The Memories and Ponderings

By Melvin E. West

Why did I write this book? Here are some of the reasons:

I wrote it to "pay back" for the thousands of stories from others that have enriched my reading life. My mother taught me that "if someone sends you a pie, do not send back an empty plate. Put some cookies on it." This book is the cookies on that plate.

I wrote it to teach. Storytelling is, I think, the very best means of conveying a truth. The story "It Was the Names" is a powerful lesson in what it means to be a pastor. The story of the picnic in the black forest of Russia is about building bridges instead of walls. "Two Nickels" speaks of a grandfather's wisdom and love. "The Cat Lady" challenges churches to be in mission where they are. The story of sending 16,500 stuffed animals to the children of Russia is person to person mission at its best.

I write it to travel again. I am ninety-seven as I write this, and age and the pandemic have kept me home. But my mind has traveled as I wrote. I've been back to Kromy, Russia, working with those families. I've been to El Roblegal, Dominican Republic, seeing the excitement as a village makes progress. I have again reached out my hand to receive the two nickels from my grandfather, and I have run to the bank with them. I've been in the hot harvest field with Ernie, a neighbor. I have been back on the well platform of my childhood home, pumping water with my brother, Olin.

I have written this book because I love to write. Words fascinate me, and it is a thrill to weave them into a word picture that others enjoy. I am a bit sad now that I have decided that this book is long enough and that it is time to dose it out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9798892432788

Book preview

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The Memories and Ponderings

Melvin E. West

ISBN 979-8-89243-277-1 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89243-278-8 (digital)

Copyright © 2024 by Melvin E. West

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

A Story

Introduction

Two Work Here

It Was the Names

The Burial at Cedar Hill

Fifty Dollars and a Wife

My Cardboard Sisters and Brothers

An Ode to Ol' Jim

My Bus Brother

Grass

The Princess at the Crossroads

Small High School Products

A Highly Trained Professional

The Three Leading Ladies of America

Fairview School

Why the Difference?

Honoring Bill

I Learned Cooperation in the Wheat Field

16,500 Stuffed Animals to Russian Children

The Miracle in El Roblegal

Senor, mira mi zapatos nuevo!

Haitian Hospitality

Remembering the Great Turtle Massacre of 1936

The Story of the Little Truck

Having Eyes to See

The Power of Quotes

The Windmill

An Ode to Ol' Blue

The Lady with the Bananas

God's Little People

Honoring Those Who Deserve to Be Honored

The Hospital Baptism

We Build with Faith at Mobility Worldwide (PET)

The Last Time I Will See It

You Will Be Tempted

Ernie Was a Neighbor

Those Amazing Youth

A Brother I Never Met

Padre Maes, the Entrepreneur

Stubborn as a Mule

The Oldest Thing in the Woods

To Get a New Church, the Women Carried All the Sand for it on their Heads from the River

Why Did You Come?

The Long Walk

Turning Swords into Hammers

If I Give You Two Nickels?

Are You Fathered from Above?

The Church Goes to the Fair

Social Entrepreneurism

The Church at the Lake

Entertaining Angels Unaware

The Cat Lady's Kitchen

You Clothed Me

The Sounds My Grandchildren Will Never Hear

We Wests Are Country and Proud of It

From Houseboy to Humanitarian

Pumpkin and I Just Sat

Everything I Need to Know about Saving the Environment I Learned Back Home on the Farm When I Was a Kid

One of the World's Wonders

Easter Is About…

The Peace Pole Project

We Have Discovered a Whole New World

Does a Church Go to Heaven?

Measuring the Quality of a Church

The Gift of Mobility

If You Talk about Me When I Am Gone

A Final Word

Other Books by Mel West

An Addendum

About the Author

To those on this earth

whom Jesus called

the least of these.

I have been greatly inspired by their graciousness,

their hope, faith, generosity, and love.

As I near the end of this life,

their friendship is counted

among my richest treasures.

In the final end, all that we will have left will be memories.

—Anonymous

A special word of thanks

must go to the thousands

of persons mentioned

in this book who were coworkers

in the work of building

the kingdom God

as reported in this book.

A Story

A famous organist, many years ago, was presenting a recital in a large church. This was before electricity and the air for the organ was provided by a boy who sat behind the organ and pumped the air.

The organist began, I will treat you to my favorite Bach.

Then I will now play for you ‘The Emperor Waltz' by Strauss.

Then Now I will play for you this Sousa march.

But he touched the keys, and nothing happened. No sound came forth. He yelled back to the boy, Pump, boy, pump.

The boy yelled back, "When you say, ‘We will play, I will pump!"

There have been times when I have sat at the keyboard, but there were many pumpers. Many times I have been a pumper. John Wesley said, If your heart is as my heart, give me your hand.

It is not important who is the organist and who is the pumper. The important thing is, how beautiful is the music?

Introduction

Faith is a verb. That is the answer I give when I am asked what I have learned in my ninety-seven years of living. Faith is a verb. And there is an addendum to that: The cross was not meant to be a piece of jewelry or an expensive top to a church. The cross is meant to be a lifestyle.

That sums up ninety-seven years of living: Faith is a verb, and the cross is a lifestyle.

I will tell you two stories to illustrate what I mean. The first is a fable, and the second is a personal story. The fable first.

Faith Is a Verb

A professional tight-rope walker was preparing to walk a cable between two forty-story buildings with no safety net and pushing a wheelbarrow. A reporter was there beside him to get the story. He asked her, Do you believe I can do this?

Oh yes, she replied.

Good, he replied. Get into the wheelbarrow.

Belief and faith are not the same. It is not enough to say that I believe every family should have a decent home. That will accomplish nothing until we pick up a hammer or write a check. It is not enough to say, I believe no child should go to bed with an empty tummy. Only as we give food or write checks will that tummy be filled.

Faith is a verb. Get into the wheelbarrow.

The Cross Is a Lifestyle

My wife and I are both from the farm, trained in dairy husbandry and home economics at Missouri University, and went back to rural southwest Missouri to develop a grade A dairy farm and work with 4-H'ers. I also served a parish of four churches as a lay pastor. Our farm became a model farm that drew some five thousand visitors on one day as a demonstration plot. All four churches grew. Our children walked three-fourths of a mile to the one-room school their grandmother had attended. Life was good, and we were established.

But a missionary to India came to speak at a church and stayed for supper. He quietly said to me, Mel, a lot of people can milk cows. Your humanitarian spirit is needed in the mission field. That means you should go to seminary.

We sold our cows, rented out the farm, and went to Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. We moved into a very small parsonage, our children were enrolled in an inner-city school, my salary was $1,200 a year, and the church had twenty-seven members. I was searching for direction and read the verse If any person desires to come after me they must take up their cross daily, and then follow me by Jesus.

A writer explained that to "take up one's cross meant that when we saw a human need (the horizontal line of the cross) and realized we could respond to that need), the vertical line of the cross, then we had responsibility to do all we could to meet the need. That was our cross for that moment in time.

In this book are memories of living a life based upon those two assumptions.

No writing is good

that does not

tend to

better mankind

in some way

or other.

—Alexander Pope

Two Work Here

The Earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

—Psalm 24:18a

On a road in the coffee fields near Alajuela, Costa Rica, 1996

The dark green leaves of the coffee plants sparkled in the tropical sun as I took a long walk through one of my favorite spots in all the world. I do not care for coffee as a drink, preferring tea. But I love the simple people who prune and pick the coffee, and the valley whose contour planted shrubs are as lovely as any garden landscaped by professionals.

Water gurgled through the irrigation pipes that skirted the road. A flock of green tropical birds took noisy flight from a flame tree as I passed by, scolding me for having disturbed them. Two bright-eyed children, playing in a front lawn, giggled at my effort to speak to them in Spanish and fled into their little home. Their mother ceased her mopping to glance at the stranger in their midst and smiled a cautious smile. A half-grown puppy stood guard by a banana tree to make certain I did not leave the road.

Then on my left, a lean-to shop caught my attention. It was perhaps ten feet wide and forty feet long, made of crude lumber and tin. The front had no wall, and as I stepped inside, I saw wooden bedsteads for sale. They were hand-carved and a bit crude but sturdy and with a unique air of elegance about them.

The carpenter came to the front, and I explained to him that I was not there to buy but was interested in him and what he was doing. This brought forth a tour of the shop. He used rough lumber, cast off from sawmills, with the bark still on two sides. His tools were simple, and the work very labor-intensive. With great pride, he showed me a corner cabinet he was making for his wife.

I asked him how many worked in the shop, and he replied, Dios. Two worked in the shop. I looked around for the other person. Smiling, he pointed to himself and said, Uno (one). Then, pointing upward toward the heavens, he said, Y Dios (and God). He and God worked in that shop. Reaching for a piece of rough lumber, he said, Dios. God provides the materials. Pointing to a finished bed, he said, Yo y Dios (I and God). God made the wood; he made the bed. Two worked in that shop.

His theology was simple yet profound. Pondering it as I left the shop, my mind went back into the Old Testament, and I reflected upon how our spiritual fore-parents saw the hand of God at work in all that happened. Since it was near Christmas, I remembered how the boy, Jesus, had played in a carpenter's shop much like the one I had just left. His father, Joseph, was able, also, to see the hand of God at work in what was happening around him.

Sophistication and progress tend to lead us away from the finding of relationship with the eternal in what we do. How many work where you work? Is God included in that count?

Ponderings

As I grew up on the farm, it was rather easy to think as did the bed builder that God made the soil and the seed. We tilled that soil, planted that seed, tended it, and reaped a harvest. Two of us. God and me. All around us was the evidence of a creative God—animals, plants, the wind, the rain, and the sun. We recognized and celebrated this. In the fall, we held harvest festivals. In dry times, we prayed for rain.

It is difficult, then, for the person who puts the engine into a new aoto on the assembly line to say in his/her heart, God and I made this car. A farmer, with several million dollars invested in equipment. including irrigation pumps, is more apt to say, John Deere and I grew this crop.

How can that long line of persons responsible for that machinery that grew that crop each think in terms of God and me? There is the miner who dug the ore from the Earth, the person who made it into steel, the machine designer, the tool makers, the welders, the painters, the logistics persons, the salespersons, and the mechanics who keep it going. Do they work in partnership with their Creator, and do they recognize it?

The important question is,