"2Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them." (NIV Acts 2:2-4)
Imagined a similar spirited service 1,900 years later, I don't remember what the preacher said at that service, but Saint John Pentecostal Holiness Church was a rocking place. Hands were waving, feet were dancing, bodies trembling, and alien-voices were thunderously intensifying.
In the Bentonville community, NC, just east of my home church Ebenezer Methodist, about half a mile, adjacent to the Wayne County line, St. John Pentecostal stood. (In fact if the stories are accurate, St. John was an offshoot of Ebenezer Methodist around the late 19th Century or early 20th Century when Pentecostalism was born out of Methodism. Charismatic-other-tongue speakers left Ebenezer to form St. John. In Pentecostalism's history, Reverend Charles Fox Parham was a former Methodist who became an independent Holiness preacher.)
At St. John Mrs. George (Pearl) Lee, its matriarch, had invited my father Cornice to bring his family to this revival one evening in the late 40s. Of course, my dad knew that the services would be quite different from those of our staid Methodist worship, not to mention those of his mother's Disciples of Christ Church or his father's Quaker meetings where the congregants would sit quietly for hours waiting for the Spirit to move. At St. John, the Spirit didn't just move over long stretches of time: it sang, danced, and moaned all the time.
Several Methodist Churches into recent years have retained a very small remnant of other-tongue-speaking. And it was natural that Ebenezer retained a remnant into the 40s as Granny Flowers at times could not contain the Holy Spirit. So charismatic worship, even then, was not totally unfamiliar to me, but at St. John it was emotionally overwhelming for this young child.
That night, Mrs. Pearl and about five or six others tested the very foundation of that solidly constructed wood-frame-church building, and my memory was frozen in the Holy Ghost.
A few years later, 1957-58, the St. John congregation made a decision to build a new, more modern-brick-church structure. A local entrepreneur, William (Bill) G. Flowers, purchased their older, structurally sound church-building and had it moved 3/10 mile back west on his property facing Harper House Road. Bill's dream to turn the church into a commercial feed-mill was on its way to being fulfilled. He knew a local engineer who moved buildings and could make, or engineer, most anything that could be envisioned. William F. (Shorty) Harrell, of our community, lived across the Johnston County line in Wayne County. He was essentially a savant, although he never completed high school or had an official degree of any kind. He was the master of, engineered, a mill complete with all-new corn sheller, hammer mill, mixer, and a large open-top-corn-storage bin. Within a year, Bill's dream came to fruition in the holiness structure. It had a few add-ons, including shelter over the grates where corn or grain was dropped from truck or trailer, for elevation to the corn sheller or hammer mill. The structure of the old church was of impeccable strength, reinforced by Shorty's genius-integrity to make it mill worthy. Shorty's engineering of the wooden constructed open-top-grain bin, its strengthening with twin-steel rods connecting each side, intersecting midway the top, gave proof he knew the calculus: The pressure that would be imposed on the walls when filled to the top.
On completion of the commercial mill, Bill needed, as he would say, "a manager." He came to me knowing of my love for farm life; I was in my third year of diversified farming, livestock and crop productions. "Let me think about it," I said. At twenty-one years of age, I was young, energetic, enthusiastic, somewhat ambitious and physically capable. After significant consideration, I took his offer.
Being Bill's manager was a rewarding experience: working feed-formula ratios, operating the equipment, swiftly spinning a miller's-tie around a bag. Carley Dudley was my main helper and Tommy Rhodes, who trucked, from Norfolk VA, our brand of Wayne Feeds pre-bagged and feed-concentrate products. Bill usually was on standby to help.
Bill and his wife Dinkie's enterprises, which also included farming, did not detract from raising two fine children, Dixie Ruth and a son, Phillip. Phil was 10-years of age and loved to play around the mill when not in school.
One fall day when the corn we purchased had filled the open-top bin to the brim, some of it had to be augered out and loaded on a long transport trailer for market. All the electric motors were humming at full speed, a cacophony of sheller, hammer mill, and augurs churning, moving grains.
Deafeningly the mill made unclear any other sounds. But as I sat at my desk about 30-feet away from the grain bin, I vaguely heard a terrifyingly high-pitched sound coming from above the open-top bin. I raced up the ladder to see what it was. There in the middle of the bin, in a trail of corn kernels vastly cascading to the sinking center point was Phillip. Already halfway up his lanky body, he was stuck, wedged in corn; he had no hope of escape. At the top of my voice, I called to others, about five people in the building, to instantly shut down all switches, I rushed back to the center of the bin, treading the twin-steel rods, to grab Phil's outreached arms, as he was still sinking.
By this time the corn was already on his shoulders. Others raced up the ladder to see, and to surmise what we could do to get him out. Sadly, Shorty Harrell was not there to help us in some genius way. Standing on the steel rods, I dared not relieve my almost-full-strength pull on Phil's arms, he would sink even deeper; he cried, pitifully, "don't pull my arms off."
The only way out was to cut a good-size hole in the side of the wooden bin to relieve the pressure. There had to be as little vibration as possible, so as not to create motions that would sink Phil further. But we didn't have a chain saw at hand; there was only an ax available. As one of the men started slamming away against the bin wall, Phil would sink ever so slightly, kernels were under his chin, and ----- finally, a larger hole released a downpour of grain onto the mill floor that had to be spread across the floor to get even more out. We breathed an exhausting sigh of relief. Once the grain was down to around his knees, we were able to pull him out to safety.
The Holy Ghost had certainly not left that building, for I knew within that thirty-minutes of frightening apprehension there was for certain an extraordinary Spirit moving within those men.
The masterful spirit lives in men like Harrell and Flowers, who inspired ethics and initiative in a younger generation. Those were men of uncommon skills, remarkable talent. Shorty Harrell, whose raw-engineering genius further endeared him to companies such as Hog Slats, died 5-years ago, and Bill Flowers, who died this past March, left proud legacies to their families.
A dynamic spirit and initiative lives on in Phillip Flowers, who married my cousin Martha Westbrook. He continues to carry on the Bill Flowers tradition: a most notable entrepreneurship in Greenville NC. Phil's architectural design of buildings, commercial construction, and the Rock Springs Center facility are among his and Martha's enterprises, serving the broader community of Greenville, NC, home of a world-class medical complex and East Carolina University. Phil's community leadership, fostering civic responsibility, combined with his free-market achievements, are a testament to man's most noble undertaking to make a better world and better life for his family and others.
Thanks be to The Great Spirit who gives life!
No comments:
Post a Comment