The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus

"Oh the deep, deep love of Jesus
All I need and trust
Is the deep, deep love of Jesus." Samuel Trevor Francis (1834-1925)

At seventeen years old I graduated from the Enterprise High School, Enterprise, Alabama on Friday May 28th. Beginning that night, I spent the weekend with my family and a friend at the Redmon family beach house at Laguna Beach, Florida. I enjoyed the weekend except for the knot in my stomach.  My mother and father were taking me to Nashville, Tennessee on Monday for training with the Southwestern Publishing Company. And from there I'd go with my team to regions unknown to sell Bibles and Bible story books door-to-door all summer.

I was actually recruited to sell  books by my older brother, the student manager,  who had sold the previous summer.  I was to be with his team from Oklahoma Baptist University. When he arrived from Oklahoma and splashed into the gulf water on Saturday afternoon he exclaimed "Guess what!?  I'm not selling books; I'm staying here and working for Dad."

Why didn't I decide right then and there that working for Helms Construction another summer wasn't such a bad idea?

Instead Mom, Dad and I ventured to Nashville on Monday. My father didn't tell me until he picked me up the last week of August that he thought he was telling me goodbye for good.  He didn't think he would ever see me alive again. But Mom and Dad wished me well, hugged me and left me there to fend for myself. I think we all cried a bit.

It was a grueling and demanding week of sales school. At the end of the week they put me with a team from Texas to spend the summer in Owensboro, Kentucky.  Within two weeks the entire eight man team, including the student manager, had quit and gone home.   Why didn't I go home too?  What was I trying to prove?

At that point the company put me with two other guys from Texas.   John and Dave affectionately referred to their school Howard Payne University as "Hard Pain University". We stayed in a boarding house in Owensboro for about three weeks and then moved.  John and I moved to Fordsville and Dave went to I don't remember where.  At the end of the summer we all hooked up again in Owensboro to deliver our books from there. Both of them completed their summer a week before me. I stayed there alone the next week to deliver mine.

Although Mercy  delivered me safe and sound to my parents who drove to Owensboro to get me, I did have a few close calls. Since I had no other means of transportation I hitch-hiked the entire summer.  One night hitching from Hartford to Fordsville, about twenty miles,  was one such close call.  Only a second too late after I closed the door of the car did I realize that the three passengers were all drunk, including the driver.  And they were still drinking beer, including the driver. To drunks everything is very, very funny. It was hilarious !  It wasn't at all funny to me. Not only was he driving over 100mph on a county road, but there was a short in the electrical system that caused the headlights to go off and on.  I thought that was it. When they finally let me out in Fordsville, I got out and kissed the ground.

Never before or since the summer of '71 have I felt as strongly that I was being carried.  Call this force angels, God, Jesus or Whoever, but I knew I was being protected and cared for.  I kept a journal that I called my daily book of miracles.  And they were many.

I cared about my sales team of three, but John and I particularly bonded.  You get close to people under those circumstances. When they were leaving me in August, John put his hands on my shoulders, looked at me and said, "David, you need to stay close to Jesus. He's the only hope you've got."  Truer words were never spoken.  And then Dave gave me his own Bible and said, "Here I want you to have it. You read it a lot more than I do."

The summer of 2016 finds me alive and well.  I am surrounded by a community of family and friends who are my family. My wife and I are dipping our toes into the Golden Years and finding we like it. We are provided for in every way possible.  We feel loved and cared for. Because we are loved and cared for. We feel a deep sense of gratitude for who we are and for what we have together here.   But May never becomes June without the summer of '71 finding me. It was a long, difficult, home-sick twelve weeks, but  I wouldn't take anything for the love of God and the power of friendship that I found there in  Kentucky.

Just how deep is the love of Jesus?  As deep as you need for it to be.  And for me that's pretty deep.