The Memoirs of a Circuit Overseer’S Wife

By Margie Purvis

I am sure you will found that The Memoirs of a Circuit Overseers Wife will bring a smile to your face, a tear to your eye, warm the cockles of your heart, and reflect the warm love of animals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514402955

Margie Purvis

I am Margie Purvis. I was raised in Montrose, Colorado, and the youngest girl in a family of seven children, five girls and two boys. They are my brother Lee, my sisters Frances, Violet, Betty, Ruby, myself, and my younger brother, Robert. My parents, now deceased, were our father, Leo English, and our mother, Anna English. As a child, I have always enjoyed hearing stories around the kitchen table from our father and other relatives. In high school, I enjoyed my journalism class and was able to help with the school paper and the school annuals. I also had a regular column in the local city's newspaper entitled "Topics under the Teepee." The school was and still is, I believe, the Montrose Indians. Three years after I graduated from high school, I moved to beautiful West Virginia with my sister Ruby and my cousin Priscilla. There we continued our Bible-teaching activity as Jehovah's Witnesses. Then on November 9, 1968, I married my husband, Kenneth Purvis. Shortly after we were married, we continued our career in the full-time Bible-teaching work as Jehovah's Witnesses. Twenty-six of those years we spent in the traveling ministry. Today we are still enjoying and absorbed in helping people get the most out of there Bible studies. For the past thirty years, I have been collecting my stories and hope you will enjoy them as much as I have had in witnessing and in experiencing them. I sum them up by saying they will bring a smile to your face, a tear to your eye, and warm the cockles of your heart, and they definitely reflect a love for animals!

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Copyright © 2015 by Margie Purvis. 719694

ISBN:      EBook      978-1-5144-0295-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/01/2015

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CONTENTS

Citation

Fertile Soil Promotes Kingdom Growth

Questions Answered

Circuit Itinerary

The Cat With The Six Toes

In Conclusion

* Addendum *

Finishing The Book

Poems I Wrote

Will Your Days Be Like The Days Of A Tree

Job

A Wedding Wish

Pioneer Service School

Interesting E-Mails

Acknowledgement

CITATION

The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (NWT) is a translation of the Bible published by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in 1961; it is used and distributed by Jehovah›s Witnesses.[4]Though it is not the first Bible to be published by the group, it is their first original translation of ancientClassical Hebrew, Koine Greek, and Old Aramaic biblical texts. As of December 2014, the Watch Tower Society has published 208 million copies of the New World Translation in 128 language editions.[5][⁶][⁷]

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Dedicated to:

All the faithful Traveling

Overseers’ wives who have

served before me and

beside me, along with

those now serving and

those yet

to start in this

unique work

Foreword: This account is arranged

in four sections, as follows:

The account concludes with some e-mails sent to friends while we were at the Watchtower Educational Center, Patterson, N.Y.

FERTILE SOIL PROMOTES KINGDOM GROWTH

Jesus’ illustration in Mark 4:26-27 speaks of a sower sowing seed.¹* In the life of the individual Christian, it is not only important what we sow, but where we sow the seed. In this illustration the seed sown by the individual is his own personal qualities, attitudes and capabilities for service. The ground is the social and religious environment in which our qualities develop. Many times our early Christian life has a great bearing on our future, as my personal experience gives proof.

Our family was living in Montrose, Colorado when my parents got baptized in 1949. I was six years old, the sixth child in a family of seven children. The congregation was small, but strong. Some of the pioneers working in Montrose were Brother Keith West and his wife Lois, who later went to Gilead and became missionaries in Venezuela; Brother Merle Lowmaster and his wife Fern, who also later went to Gilead; plus about ten other publishers, and Sister Merle Roads, a special pioneer sister, who first contacted my mother in the street work. My mother would always take the magazines and enjoyed reading them. She eventually started a Bible study. She always regularly had her Bible study even though my father gave her opposition.

The first meeting she was invited to attend was the Memorial or Lord’s Supper. She was not able to go to that meeting, and not understanding what the Lord’s Supper was all about, when Sister Roads came for her Bible study that week, my mother asked her if they had a lot of good food at the lord’s supper. My mother said she noticed that Sister Roads sort of smiled when she said that, and it was not until much later she found out why. She continued her study, and finally when she was able to go to a meeting with Sister Roads, my mother was asked if it would be O.K. if they went and picked up another lady. The other lady was my dad’s sister Virginia DeJulio, who was also studying. When she and her husband got interested in the truth, my dad decided he would study too. So we then studied as a family.

Baptism Day––March 29, 1949, Ridgeway, Colorado

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This picture was taken at the baptism: The young girl on the far right, next to the sister in the black coat, is my sister Ruby Wells. In 2013 she completed fifty years as a Pioneer. I am next to her, and we believe the third girl is a cousin.

The ones doing the baptizing were my Uncle Louie Massarotti and Brother Merle Lowmaster. My uncle John DeJulio in the white T-shirt is with them in the water.

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A day in the field ministry. We would travel to one of the smaller towns. Spend the morning in the ministry, and then meet back at a park and have a picnic. That is me (Margie) in the middle on the front row.

Soon another relative, Annie Deltondo and her family started to study. In time my father, two of his sisters, my mother, her sister and her brother (Dan DeVincentis), along with his wife and their older children all began studying.

Before long, there was a congregation baptism in Montrose, in which thirty-two were immersed. Twenty-eight of these were my Italian relatives! In fact, the story is told that when the baptism report was sent to the Society, the brothers wrote back and said, We wanted the number of those baptized, not the attendance, and the local congregation there in Montrose had to write back and tell them that thirty-two was the number baptized! This number included my father and mother, Leo and Anna English, my brother Lee and two of my sisters Frances and Violet. Violet was among the youngest baptized that day at the young age of eleven. One of the brothers there asked her if she was getting baptized because her older sister and cousin were. She replied: I am getting baptized because I love Jehovah. She has since proved that love for the past fifty-six years, and now serves as a regular pioneer in her congregation in Grand Junction, Colorado.

The congregation there in Montrose proved to be fruitful ground for the seed of my spirituality to develop and grow. Even though our family was then living on a farm where lots of chores had to be done, service and meetings were not neglected. As a young girl one of my first service experiences was that of passing out handbills on the streets advertising the Sunday talk, while my mother would stand on the street corner with the latest copies of the Watchtower and Awake magazines. It was always a treat for us children afterwards to go to a nearby cafe for curly-Q french fries and a soda pop.

We all had our own magazine calls, and I especially remember one older man, Mr. King Richards, who would always give me a quarter for the magazines that were then only a dime. Each Sunday morning the family engaged in three hours of field service and then the evening we would attend the Public Talk and Watchtower study at our local Kingdom Hall, located upstairs over the local J.C. Penny’s store. My father and mother always made sure we were regular in field service.

One particular time stands out in my mind. One summer right in the middle of peach picking season, my Uncle Louie Massarotti, who was then the Assistant Congregation Servant, and our Book study conductor, called us on the telephone and told Daddy that none of us had reported field service yet that month (back then we used to report our field service weekly), and there was only one day left in the month. So