Patterns of Purity

I'm reminded this morning of when I was a child and my mother used to do what many women never do today - sew. It is much easier to run to the store, paying over $3 a gallon for gas today, shop for hours, and buy a dress made in Japan for a price only fit for an American banker or oil baron. Never mind developing character, talent, patience, and the pride of a "handmade" garment. My mother learned sewing obviously from her family of raising. Her father left her mother when she was a child and as far as I know all three of her "parents," her mother and her two aunts in that matriarchal regime were quite good at the old singer machine. My aunt Clara Starnes was the best. I remember leaving home to go to seminary and for three years at least when I would return for vacations Aunt Clara would ask me about the slacks I had left in her closet if I would come and take them with me. Well, I had married and my wife's cultivated expertise at biscuit making had created a multi peril in returning to the old slacks. New and larger ones had long since taken their place. Never nagging, but quietly finding ways to accomplish her goal, I received a gift from Aunt Clara my last year of seminary. She gave me a quilt she had made and as I admired the handwork suddenly each of the patchwork swatches of fabric in that quilt broadcast a startling familiarity. I admire that quilt even today, 26 years later, of the obvious labor of love and patience that went into its making.

Paul, the apostle, writes in Philippians 3:17, "Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample." The Greek word for followers is "mimetai", an obvious cognate of mimic or imitate. To do that we have to have a pattern just as Aunt Clara had to layout the design of her sewing marvels with thin paper patterns she could pin to the material. I was reading this morning on the life of Evangelist Bud Robinson. He was an old "Tennessee boy." He grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee in the primitive settings of poverty. But he was rich in so many other ways. When he was 16, his father died, and his mother sold what little they had and moved to Texas. Bud hired out as a ranch hand. In August of 1880, during a camp meeting, he felt deep conviction for his sin and received Christ as his Saviour and was gloriously saved. That same night, while lying under the wagon with his hat on a mesquite stump for a pillow, the Lord called him to preach. During his ministry of 60 years in itinerant evangelism, it is estimated that Uncle Bud traveled over 2,000,000 miles, preached over 33,000 sermons, witnessed more than 100,000 conversions, personally gave more than $85,000.00 in helping young people with their Christian education, secured over 53,000 subscriptions to his church paper, The Herald of Holiness, and wrote 14 books and sold more than 500,000 copies. But he had a speech impediment to the point that he could hardly even pronounce his name. People tried to get him to not go into the ministry. I especially like his regular morning prayer that included (you may have heard it): "O Lord, give me a backbone as big as a sawlog, and ribs like sleepers under the church floor. Put iron shoes on me and galvanized breeches, and hang a wagon-load of determination in the gable end of my soul. And help me to sign the contract to fight the devil as long as I have a vision, and bite him as long as I have a tooth, and then gum him till I die! Amen!" Now that is the kind of preacher I would like to pattern my life by.