The Journeyman's Journey: From Drewry to Doctor

By Melvin Bullock

The most precious virtues of life are often lost because of their superficial presentations. It is the purpose set forth in the expressions of Dr. Melvin Bullock, Sr., as he retrieves life long memories, sharing what seem at first to be destructive weapons but throughout life’s journey these retrieved experiences have taught lessons which

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643454948

Book preview

The Prelude Speaks

My story is my story. It did not begin today or yesterday. Rather, it is yesteryears’ consciousness. Therefore, you could be partly correct by your forethought as to me choosing to share my formative days’ experiences. After analyzing my experiences, hopefully you will be awakened by your dormant treasure and determine whether there are some midnight awakenings that would force your consciousness to consider the relativities of today’s world as they relate to family, church, school, social, and spiritual practitioners. Do be mindful of how you speak and behave toward dignitaries for they lurk among society’s dark places, seeking opportune moments to set off your dormant giant awareness relative to values in all walks of leadership. These quiet places house good and unpleasant thoughts, which dictates future failures and successes.

The shock of reality invades the awesomeness of consciousness, trickling unpredictable dormant attitudes, which warrant immediate attention whether they be positive or negative, acceptable or unacceptable. It mimics a false alarm in the darkness of the night. It is difficult to postulate which direction should be taken while struggling to resolve which direction needs to be exploited. Many tragedies have found places to parade their activities when suddenly awakened by some inward consciousness at an inopportune moment and at a time of unpredictability.

It does not matter when, what, or where the dormant giant lies. When it is brought to consciousness, it is confused about what to do due to the interval, which never seems long enough to prevent the head-on collision. At the moment of anger, it would have been best not to have owned the knife or the gun, or any other destructive source.

Some might be shocked at some of my choices and feelings as they relate to family, community, and social and religious or spiritual boundaries. Surely it is difficult to swallow when the throat passage is constricted. Even so, when anyone permits yesteryears’ behaviors to have the privilege of preventing tomorrow’s conditional behaviors, they have aborted today’s opportunities the freedom to foster tomorrow’s dreams.

The shock of reality always incites diverse emotions, which discover residence where many care not to inhale nor exhale such emotions. To inhale would be like deep-sea diving—you soon must let go long enough to recognize the cause of the moment. To exhale would be to take a chance long enough to absorb the certainty of the thought and determine its value and fitting to life while observing others as well as yourself. It is what we ingest and digest that foster favorable objectives a guide to positive behavior.

The story warrants the reading, listening, and sharing with those from whom life seemingly has confiscated a stacked deck of cards, determining life’s beginning and ending. My story gleans from my family and those living nearby the Nutbush Creek who invested in their dream, never anticipating losing hold of future success. It matters not which role or what role you play, winner or loser; it seems to be a higher authority signifying a loss rather than a victory. It is hard to imagine all losses and no triumphs.

This is a falsehood permitted to penetrate the intellect of many—forcing them not to value their greatest resources. These values are often realized in life’s shocks at an early age, as were mine. They are recorded in memories, but they are camouflaged where there is no positivity in store. It is a sleeping giant’s obstruction. In fact, where there are no positives, mathematics is vain, and the electric systems would leave the world in darkness. So it is with everyone’s life—no values equate to no direction.

It is the story’s story that captivates the teller and its reader. It must be told in whole or else the message will soon evaporate bit by bit between each idea, a little here and a little there, until there is nothing left. Yet this is what this story intends to accomplish—imparting sprinkles here and there, sharing experiences of one sort to experiences of another sort. It is the sharing of bad (low) times overcome with prosperous times. It is the leaving from minute situations to rejoicing in growth and splendor.

Seeing the past through contemporary lens and evaluating its core value in accordance with today’s practicality, yesterday’s standards have taught lessons that have escaped its predecessor’s standards. It is there in which I anchored my call from God. I continue to tread toward the future. It is a future nested by what some might consider generations’ bed of suffering and shame. I dare to trade my infancy and its lessons. Categorically, these lessons cannot be measured by society, economy, education, or spirituality.

This is God’s story willed to a little boy born of parents whom I am sure no other X and Y chromosomes could have wrought—no other conditions could have molded me to be who I am, sentence me to where I grew up, and lead me to where I am today. Divinity has intricately woven together a natural richness and merciful sharing that allow me to glean from life’s many experiences seasoned with appreciation. It has rewarded me with the ability to realize and cherish numerous moments worthy of sanctioning, where today’s world is left void and segregated from those lessons.

I walked three-plus miles to and from school. I plowed mules, milked cows, pulled tobacco, picked cotton and cucumbers, and gathered fruits and vegetables for sale. I strained lifting two-hundred-pound bags of fertilizer, wheat, and others grains. I sawed and chopped wood for building tobacco barns, cooking, and keeping warm in the winter. I even fantasized being a man making my workload enjoyable. I lived without electricity until 1953. I failed first grade because I cried the entire three-mile walk to school, and my first grade teacher did not like me because she never got to know me. I learned later that she was very ill and was later relieved from her teaching duties.

This is my personal story. It is a capsule of who I am, what I am doing, and who I am called to be. I was born September 1, 1939, to my parents and raised by them. Charlie James Bullock and Mary Magdalene Campbell birthed me in the township of Drewry, Nutbush, and Piney Grove near the banks of Nutbush Creek, some 880 to 1760 yards from our house. It is known today as John Kerr Lake, which receives water supply and maintenance from Buggs Island Dam, Mecklenburg County, and Clarksville, Virginia. This lake now supplies services, skiing, drinking water, and electricity to many nearby counties—especially Vance, Warrenton, Granville, and Person counties. There were eleven other children (two passed as infants), all from the same union: Charlie, Samuel, Mariner, James, Evelyn, Jewel, Jasper, William, and Omega. I am wonderfully and happily married to my wife, Lee Tishie Davis Bullock. We are fortunate and blessed with eight children of the same union: Melvin Jr., Lola, Timothy and Tammy (twins), Lamont, Lydia, Joshua, and Priscilla (in that order). We have eleven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

Many lessons were taught from this humble setting. Many experiences linger consciously and subconsciously, giving lessons after lessons.

It is a common fact: experience is the best teacher. This fact holds true with any profession, whether it be societally or biblically driven or biblically expressed among individual characters of a select group, kings, or nations. Experiences determine success or failure. This thought fits both sides of every equation: success or failure, acquired experience or lack of experience, religious or nonreligious, and faith in God or no faith in God. Experience works from the inside out; so does practice. You can judge these by numerous manifested behaviors. This is exactly what salvation does—reversing the inside out once it has been cleansed.

I shall fast-forward with this thought, and then comes the story: no one can be God’s messenger without experience. As biblical scholars, can you imagine Moses after escaping his ills, which should have landed him in the same Egyptian’s prison cell as Joseph forty years later, returning to a new pharaoh, articulating a message from the God of the universe, demanding this Egyptian grant a God-given command, Let my people go so they might cross the Red Sea so they might worship the God whom Pharaoh knew nothing of because he had no experience with God.

It was Joshua’s experience directing and commanding former slaves to march around Jericho thirteen times and assuring them that the walls around Jericho would crumble down. It was Joshua’s experience with the omnipotent God that taught him the power of trust and victory. What assured Samson, without his eyes, to command and to trust the people to place his hand on the pillar of the temple? Certainly, it was Samson’s experience with God that bid him the will to sacrifice his life and the lives of others by destroying the columns supporting the temple. Experience is the method whereby many, including myself, found their way and places in life’s successes by traversing from experience to experience. Therefore, it is permissible to reflect upon God’s greatness, even in others. This conviction is the manifestation of my experiences I shall share with you, the reader in mind, the lessons taught by my father and mother’s faith during their sacred moments of illness as I journeyed on the pathway of my story.

My mother and father were two remarkable people. I mention them frequently throughout my story—sometimes emotionally and sometimes relationally. They did more than make me tearful. They also taught and modeled a positiveness I have not found in others. They never raised their voices when communicating with each other. Daddy loved Momma more than himself. You will have to read my story to know why I believe my parents performed like geniuses and displayed role-model lives that were challenging to follow. They were leaders and followers when it came to charity. They did not carry or promote hatred even when they thought they were wronged. Mother would say, Forgive them, Charlie. They do not know what they are doing—poor creatures.

I hope you will find strength and encouragement from me sharing my moments in history and development, appreciation of my rearing, and my expression of my call to the ministry. I was prompted by my observances. Furthermore, I attribute these moments and experiences as building blocks for today’s message. These family moments have wrought within me lessons suitable for deliverance relative to mounting challenges in our present society.

You as readers—and listeners, perhaps—never knew Charlie and Mary Bullock who modeled dignity outside of the walls of education and theologically trained ministries. They possessed unlimited spirits and gifts of charity. Yet my stories live and build me from those principles and experiences that seem foreign to those who never knew the effect of their everyday glow, even during dark times. I live and share some of Daddy’s and Momma’s greatest and trying pains—Momma’s fall, Daddy’s gallstone, and the governmental siege of their land earned by the sweat, tears, and hope for their children in the tomorrow’s tomorrow. They would never let it be known that these were situations that threatened their emotions and dreams.

Nevertheless, God’s truth marches onward. How else would one understand the present without some knowledge of the past, and how could the future be instructed without the sensitivity of what has transpired before it? These are questions that are most surely to visit the thought of every individual as life’s experiences teach lessons relative to individual encounters as well as shared experiences of others.

This is the truth as it relates to practical and wholesome living. Therefore, each of us must be mindful of what we say, do, or hear, concerning not only secular matters but much more in the religious arena, which breathe and birth numerous spiritual ideologies.

Many of them are venomous enough to have contaminated religious and spiritual methodologies, engraving poisonous principles and practices in various phases of Christian’s worth. Of course the term Christian here is intended to mean those who profess Christianity, global recognition of Jesus Christ as the savior of sinful humanity. Otherwise, it would be abominable and permitting contrariness to continue its deadly course, as guilty as the past staging Christianity upon the platform of falsehood. Christianity is a synonymous characterization of those who were first called Christians at Antioch (Acts 11:23). I am careful not to confuse the two ideologies surrounding the origin and worldviews of what Christianity meant in the biblical context and what is practiced globally following the message of Jesus Christ’s servants (twelve apostles).

If it was humanly possible to gather all of the strands of Christians’ thoughts and place them in one central locale and sort out those who coincide with the teachings of Jesus Christ as taught by the church in Acts, the pile would multiply at the rate of a one-cell animal like the amoeba. The true church would be seen as a spiritual regeneration mechanism, void of polity and practices of the degenerating philosophy of the universal church, Catholicism, which is responsible for the misdemeanors of Christianity in the face of biblical Christianity.

It is my thought, as well as that of numerous theologians that Christianity holds and shares a rightful position among world religions, which has given light of truth according to the church of Acts’ experiences and practices. It is an absolute truth that Jesus’s coming into the world in fleshly form is God with humankind for the purpose of restoring humankind unto himself. Jesus has given this message to the twelve Apostles, seasoned with signs and wonders and spiritual justification, the day of Pentecost, to be shared with the world. Amen.

Introduction

Numerous events, presentations, oratorios, sermons and sermonettes, lectures of various degrees on diverse subjects, collections, and world’s concerns surfacing from social, political, financial, and spiritual interest groups are matters destined to help some while the disadvantage continues search for reasons to validate missed opportunities, which falsely present themselves as once in a lifetime occurrence. Circumstantial evidence conveys the thought possibility without positivity. This lesson I learned from experiences after experiences. This message is taught as my story is told. It is a testament sealed with hand-on experiences. Regardless of what life-challenging circumstances might present, people all seek places to drop off their loads. Whatsoever they might appear to be, they levy their faults on those who are strong enough to shoulder diversities of life and possess abilities to aid others in achieving whatever pathway they have considered life’s predestination for their service and rewards. Of course, the moment that is about to be announced stages the presenter and awards the occasion, its designated speaker of the hour, with this documentary.

This documentary has a distinct beginning. It is less than three to four years younger than its writer. It has not met its life expectancy because of divine ordinance. Many have passed, and some shall continue to exit by reasonable strength divined by God.

Many stories are presentations emanating from numerous strata of life’s seedbed, viewed in the realm of reality and stemming from selfish treasures of fanaticism. Nevertheless, a story does not escape the thoughts of its teller. The story is an issue that originates in the subconscious of its teller, which has been lying dominant since its conception. The frequency of its owner sanctioning forces this dominance and subconscious to yield time, place, and reason of its origin. These thoughts are revisited by the storyteller’s conscious in a persuasive way, worrying him or her until they are forced to acknowledge the true revelation of story’s message. It is this moment in time subconscious and conscious unite with its storyteller, whereby others might gleam from similar lessons fit to live by or become proactive in measuring what would correct wrong and embrace right, which would refute wrong and embrace right. These principles have been determined by the story’s message.

As numerous as stories are, they are equally as diverse in meanings. It does not matter how frequent one ponders the pathways of someone else’s journey of life, compromising his sorrows or delighting in his joy, it is never understood what triggered the dialogue between the storyteller’s conscious and subconscious mind. It is difficult to understand the agony or joy of the storyteller or the nature of the story being told. To whom do the pains and joy belong?

Life experiences have more than personal impact. They spill their messages to readers and listeners, telling their story. It has been part of my conscious and subconscious rivalry in exchange with the real me, which continues to hold conference with my five senses, made known by the controlling sense of consciousness, which I choose to call the sixth sense in control. This story began the day that I could recall and account for my present being. The journey goes far into the past. It surpasses my existence and connects many family members, neighbors, and friends who lived as I on the banks of Nutbush Creek,