Living in a Place Called Evergreen

Living in a Place Called Evergreen

I was preparing to drive to another part of the state to share a few days of church camp with our youth group.  As I was packing, I got a telephone call from my sister, Debbie.  Preacher Floyd is in the hospital, she told me.  Rev. Harry Floyd was pastor of my home church during some of my most formative years.  During his ministry, I became a Christian.  His hands placed me beneath the waters of baptism.  Years later, he gave me my first invitation to lead revival services.  He returned to my home church to preach my father’s funeral.  He sat on my ordination council and preached my ordination sermon.  On my shelf is a set of books he gave me from his own library.  In ministry, my first reflex is to do what Harry Floyd did.  When I heard that he was in the hospital in Florence, I knew what I needed to do. 

I left a little early for camp and drove to the hospital in Florence, SC where he had been a patient.  When I asked for his room number, the woman at the information desk said that he had been discharged the day before.  But amazingly, she knew Harry Floyd.  They attended the same church.  She found his home telephone number and got me in touch with Harry.  He said he would love to see me and gave me directions to his home.  He lived, not in Florence, but in a little town called Evergreen. Armed with these directions to a place I’d never been or heard of, I headed out to find him.  Remembering all that he had given to me and to my family, I wanted to give something back to him. 

I wasn’t sure what I would find.  His life had been anything but easy in recent years.  Not long after his retirement, his wife, Lois, underwent bypass surgery.  In those days, blood was not screened or tested as closely as today.  Mrs. Floyd was infected with the AIDS virus from a blood transfusion, and, for the next several years, died a very slow and painful death.  The oldest of his three daughters suffers from an illness which now has her in a nursing home, her life slipping away.  His own eyes that so loved to read the scriptures and study commentaries and write messages, were growing dim.  He is legally blind.  Some form of asthma makes his breathing difficult.  And now, I learned, his back keeps him in constant agonizing pain.  “How,” I wondered, “could one who served so well and so long end up like this?  And what can I say or do to help him?” 

The directions were clear enough, even for me.  I found Evergreen and soon found his house.  When I knocked on the door I was greeted by Rev. Floyd’s new wife, a lifelong friend God brought back into his life some time after Lois had died.  Merlee met me at the door and took me to the den where Harry was stretched out in his recliner, the only place where he could get some relief from the back pain. 

As I entered the room, he heard my voice from across the room and greeted me.  I came to him, gave him a very careful hug, and sat down beside him.  When we’d been talking a few minutes, I realized that he wasn’t telling me much about himself.  He wanted to know about me and what I was doing.  He asked about the church I was serving.  He wanted to know about my family.  I bragged a little or maybe a lot.  Somehow, with all that he was facing, he had the capacity to step outside himself.  I was amazed.  I know how pain can move the focus of your life inside yourself.  I wanted to give him a chance to talk about his own life, so I turned the conversation to him and how he was doing.

That’s when it happened.  That’s when I saw something more impressive than any worship service he’d ever led, more touching than any story he’d ever told, more profound than any sermon he’d ever preached.  I saw the glory of a grateful heart.  He was honest about his physical problems.  I wouldn’t settle for less than that.  He told me about the surgery he needed but might not be able to endure.  That physical assessment and those medical facts came from his head.  Then he opened his heart. 

He thanked God for his years with Lois, and now for bringing Merlee into his life to share his journey.  He glowed as he spoke of how he and Merlee had accepted and cherished each other’s children and grandchildren.  He spoke with pride and joy about the churches he had served, the friends he had made along the way, and how God had allowed him to make his living doing what he loved most. He celebrated the technology that allowed him to listen to some books on tape, since he could no longer read them very well.  And then he looked at me with both the tears of back pain and the tears of spiritual joy in his eyes and said,

Ronald, I’m like the ‘old boy’ who said that God had been so good to him, he couldn’t think of anything to ask for when he prayed.  God has been so good to me that I don’t know what to ask Him for.  That’s how I am.   

I didn’t know what to say.  I wondered to myself,

Why aren’t you angry about the Aids-tainted blood that took your wife away from you so painfully and so young? Why aren’t you bitter about the illness that has reduced your daughter to an invalid? How can you be so thankful when you’re spending most of your time in a recliner, hardly able to see, struggling to get a deep breath, and hurting almost every moment of every day? 

Simply because, in the midst of all of the shadows, the struggles, the losses, the pain of his life, with failing eyes, he saw what many of us can’t or won’t see.  He saw good and he saw God.  And because he did, he was more alive than I am on many days. 

As I left him and drove out of town toward camp, I once again saw the little sign which read Evergreen.  And I thought, “Yeah, that’s where he lives.  More importantly, that’s how he lives.”  His joy doesn’t ebb and flow with the seasons of life.  A grateful heart is ever-green. 

This story is included in my first book, The Stories of My Life, available at Amazon.com (link on this blog page) or the offices of St. Andrews Baptist Church, Columbia, SC.