I Remember Daddy

 "I think I met your grandfather!" the patient was telling our son, Mark, who as his pastor in the small town of Anthony, Kansas, was making hospital calls that day. "I believe he is the one who sold me a Bible a long time ago back on the farm." 

Somehow their conversation led to former times and Mark mentioned how my dad used to be a Bible salesman and had worked in many rural areas in northern Oklahoma and southern Kansas years before. The gentleman in the hospital bed was a highly successful business man who had come up in the ranks and now owned some sort of family farm implement company, if I remember right. I had seen some of his glossy company publications at Mark's house once.

As they talked, and Mark described my dad and his long-time associate, a dignified Colonel Sanders type with a white goatee, and the type of car Mark heard they drove, the  man said, "I'm sure of it. I remember it well."

He told how he'd come in from the field to talk to these courteous men, and of their conversation in the living room ending with him signing the contract for the $29.95 Bible.

Daddy had worked for the International Book Company in Wichita, Kansas, selling Hertel Bibles for a number of years when I was young. A quiet spoken "people person," few could resist his earnest soft-sell approach of showing them they needed this particular copy of the Word of God.

"That changed my life," the man went on. "I wasn't established then. But as I got into the Bible and started to live by its principles, I began to prosper. I got saved and learned to put the Lord first in my life."

Daddy had been gone many years when Mark told us this story. He had died when Mark was in college in 1980. Though my mother was more out-spoken about her faith, Daddy quietly shared the gospel in his own way, using his gift to provide income for our family as he spread the Word across the plains of the Midwest in those years of the 1950's. Thank you, Daddy.