Paying Tribute

It’s one thing to recognize contributions for which you owe a debt of gratitude for the good things people have added to your life. It’s an altogether different thing when someone makes your life possible. There is one fellow out there who owns a piece of my soul. When God ends all things and we stand before Him, everything likely to show up on God’s record of my life will always go partially to the credit of this one man.
Reverend Thomas Duncan never bothered with getting a degree. His mission in life hardly required one. There were three periods in my life when I spent any significant time with him. The one which matters most was quite early.
Sometime around age 7 I passed through the Baptist conversion ritual. Baptists don’t like calling it a ritual, but it doesn’t vary across the entire world where such churches exist. I recall the ritual, but nothing of the discussion which was supposed to justify the ritual. Among the frequent moves we made when I was young, I turned age 9 at Purcell, OK. We attended Union Hill Baptist Church outside of town, and Tom was called as pastor that year.
It was because Tom was the kind of man he was, that his wife was the kind of woman she was. It was she who recognized my youthful turmoil was not merely typical kid stuff, but meant something. It was she who with a single sentence led me to reach out and touch the Spirit Realm which called me. She skipped all that conversion talk and offered what little could help. Subsequently, it was Tom who taught me how to do business in that realm.
He didn’t try to teach me that. No one can. It’s not taught, but caught. Indeed, most of what he tried to teach me never stuck, because it really didn’t matter. Precious few of our conversations were memorable. What was memorable was the way he operated hard-wired to Heaven. All his flaws and limitations had no bearing on what he accomplished, because his vital energy and peculiar sense of what was important did all the work. The things he could tell me were simply his own peculiar intellectual grasp, but he was one of the precious few who seemed comfortable with God looking over his shoulder.
So at the tender age of 9 I caught it. Nothing was ever the same. From that time forward, I remained sensitive to the Spirit Realm. I was flatly incapable of ignoring it. My conduct was always in check.
There are plenty of secret scars on my soul, things which were quite awful when measured internally by the standards of the Spirit. But I defy you to find evidence by which I actively, intentionally harmed anyone else. For this, I owe much tribute to Brother Tom. A genuine spiritual awakening will tend to restrain self-interest, and put the focus on something much bigger than yourself. In religious language, you hunger for holiness more than anything else. Tom was that kind of man himself, and it branded my soul for life.
There are no words of thanks adequate for such a gift.