[It’s difficult to think
about anything but the Corona virus and its effects. All the more reason to try
to think about “normal” things. So I have gone back to listening to [reading]
the lectionary Bible readings for each week. That’s how this started, anyway…]
Jon Stroble emailed this
week. It’s always so much fun to hear from him. We met in our first week at IU,
walking back and forth from Linden Hall, where we were in The Residence
Scholarship Program--for kids with ambition but no money, who were willing to
work their way through college--to the Rogers Center [graduate students] dining
hall, where we had been assigned as bus boys. We’ve been friends for 65 years.
Jon probably doesn’t remember, though, the night that started me using my mind
to serve God, even though he was there.
In the spring of our
sophomore year, we went together to a mid-week worship service at Fairview
Methodist, on the west side of town. I was a twenty-year-old IU sophomore
preacher at three little Methodist churches in Greene County, and I had gotten
a letter from the District Superintendent to all the pastors in the district,
saying that students from an IU religious organization were speaking at
Fairview, and we should go to be supportive. I did not know you could disobey
the DS, and I had not been to many district meetings, and didn’t know what to
expect, and didn’t want to go alone, so I got Jon to go with me.
I definitely did not know before we went that
one of the speakers would be the prettiest girl I had ever seen. [I didn’t meet
Helen until a year later.] As Phyllis Krider stood there in the pulpit, I was
suddenly, immediately, and completely in love. In addition to beautiful, she was
so composed, and articulate, and sincere. Everything a good Christian boy could
want in a girl. Everything a preacher boy could want in a wife.
She was already an RN and
at IU working on a BSN. Most importantly, she belonged to an open group where I
could just show up and see her again and she would have no idea that I was
secretly planning how we would do morning devotions once we were married.
The kids speaking that
night were from IVCF, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, a group I’d never
heard of but which I immediately decided to join. This IVCF outfit had to be
the best thing that ever happened to a Christian boy if it had girls like this.
Well, specifically, it had her.
I could hardly wait until
the next Wednesday night to go to the basement of The Reformed Presbyterian
Church, where IVCF had its weekly gatherings. And there she was. To make a long
story a little more palatable, she was kind to me, and went out with me a few
times, even accompanied me to my little churches where I went to preach. But
Phyllis was a mature woman, intent on a life as a missionary nurse, and I was
just a moon-struck boy. She let me down so easily I didn’t know it had happened
until I realized she had steered me right into the arms of Uree, another IVCF
girl, as Phyllis herself quietly slipped out of my peripheral vision, but Uree
is another story. [1]
I started this column
because of the lectionary Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, the one in
John 9 about Jesus healing the man born blind. Something happened in Bible
study at IVCF that set me on a life of using my mind to serve God, as well as using
my heart and soul and strength. [Luke 10:27] Learning to use my mind for God is
probably the second-best thing that ever happened to me, and I owe the start of
that to Phyllis. She caused me to lose my mind, over her, and to use my mind,
for God.
But the story of the IVCF
Bible study of John 9 will have to wait until next column, because, having lots
of time on my hands in these “quarantine” days, thinking about this caused me to
research Phyllis online.
I learned that Phyllis
died when she was only 27, just a few years after she caused me to lose my mind.
All that commitment and beauty, lost so soon. But not quite. According to his
2019 obituary, her death was the occasion of her brother, Robert, becoming a
Christian, leaving his job, entering Bible college, and becoming a pastor. She
would have been so pleased by that—in a composed, articulate, beautiful way.
John Robert McFarland
1] It’s in my book, The
Strange Calling.
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