Hugh's News & Commentary

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We are highly honored to have you as our faithful readers and want you to know that we value our relationship with you.

This past week, Melvine and I have celebrated our birthdays, December 15 and 16. My birthday comes first in the day of the month and hers is next.

God has blessed us with a good marriage. We celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary last August. What a thrill it was to welcome over 150 of our family and friends to this celebration at the Fellowship Hall of the Bethlehem United Methodist Church in Bethlehem, Georgia, near our home in Winder. Our adult children, Greg and Stephanie, helped plan this event.

This week I was privileged to spend quality time with Melvine over a lovely dinner meal talking about family, friends, and our faith in Jesus Christ. You see, Melvine and I are committed Christians. We have endeavored to follow Jesus, to obey His voice and do what He would direct us to do in ministry. We have discovered that God is faithful and has always supplied our every need.

Following our honeymoon to the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, we drove to Wilmore, KY, where I planned to enter Asbury Theological Seminary. We literally went there on faith. We had very little money, no place to live, and without employment. However, God's gracious hand was upon us and He showed us favor after favor.

We arrived after midnight in the sleepy town of Wilmore. There were three male students on the front porch of one of the buildings. I got out our our car while Melvine remained seated. I spoke with them and one of the young men knew the manager of the Guest Housing and awaken her. She graciously gave us a room with air conditioning, clean beds, and bathroom facilities with a hot shower. We were exhausted after a long drive from Draper, NC, without the benefit of interstate highways. Our 1956 Chevrolet had no air conditioning and no radio. We slept soundly and awakened the next day ready to face the challenges before us.

I am blessed to have a strong and determined wife. Very few women would take a chance on a guy like me without any money, no place to live, only a call and a vision. She believed in me and that was all I needed to follow the call of God upon our lives. She was willing to teach school to help me make it through seminary. She has supported me in every venture we have made and without her, I would have never made it. She is the wind beneath my wings, and my best friend. She is gracious, genuine, honest, and always tells me the truth and is willing to speak her mind when she doesn't agree. I respect her for that, and I am better off when I listen to her advice. She is usually right, and I need all the help I can get.

The next day after arriving in Wilmore, Melvine was able to get a teaching position in an elementary school in nearby Versailles, about 17 miles from Wilmore. Only God could have done that. All the teaching jobs had been taken, but this one. It was a third grade class. We located a furnished basement apartment, and the landlord, the butcher at the IGA store, rented us the apartment without a down payment or the first month's rent. He was willing to trust us until Melvine could get paid, which would be in a month after school started. I was able to get a job at Winn-Dixie in Lexington, but soon found out that it was not economically profitable because of the distance, and I found part-time employment at the local IGA store only a block from where we lived for three years.

The money I needed to enroll in seminary was sent in the mail by my brother-in-law and sister without any appeal from me. God had prompted them to send us the money without knowing what we needed, but it was exactly the right amount of money I needed to enroll.

When I registered for classes, I discovered that a Methodist lady in Sebring, FL, had asked to be my donor, i. e., to pay one half of my tuition for every quarter for all three years. She has always wanted to invest in a Pentecostal preacher boy. I was he. I wrote her faithfully twice every quarter to say "thank you" and to keep her informed of my progress in seminary. That accountability was important for me and I learned many valuable lessons about faith in God and about people.

During my last year of seminary, I was hired as the minister of music at the Wilmore Presbyterian Church. I directed the music for the Sunday worship service, directed the adult choir, preached on occasion when the pastor was gone, and Melvine directed the children's choir.

Three of the happiest years of our lives were lived in that college and seminary town. We have maintained contact with several of my classmates and our landlord. For years, I maintained correspondence with some of my professors and the president of the seminary.

I graduated in May 1963, and we traveled to Alabama where I was assigned my first pastorate by Leon O. Stewart, my conference superintendent. It was a country church in Conecuh County near Evergreen, in a community called Brownville. The church was named Brownville Pentecostal Holiness Church.

As I have learned over the years, conference superintendents will always tell a young preacher that although the pay is very little, only $35 a week, plus an unfurnished parsonage, the opportunity is great. It is great only if you work at it, and that is what we did. Melvine taught high school and I gave my full time to the church. Hard work paid off and the church grew and was greatly blessed by God. We met some of the finest people in the world in that community and county. I became involved in the ministerial association, the Kiwanis Club as their chaplain, the Civil Air Patrol as their chaplain, did a radio broadcast, and was a free-lance writer for the Evergreen Courant, the local newspaper.

Melvine and I, along with Greg and Stephanie, wish you and yours a Merry Christmas.