JOHN and RUTH

My former pastor, John, was a passionate man.  He was passionate about preaching the gospel of Christ.  He was passionate about playing the piano.  And, oh yes, he was passionately in love with Ruth.  

As a young man, John preached the gospel in tent-meetings across the South with the Rev. Glenn V. Tingley.  One of the churches which had its roots in those tent meetings was the Alliance Church in Gadsden, Alabama.  John went to Toccoa Falls Bible College in the mountains of north Georgia to study to be a christian minister.

Ruth was an instructor in Bible History and Greek.  By her own admission, she was an old maid school teacher and intended to serve the Lord in the capacity of training preachers and missionaries for the rest of her life.  John took some of Ruth’s classes and was quite taken with her.  On the close-knit campus, their paths crossed almost daily.  Perhaps, John even began to plan chance meetings.  Ruth was several years his senior so he knew that it was unlikely that a real romance could develop between them.  The rules of the college forbid fraternization between staff and student, so their relationship remained that of student and teacher and of good friends.  Still, for John, there was an attraction that he could not lay aside all through college.  

After the graduation ceremony, John found Ruth in the crowd to have one last conversation with his friend.  When he told her that he was headed to pastor a new church plant in Gadsden, Alabama, she asked him to promise to come back to the campus in a year and tell her about his first year of ministry and how the work in Gadsden was doing.

John plunged into his task for a year and the Gadsden church grew as souls were added to the family of God.  John was consumed in his ministry but as the days went by, he became more and more convinced that Ruth was the woman that God had chosen for him.  He determined that he would pursue a more serious relationship with her.  As a successful pastor, he could offer her a house and home and an opportunity to serve the Lord in a growing work.  

He was convinced that this was the right thing to do, but still, there was a lingering doubt.  What if she rejected him.  With much prayer, he set out for Toccoa.  If his plea fell on deaf ears, he was ready to take that as a sign from God and to go on without her to the work that God had laid before him. 

He arrived on campus on the last day of regular classes.  He went directly to Ruth’s class which was about to begin.  He entered the room with the students and quietly slipped into a seat at the back of the room.  A few students noticed this intrusion but Ruth seemed not to notice her extra student.  She proceeded with a final lesson and then a concise review of the semester's work.  John sat there content to be back in her presence but soon found himself listening intently as if he had to take the exam.  She concluded the review, reminded the class of the scheduled time for the exam and dismissed them with a prayer.  

Over the next week, as Ruth administered and graded exams, they managed to renew their friendship.  By the end of the week, a proposal had been made and accepted and a wedding date set.

John and Ruth went north to be married in her home church in Pennsylvania.  They were driven there by an older minister and his wife in their Ford A-Model Roadster.  If you remember, the Roadster had only a front seat in the cab and an open-air Rumble Seat which was where the trunk is on modern autos.   When the weather was clear, Ruth and John sat in the Rumble Seat.  When it rained, all four of them crowded into the cab on the front seat.  Now, that seat is not wide enough for four so when it rained, Ruth sat on John’s lap.  In later years, John would reminisce, with a chuckle, of that time of closeness as symbolic of their closeness through their years.

He and Ruth raised four children and he preached the gospel as the pastor of several other churches.  He preached the gospel on a missionary trip to India.  He preached the gospel as pastor of an International Church in Cambodia.  He preached the gospel as a traveling evangelist.

From the evangelist road, he and Ruth came with their travel trailer to pastor our church and stayed on to shepherd us for several years until failing health led him to resign.  After a time of recover, he began to accept an occasional evangelistic engagement.  He went back to his first pastorate, the Gadsden church, for a series of meeting and while there he fell sick and went to be with the Lord.