CHURCH

Some of my earliest memories are of First Baptist Church, Calhoun City, Mississippi. I remember graduating up to the 4 and 5 year old room -the Beginner Department - with Mrs. (Red) Goodson as my teacher.  It was a big room with a kitchen area, block area, reading area with a bookshelf of books, table and chairs for working with crafts, a piano, and a semi-circle of wooden chairs with a yellow seat. In fact I have a couple of those very chairs.  The church did some updating  about 25 years ago and was just going to throw out the chairs.  My daddy got several and passed them around.

Another thing I remember about church was choir.  Most of what I remember about the preschool choir is getting dressed in the choir robes -- white with big maroon bows -- and standing in line waiting to go to the sanctuary to sing our little hearts out.

One of the things that was so neat about Mrs. Goodson was that she went on mission trips to far away places and always brought back stuff for us to see and would tell us all about it.  Looking  back I realize what a very good pre-school teacher she was. She did it for many years. I also remember one spring during Vacation Bible School we got to go to her house and have cookies and juice (I think that's what we had). She lived within walking distance of the church. So they lined us up and had us hold onto a rope to keep us all together.

Then we graduated to the Primary Department and got a Bible as a gift from the church. In this department we were separated by grades in small class rooms with a big meeting room in the middle where we met together and had a devotion and song to start the day.

Our next step up was the Intermediate Department and then the Junior Department. As always church choir was a big part.  The robes got a little more dignified as we got older.  A couple years ago I found a picture of our choir when I was in middle school or junior high as we called it.  It brought back memories of Mrs. Helen Lackey, Mrs. Minnie Lee Pryor, and Libba Jane Harrelson and all the choir trips we took.

We went to Jackson for choir festival every year which was a big deal for little o me.  This was a one day trip but it always ended with us eating at a fancy restaurant which was something to treasure for me. Mrs. Pryor would get a shish kabob -- something I had never heard of  - and it would be on fire. Another fun thing was to get to ride in Mrs. Pryor’s Cadillac. Fancy doings.

I have some very good memories from those days in church.  A lot of seed was planted in my heart and life that finally came to fruitation many years later.  I walked the aisle when I was 10 years old. Following  my cousin because I had this incredible urge to do something. But not understanding what it was I needed to do. But because I had been in church all my life I must have had the right answers to Dr. Curtis’ questions or maybe he fed me the answers in the way he phrased the question. Anyway I was baptized and then tried unsuccessfully to make myself into what I thought God wanted me to be or to do. I was a good "church" girl, very involved and committed. You know when you're not a bad person or don't do anything really really bad sometimes it is hard to realize that you are a sinner just the same and can't do it on your own.

Thankfully God knew my heart and kept knocking on my heart's door and giving me opportunities to truly find Him.  It wasn't until I was a mother of two with another one on the way that God finally made plain to me that I needed to seek His forgiveness and open my heart to Him.  I was going through the Paul/Timothy Study from Billy Graham with a friend from church -- now Coldwater First Baptist.  She shared a tape with me of someone giving their testimony and it opened my eyes to my own need.  Up until that time I realized that I had never looked at myself as a sinner. So sitting on the side of my bed in Coldwater in a big old drafty house one morning after having what I considered my devotional. I confessed to God that I was a sinner and needed for Him to forgive me and to come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior and He did.  Up until that moment I had never had any peace or assurance that when I died I would go to heaven.  He took care of that problem.  Then for months I pondered what to do. I mean I had already been baptised but did it count? I had never heard of anyone being baptised again.

Well  God took care of that problem too. Through a round about way He placed me in my uncle's house in Atlanta, Georgia where I had a conversation with my aunt that gave me the answer to my question of what to do now.  She told me her experience of her second baptisism and why she had done it.  So I knew then that was what I needed to do.  I have the date written down somewhere but I think it was in September 1979 that I was baptised following my true conversion.

By the way you may have noticed that I now use periods instead of hyphens or at least most of the time. That’s in response to a good suggestion from my son.  See moms can learn from their children.