Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Teach the older men to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love and in endurance.
Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children,

• Titus 2:2-4

Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.

• 1 Timothy 5:1-2

In the same way, you who are younger, submit yourselves to your elders. All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because,
“God opposes the proud
    but shows favor to the humble.”

• 1 Peter 5:5

My sister was released from the skilled nursing rehab center in my old hometown, about a month ago.  She is doing even better now after going home.  I was not sure where it was until she said that it was where MawMaw had been just before she passed away.  Then I remembered going to that facility to pick up Mrs. Edwards and bring her to church when I was in college.

I don’t usually mention people by name, but it makes sense in this case.  Mrs. Edwards had been MawMaw’s next door neighbor.  They bought the house that my father had built when we moved to southern Mississippi for a year.  Mrs. Edwards was married to Jim Joe Edwards, a baseball pitcher in the 1920s, having played for the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox, and Cincinnati Reds.  He played for the Seattle Indians, a minor league team.

Jim Edwards was born southwest of my old hometown, in the next county.  He had a deer stand in the middle of nowhere down there, but late in life, he got a job as the custodian for the City Hall building where I grew up.

When I was in Cub Scouts, he gave our den a tour of City Hall.  He locked us in the only jail cell in the basement.  He showed us the mayor’s office, and where we would each apply for a driver’s license when we got old enough to drive.

Then, we went into an all-purpose room.  He sat with us and talked about life as a baseball player in the 1920s.  He had struck out Babe Ruth many times, but then on a couple of occasions, Babe Ruth had gotten home runs off him.  His career was not stellar, but he made it to the big leagues when he was about 26 years old.  He had played baseball for Mississippi College until 1922.  He had probably served in the military during World War I, but I do not remember that part of his talk about the war.

But then, fast forward a couple of years.  We lived a year in southern Mississippi.  My parents moved to Tupelo, Mississippi, and I moved in with my grandmother.  Her husband, PawPaw, had passed away while we were living down south.

One day, my mother was going to come for a visit, but I had wandered into the neighbor’s yard.  Mr. Edwards recognized me and said that I had to earn my keep.  He had erected fence posts and he was putting up a pig wire fence.

Pig wire is heavier gage than chicken wire.  While chicken wire was a mesh, usually hexagonal about one inch distance side to side, pig wire was a square mesh about four inches side to side.  I helped him crank the chain fall that stretched the fence.  Then we each took hammers and nailed U-shaped fencing staples to attach the wire to the wooden fence posts.

For a boy about 10-11 years old, I was doing a pretty good job until my mother screamed that she had no idea where I was, but I better get home for supper really fast.

Mr. Edwards laughed and thanked me for helping him, and I ran home as fast as I could.

Mr. Edwards was checking out his deer stand soon after we had put the fence up.  His old jeep slipped off the gravel road and Mr. Edwards was found in the vehicle.  They don’t know if he died of a heart attack and then the vehicle wrecked, or he died in the crash.

But visiting my sister while she was in that nursing and rehab center brought back those old memories.  When Mr. Edwards’ wife could no longer take care of herself, she had moved there.  Either I picked her up to take her to church or my folks did until she passed away.  I had been in the lobby of that rehab center many, many times.

We have no knowledge of how our lives will affect someone else’s life.  And Mr. Edwards was a humble man who made a difference in other people’s lives.  You never know who or what influence the custodian might have had, back in the day.  But if all you see is the human being, you can learn a lot from them.  I learned how to stretch a fence, and I learned to let MawMaw know where I was going before I visited the neighbors – all in one afternoon.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.