freeway, the fill for the freeway at that point covers what was once a field of springs and that property used to belong to my Grandfather Walter Alexander Smith. I spent many happy days as a small boy in his house which used to be about where the outer loop lanes of the beltway are. His old house was so old that instead of nails, it was put together with wooden pegs. When they got ready to build the beltway, it was burned down for fire department practice!

At some point, as a toddler at home, I recall pushing a toy truck across the floor and somehow falling and cutting the right side of my upper lip just below my nose. It happened at a point at which the concrete of one part of the porch floor joined to a wooden portion and there was just the slightest bit of a groove or bump there. I am not sure if the gash was made by a sharp edge on the metal toy truck or the sharp corner of a wooden toy box that was right by that same spot. I do know that even at the age of sixty-two, I still had that scar and I am reminded that it could just as easily have been my eye that got cut. I am thankful that I was In the Hollow of Jesus’ Hands. I am thankful not to be blind in one eye.

My next early childhood recollection is of standing in my Kiddie-Koop, a sort of wooden framed crib with wire screened sides and a screened top that could be closed to keep the mosquitoes from eating me alive while I slept. On this particular day, a strong rainstorm had hit. Some stranger in an old Essex car had come and bought the old house-trailer my parents had traveled in during the time Dad was a traveling tent evangelist. The Essex was driving out of our driveway towing that trailer. I still visualize the scene with the big old ironwood (hackberry) tree that shaded the southeast corner of our yard. The driveway then was about midpoint of our cypress-slab house. The field in front of our house, which was real rich black muck land that tended to flood every time it rained hard, was usually planted either in okra or Black Valentine beans, but on that day I recall that the okra was being blown hard enough from the North that its tops were bending down into the water, the rain coming down in driving sheets as that Essex and trailer rocked out the ruts of our driveway.

In those days, Dad was farming the rich mucky field in front of our house, which we owned, as well as several other nearby fields that he rented and also selling firewood for a living. Several times, I got close behind the old mule and he tried to kick me, but always missed. I was in the hollow of God’s hand.

I can never forget the many times, most likely daily, that my mother held me in her lap and read the Bible to me. Later, it was Bible stories with me sitting at her feet. I look back, now, and am very grateful for that early training in the Word of God. It has truly proved to be …a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my pathway. Don’t ever let anyone convince you that reading to a small child or teaching your child the Bible and right and wrong at an early age does no good, because I am living proof that it does.

The water pipes in our bathroom were out in the open. At first because the original cypress slab construction had no hollow walls in which they could be concealed. The weather was cold enough in the winter time in that part of Florida that if the pipes had been outside, they could possibly have frozen. I remember one night as I was in the bathtub, a black snake somehow squeezed in the hole beside the water pipe and came crawling across toward the tub. I yelled and Mom came running. I don’t remember who killed the snake —- probably Mom. In those days, we did not consider any snake to be good because we believed that they represented Satan or satanic power.

At least a couple of years before I started school, I remember our neighbor, Mrs. Lang holding me in her lap as we ate Christmas dinner. Mrs. Lang became very sick a month or two later and was hospitalized for a while. Then she was transferred to a nursing home in DeLand where she died of Tuberculosis around Easter.

For several years afterward my parents went and held church services for the people in that Old Peoples’ Home on Sunday afternoons. We had a fold-up reed type organ that Mom played for the song service.

Before she got noticeably sick, Mrs. Lang had a bad cough for quite some time. But whenever we went back and visited them or they came over to our house, like at Christmas, she usually held me in her lap. I never realized at that time just how important my exposure to TB at that young age was, but many years later, I realized that I had been protected in the hollow of Jesus’ hand and I thank God. My exposure when I was in youthful peak of health had helped my body build immunity against TB, to which I have since been exposed numerous times without ever contracting it.

My parents always to gave to the Tuberculosis Association’s fund drives.

I have no idea who all the different faces of my parents’ friends were, but another of my very earliest recollections was of being asked what my name was and I would say, Sam-u-el Mer-i-we-ther Smith. Everyone seemed to think it was great stuff that a child so small could pronounce and later spell a word as big as Meriwether.

My parents were always proud of my accomplishments in saying things and, after I started school, at Enterprise School, in spelling. By December of my first grade year, I had asked Miss Euretta Faber, who taught both first grade and half the second grade, and I was allowed to take the second grade spelling tests on which I usually made 100 percent.

We lived directly across the old Osteen-Enterprise Road, which is now known as the Lakeshore Drive, from Stone Island Ranch. Today, a road department two-headed arrow sign blocks our old driveway to warn Stone Islanders they must either turn left or right. The main thoroughfare from Enterprise to Osteen now is what used to be known as Doyle Road and in my childhood days it was an unimproved, almost impassible soft sand road. Grandpa Deardorff used to spend winters with us and always enjoyed going fishing up on Mitnick Lake which is on the north side of the present Doyle Road. Great care had to be taken not to get stuck in the soft sand. I remember one time we did get stuck in Grandpa’s 1935 Chevrolet and how we dug down and put branches and palm leaves under the tires until we were able to get rolling at enough speed not to get stuck again. We were in the hollow of God’s hand.

My mother was about as anti-alcohol as you could get. She detested anything to do with the stuff! But she would go to the Rexall drug store in Sanford and buy a little bottle of Hires Root Beer Extract. She would make it up as directed with the sugar and water, extract and yes, yeast. The first few days after she made it, it was just sort of sweeter than store-bought carbonated-water rootbeer, but as it aged, it got bubbly and began to have fizz to it. After about a month or so of this aging, it had some real kick to it.

I don’t think Mom ever did realize, that it was really fermented beer with a real alcoholic content! She thought, and I believe rightly so, that it was more nutritious and healthy than the store-bought carbonated-water kind.

During most of the early years of my life, Dad sawed and sold firewood for a living. He had rigged up an old 1928 four-cylinder Chevrolet engine with a clutch and transmission and a long, spliced shaft attached to a 32-inch diameter cut-off saw. He then had attached a carrier table, which pivoted at the bottom to support the weight of the log or slab he was sawing while he would push it against the whirling teeth of the saw. After he finished sawing wood, he would shift the transmission into neutral and shut the engine off because the momentum of the saw was enough to keep the engine turning over for some time and that sucked up gasoline even though the engine was not really running. Back then gasoline was around four gallons per dollar!

I was surely in the hollow of God’s hand when I was about four or five. I knew about the way Dad shut down the saw and knew that the teeth of the saw were very dangerous, but I thought I would just use my hand as a brake on the flat part of the blade near the hub, well away from the teeth. There was nothing sharp there. Although I don’t think disk brakes for cars had been invented yet, the principle was what I tried. I was just going to ease my hand against it real easy and slow it down, but instead, its momentum was great enough that it threw me flat on my stomach nearly five feet away. I didn’t realize my left elbow had swiped the teeth as I flew by, but I had gotten cut. I didn’t feel any pain there for a few seconds until Mr. Holland, our neighbor and Dad’s employee, came running over and said, Oh, you’ve cut your arm! Then, more from seeing the blood than from pain, I ran crying into the house to Mom. To this day, at age 74, I have several diagonal scars on my left elbow from that incident, but I may also owe my life to the injury, as you will read about in a later chapter. I was certainly in the hollow of His hand as I flew by that saw’s teeth! God still had plans for this boy!

About this time in my life, I also made my first attempts at preaching to Mom and Dad on several occasions that we missed going to church. Gasoline was rationed during World War II and sometimes Dad didn’t have enough ration stamps to buy gasoline to deliver the firewood to his customers and also for us to go to church.

I would get out the big old family Bible and we would sing a few songs. I would ask Mom or Dad to pray and then I would expound my childish understanding of the Bible story that went with some picture of Bible characters or scenes that I happened to turn to in that old family Bible.

Dad almost got killed on that same saw when I was in either the first or second grade. He was sawing green live-oak branches to fill a firewood order when, at about ten o’clock at night, a piece of gnarled live oak he was cutting bound on the saw, hit him in the head, knocked him unconscious and his head came down right across that vicious blade, cutting his forehead and making a track back across his scalp a distance of seven and a half inches. Miraculously, it did not penetrate his skull and about a half-hour later, he came to and came into the house all bloody. Mom almost fainted at the sight. However, when it actually happened, I was in the bathtub and Mom was making sure I was clean. By the time he came in the house, I was sound asleep in bed. We didn’t have a telephone to call a doctor if we had wanted to, but both Mom and Dad completely trusted God at that time for healing and wouldn’t have used one anyway. So they prayed. That night, not only I, but Mom and Dad were all in the hollow of His hand. I don’t know how Mom and I would have survived without Dad at that stage of our lives.

Unbelievably, but true, he was back out sawing wood to finish the order at nine o’clock the next morning! Furthermore, he also delivered it when he finished, and he didn’t have a dump truck. Every piece of wood on the truck had to be pitched off by hand and some customers even wanted it neatly stacked by their house.

When I was about six, Dad made me a scooter airplane from one of those scooters that had a push-pull arm connected to a crank on the rear axle that made it go. He used a fairly thin piece of solid yellow pine wood to make the wings because in those days, 3/8 inch plywood was not available. The wings were about a foot wide and about four feet long with the ends uniformly cut in a rounded fashion similar to the wing tips of the World War 2 P-47 Thunderbolt fighter. Mom painted it overall with ivory enamel and trimmed it with red, white and blue star insignias on its wings just like the Navy fighters and trainers we saw flying over all the time from the Naval Air Station in Sanford. I spent many enjoyable hours with that thing! I also had a few close calls with cars, but God was watching over me, keeping me in the hollow of His hand. He had plans for me in the future!

When I was in the first grade, my teacher, Miss Euretta, had all of us students line up out on the playground at the end of one morning recess and gave each of us a soda cracker on which she placed a spoonful of fresh comb-honey out of a wooden box-like thing. I had eaten honey before, but that tasted so good!! Later, when I told Mom about it, I must have been pretty persistent, because she went and bought some comb honey in the wooden boxes from Mr. Carl Dietz, my teacher’s landlord, who had about a dozen hives of bees just across a small field from the school grounds. In fact, for quite some time, we were regular customers for his honey and Dad decided to buy a hive of bees from Mr. Dietz so we could have our own honey. He talked with Mr. Dietz who told him that if he would buy a new bee-hive, he would give him the first swarm that came from one of his hives.

That first hive of bees was a productive and also very gentle strain of three-banded Italian bees and Dad soon learned to work them without getting stung, so he got really enthusiastic about beekeeping. At some point, when Mr. Dietz decided to sell his bees entirely. Dad bought all twelve hives. But not all the bees were as gentle as that first hive. Alas! There were at least two hives of the strain known as black Germans and which are really mean, very inclined to sting, to mass badly and to run pell-mell over the combs when the hive is opened. After a few good stings, Dad’s enthusiasm for beekeeping waned and he gradually quit paying any attention at all to the bees. Of course, my boyish liking for comb honey also waned as it became common and plentiful in our house. Before long, the bees were all but forgotten for several years.

Toward the end of my first grade year, I watched as a sweet Christian girl, a second grader I’ll call Ann, with whom I thought I was in love, laid down behind a big oak tree on our elementary school playground one afternoon while I was waiting for my school-bus, I helped cover herself with gray (Spanish) moss, pull up her skirt and take off her panties and then watched as a second grade boy I’ll call Joe, who was a newcomer to our school, had full intercourse with her. I had to chase away another girl, so I did not see them finish. I have never forgotten how fine, prim and proper Ann’s mother was and how fine Ann always seemed to be, but to this day, so many years later, whenever I think of Ann, whether I remember her winning awards in school assembly for excellent scholastic achievements, see her shooting the winning basket on the girls’ basketball team or giving the valedictory address at her graduation, I also remember that scene down by the big oak tree. I don’t know if that was the only time it ever happened, though I am sure it was the first time for them as a couple, since the boy had only been at our school less than a week at the time this happened, but she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. I always wondered if their get-together that day was pre-planned or if he just accidentally came along just in time to keep me from being invited. At the time, I had never been told it was wrong, so I most likely would have tried if she had invited me. I said all that to point out that parents may never suspect their children may be sexually active at a very early age.

If I had told on Ann, I would almost surely have been called a liar and thereafter branded as having a smutty mind. The girl I chased away slept in the same bedroom with her mother and watched her mother and step-father every night as she bluntly told me when she came to my house a few weeks later and asked me, using the slang term, to do it to her. We started to get in a position but my mother had sensed that something was up and appeared on the scene just in time. But out of that close call, my mother had a little talk with me and then got Dad to tell me about the birds and the bees. So, as a first grader, I had seen a girl I thought I loved and boy just a year older than me do it, and I had actually touched but did not penetrate another girl who saw it done nightly. Although there were times during the next few years when I wished Mom hadn’t been so perceptive, I now thank God that she was. Even in this age of my innocence, I was In The Hollow of His Hand.

Only God Himself knows how many times I was in danger of being bitten by a rattlesnake, cottonmouth moccasin, coral snake or brown recluse spider. Many times, I nearly stepped on rattlesnakes and many more times I was fishing and had deadly cottonmouth water moccasins slither right by me and drop into the water. I was, of course, taught at an early age to watch and be alert for them and how to kill them with a minimum of danger to myself. All were quite common around our property and I often was within a few feet of one or another before seeing it. I actually played with teasing the spiders. But God still kept me safe In The Hollow of His Hand while I was growing up.

Another thing that I am thankful for is the idea I got when I was in the second or maybe third grade. World War 2 was still going on and there was a lot of talk about GI’s. I knew that meant Government Issue, but I thought of starting a GIA Bible class on Sunday afternoons with the five oldest next-door neighbor kids. My GIA stood for God Is Able. Based on my long-standing Sunday School training and the Bible knowledge I had gained when Mom read the Bible to me as well as my own reading of the Bible and Bible stories, plus access to a flannel board with the paper characters to stick on it I guess I did fairly well at training those children and what great preparation it was for my adult years. More of being in the hollow of His hand.

On either my seventh or eighth birthday, I was very disappointed when the main present I received was a swimming suit which my mother had lovingly made. It had short legs and a top like overalls, as Mama knew I was very timid about showing my navel or even going without a shirt. The suit was made of some sort of navy blue wool which was typical of swimsuits of that time, and Mama, knowing how I liked airplanes, had made a simplified red airplane applique flying upward at about a forty-five degree angle toward the left on the chest. The problem was that I had somehow gotten the idea that my parents owed me my clothes and that was clothes. I made some remark about not really getting anything for my birthday, and I’ll never forget how Dad grabbed me up and started out the back door toward the pig pen where we had a big and mean boar hog, saying he wasn’t going to have a son who was ungrateful. I really don’t think he would have endangered me, but Mama still interceded for me and he put me down. At that time, I really was scared, because that boar was really big and I had seen what happened to a cat that got into the pig-pen with that boar!

A year or two later, I recall Dad sending me to round up a Guernsey cow he had recently bought. She was feeding among some young cabbage palmettos whose leaves reached to about six feet high and I was afraid, since we had not had her very long and it had only been a few days since she had gored Mom against a large oak tree in our yard. I remember Dad coming raging across from the chicken yard, leapfrogging over the tops of those young palmettos and I was too terrified to run. He didn’t really hurt me, but he sure did scare me with the big switch he was carrying but which he couldn’t really use because of the closeness of the young palmettos. I never forgot the seemingly murderous anger I saw or thought I saw on his face and I was always afraid of him and a little bit resentful of him from that moment on.

Even so, Dad had many sayings which helped mold me into the person I now am. One of his sayings that I remember from my childhood and which has made a lasting impression is, Whatever you do, do with your might. Things done by halves are never done right!

All through school, I was an avid reader, reading just about anything I could get my hands on. When I would read about the life or adventures of a woodsman, I wanted to be an outdoor person, too. When I read about news reporters or schoolteachers or policemen or investigators or detectives, I wanted to do that too. Later in life, I would indeed follow several of those pursuits for at least a few months. And always I would sooner or later see that through it all, I had been kept safe In the Hollow of His Hand.

One of my favorite book series at the school library was by Joseph A. Altsheler and featured a hero, Henry Ware, always running through the woods in Kentucky and Ohio getting away from hostile Indians — er Native Americans. Mom had also bought me the Ken series of Christian adventure books by Basil Miller and the Sugar Creek Gang series by Paul Hutchens for my own personal library. Whenever I found a word I was unfamiliar with, my parents and school teachers both encouraged me to immediately look it up in the Websters’ Dictionary or the big Grolier one-volume dictionary/encyclopedia Mom had bought for me, At school, I read everything in the World Book Encyclopedia and Compton Encyclopedia sets. Thus, I became known at school as a walking encyclopedia.

After the tailwinds of any hurricane in August, September or October, there was the likelihood that as I would be gathering up clumps of gray moss in the yard, I would find a baby gray squirrel, which Mom and I were usually successful at nursing along to full grown. I had several of them as pets over the years. After they reached a certain size, they could be fairly easily trained to use a sand box and always had one definite place, usually chosen by them, where they made a nest in some corner of a high shelf. Often, as we would be eating our own meals, they would come and sit on top of a jar of jelly or honey on the back side of the table and watch us. Sometimes, they would frisk their tails like squirrels do and bark at us if we did something that startled them. They were very enjoyable pets.

I saw an advertisement in Popular Mechanics about little Golden Bear hamsters. The advertisement told what great pets they were and how easy it was to make money with them, so I bought a pair and an extra female and started raising them. I made the hamster cages from old military ammunition boxes following a pattern Dad gave me. Despite careful care, the gentler of the two mama’s died after one or two litters and the other had to be destroyed because she wanted to fight with the male and hurt him when he was put with her. Then, when she had a litter, she would eat all the babies within the first day. I also found that they were not as odorless as the advertising said, either, and especially the females were too likely to bite to be good pets, so I soon gave up with them. I did sell several litters to my schoolmates, though so I didn’t really lose any money on that venture.

The second semester of my third grade year, I wanted to learn to play the violin. Mom made arrangements for me to get out of my regular school class every Tuesday afternoon so I could take weekly lessons on the violin under an eighty-something year old teacher named Mr. Dollison who taught at Third Street Elementary School in Sanford, but he died during that summer vacation. I remember that I played Blue Bells of Scotland and The Bells of St. Mary’s in my Third-grade school assembly program one Wednesday right after lunch. Parents were encouraged to attend the assembly programs and many did so for their own entertainment. Mrs. Tyler’s new baby girl did something that made some of the older students in the back laugh just about the time I hit a sour note. Thinking they were laughing at me, I stopped and demanded, What are you laughing about? And that made them really laugh at me! I did manage to finish the tune anyway.

I only had about six lessons in the fourth grade under a younger teacher but I was so unhappy with the skree-skraw sounds I was still getting and the younger teacher was more impatient with my imperfections, so I soon gave it up.

Dad was an on again, off again preacher most of my life. He would get right with God, then soon he would go out and find some small church without a pastor. He would preach there a few times and be asked to be their pastor. The church would grow and do well for a while, then he would fall into a relationship with some woman. He was man enough to immediately leave the pastorate, although it was unfortunate that he did not at least continue to attend church somewhere, but until he repented he usually didn’t.

In 1944, a hurricane passed right through Volusia County. At the time, I was seven years old and in the second grade. I remember staying up later than usual the night before because we didn’t know when the main force of the storm would hit, and with the huge old oak trees that overhung our house, my parents feared one might be uprooted and fall on the house. The morning dawned gray and cloudy and Dad went outside only to milk the cow and see that she was alright. I went out to feed the chickens and rabbits and returned to eat breakfast.

Electricity had not yet been run out as far as our house, so we had a 32 volt generator that charged five or six 6-volt heavy duty automobile batteries in the shed to the west of the house. Mom cooked on a full-size kitchen stove that looked much like modern big home ranges with pan storage drawers built in, but she had to open the tank and fill it with white unleaded gasoline from time to time and then she had to pump up air pressure in it every time she used it. Occasionally she allowed me to pump the pump. This was the same type of stove that Grandmother Smith had been using when she got burned.

During breakfast, we listened to one of those old church window shaped radios to hear where the storm was supposed to be centered. After breakfast, when the worst winds were supposed to be past, I put on my old gray raincoat with the red plaid lining, black rubber boots, and a red and yellow straw hat with an elastic band that held it on my head pretty well, then went out with my hoe to cut drainage trenches so the water could run out of the ruts of our driveway into the garden.

Earlier, water had been completely over the paved road by our house to a depth of three or four inches at the crown. I can still remember how the five and six-foot okra plants in the garden, in water up to two feet deep bent over with the wind gusts — the water a brownish color because of all the oak leaf tannins. I remember how those big old oaks with the heavy beards of gray-moss (also known as Spanish moss) swayed and bent, sometimes creaking and groaning with the stress, in the gusts of wind — the sounds of occasional trees or branches thudding to the ground. But though branches sometimes fell within a few feet of our house, none ever hit it and I was never injured in any hurricane. I was in the hollow of His hand.

Until recently, I still had a souvenir of that storm. A large Eucalyptus tree (I was told it was over one hundred feet tall), on the Dietz property next to Ryan’s Store in Enterprise was blown down. Dad cut it up into lumber lengths and had lumber sawed out of it at the sawmill at Benson Junction. Years later, from that very hard and durable rosy colored wood with the curly grain pattern, I made several things including candlesticks and a lamp when I was in the tenth grade woodworking shop at DeLand High School. I don’t know what ever happened to the lamps and candlesticks, although I seem to remember retrieving them and having them when I was married to my first wife and living in Ocala. I also made a modified handle for my musical handsaw out of the eucalyptus wood and some large grape vines which I gave to Pastor Carlito Imperial of The Jesus Church in Bolinau, Pangasinan Province, Philippines on my second missionary trip there in October of 1989.

People often ask why God seems to favor one person and deal harshly with another. Many wonder about a God who cares about your personal health while allowing wars that wipe out hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, guilty and innocent alike.

Of course one answer is that God is Sovereign and He is the Great Creator, so it is His right to do as He pleases. But other people see this as still not being just or merciful and still wonder