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Overview
Considered the “Paul Harvey” of Christian writers, Gene Edwards is one of America’s most beloved authors. He is also a master storyteller. He believes that like good parables, great stories can deliver dual delights of pure entertainment and the privilege of experiencing the Holy Spirit speaking to your own heart. From the author’s transformative experience with Helen Keller at the Garden Tomb, to a “modern-day” sailor who gets swallowed by a whale and lives to tell the tale, to the little-known mystery surrounding Da Vinci’s Last Supper masterpiece, Edwards offers this carefully selected collection of stories that will make you laugh and cry, will shock and surprise you, but most of all will draw you into the fascinating world of well-told stories about people whose stories are still worth the telling.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780785218692 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nelson, Thomas, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2018 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 7.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
POOR WHITE TRASH
There are, in every generation, men who are admired for their simple upbringing of being born and raised in a log cabin; two such people were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. But then there are those who could tell a story that would make being raised in a log cabin look like paradise.
Gladys did not grow up in a log cabin, or even in a dugout. Gladys grew up in a storm cellar, which is essentially a hole in the ground to climb into when a tornado is approaching. It usually goes down into the ground about six feet and is usually about six feet wide and six feet long. Some have concrete or wood walls; others are simply the dirt itself. Gladys knew storm cellars as her home. In fact, the words "poor white trash" were often used in reference to her parents, her sisters and brothers, and herself. The term was coined before the Civil War and was simply meant as a reference to white people who were living on the same level as the slaves. The term persisted after the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. It still had the same meaning: whites living on the same level as the poorest of all the people in our nation. It was a term used for the strata of human society that she would break from.
The story of Gladys's fight to leave the chains of poor white trash is as heroic as any tale you will ever hear.
Mr. Brewer, Gladys's father, had a terrible phobia of tornadoes. He felt certain that one day he was going to be sucked up into one of them, so he confined his entire family to living in storm cellars. He was also an alcoholic. The way the family made a living was to follow the local cotton fields of Oklahoma during the five months of the cotton-picking harvest. Each one of the children was to pick one dollar's worth of cotton per day. It was an almost impossible task, but nonetheless it was the expected lot.
Gladys understood that the way out of the life she was living was to get a high school education, something which no one in her family tree had ever accomplished. The possibility of actually graduating from high school seemed beyond reach. Five months of the year Gladys was in the cotton fields of Oklahoma, and the rest of the year her parents and other three siblings did whatever they could to earn some money. The great question in her life was, how many miles are there between the cotton fields — where she was on her knees picking cotton all day — and the nearest grammar school? Getting to that school and managing to receive a full year's education simply seemed impossible.
This is what Gladys's life looked like.
Her father and mother had managed to put up six beds in the storm cellar that they borrowed and lived in. The cotton sack that held the cotton she picked every day was her mattress. Inside that cotton sack were two things: a paper sack, which held the totality of all her clothes, and her books.
On days when it was raining hard, there were no workers in the cotton fields. Gladys would rise long before daybreak and walk to the school. It was not unusual for the first person to open the schoolhouse door to find Gladys sleeping in the doorway. There she would ask her teacher for the assignments for the week. She begged for damaged copies of the books so that she could draw from them for the coming week. She did her schoolwork at night by candlelight, not in the storm cellar but on the ground above it. Gladys was an A student.
Gladys would have her teachers check the work she had done and then return to the cotton field to pick cotton late into the night until she knew she had picked enough cotton to reach the standard of one dollar's worth per day. When the teachers of the school began to understand who Gladys was, they gave her books to read and gave her special work and assignments to study for the coming year.
In good weather, she slept on her cotton sack waiting for the cotton to be weighed, not at the end of the day but at dawn of a new day. If there were light showers during the night, Gladys would simply take shelter inside the ten-foot-long canvas cotton cover that was part of her life.
Food came from the legendary side-of-the-road grocery store and gas station. It was the custom of some of those cotton-field owners to allow the poor white trash to come in and use the stove for a few hours when the stove was not being used.
On some of these vast cotton fields, the owners had erected something which could only be called the shell of a house. There was a roof and walls, nothing else. There were door frames but no doors; window frames but no windows; rafters of the attic rather than ceilings; four rooms but no kitchen and no furniture. Nearby was an outhouse and a dug water well along with the faithful water pump everyone was free to use.
Bathing was something that took place at night when there was no more work to be done. Her sister would pump the water while Gladys soaped herself all over, if soap was available. Her sister made sure that there would be no males anywhere nearby. At times, the owners of the fields showed Gladys grace and favor, and she might be allowed to use a tub that would be placed in the backyard and filled with water. This was the only known bathtub for blacks, whites, and even the owners of the field. A bathtub would allow you to actually take a bath, which was a luxury out in the burning hot plains of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma was well known for droughts that often lasted one, two, or three years. Although cotton is a hot weather crop, needing little water, still there were years so severe that virtually no cotton grew. Those were the times when Gladys could actually sit in the classroom.
On Sundays, it mattered not the name of the church, Gladys was in church. Sometimes, because of her bare feet and tattered clothes, she would sit in the foyer or slip into a back row and flee during the closing prayer. She later said, "I always drew strength from a scripture, a sermon, or songs, to inspire me to believe maybe it can be done!"
At the age of nine Gladys owned her first pair of shoes, secondhand shoes given to her by one of the gracious owners of a cotton field.
In her seventeenth year, one of the drought years, Gladys graduated from high school. The faculty provided her with a new dress and a pair of shoes. When she was given her diploma, she received a standing ovation, but she received something more than that on that hallowed day.
In those days, when a high school education was so rare, Gladys could now teach kindergarten and the first, second, and third grades. But Gladys had several dreams and steadfast goals. One of them was to get a year's education in college, which would allow her to teach grammar school. With nothing but the paper sack that contained her few meager clothes, she moved to a town with a college in it. She attended night school whenever there were classes that fulfilled the curriculum for her first year of education. Gladys had no private room, but she did work out arrangements with a family to sleep at night on their sofa in exchange for taking care of the housekeeping and caring for children six days a week. She found enough odd jobs to pay for food.
One of the jobs that Gladys had on Saturdays was working at a cleaners. One Saturday a young man came in to have his suit cleaned. He was medium height, dark, and handsome. She put a note into his suit's lapel pocket with only two words, "Hi, handsome." It is said he cut quite a stride because he was built like a Greek god. They soon married.
Gladys finished her first year of college. Now she could begin taking education courses and go through a year of tutorial training under a certified teacher. Meanwhile, she was working as a part-time kindergarten teacher.
Gladys was married that same year at the age of nineteen, and she later became the mother of two boys. She now had another dream: to see her two sons graduate from college, something unprecedented, never even dreamed of, on either side of the children's family tree. Her hope was to have two children who would turn out to be boy geniuses. That dream was soon crushed to the ground.
Gladys's elder son spent three years in the first grade. The fourth year he was allowed into the second grade simply by mercy. Gladys took some hope when it was found that the reason he was failing was because he had one wandering eye. By having a patch placed over one eye for the next year, the two eyes came together. After that, the older son took a normal trek to high school until his junior year, when he dropped out of school to join the army.
There was no such luck for the younger boy. He was the bane of Gladys's existence. There was no question that this child, at best, had come up short in learning skills. No one could read his handwriting, including the boy himself.
Math was a wonderland that he could not understand beyond the third grade. There was not a single word he could spell correctly. At the end of every school year, his grades would be Ds and on occasion an F. But Gladys found a way around that. She was now a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. She had students in the first through the sixth grades, no one in the seventh grade, and three students in their last year of grammar school.
Gladys's solution was simple: she would take her pathetic son and enroll him in her one-room schoolhouse, tutoring him night and day. When she felt he might be able to handle that particular year, she would transfer her son back to the grammar school in town with a report card that showed he had passed the grade before. Unfortunately, the year he was in the seventh grade, there were no seventh-grade students; therefore her younger son had to go to school in town. He failed, and Gladys enrolled him in her eighth grade and ignored his report card. The son graduated from grammar school.
By this time, Gladys and her husband had a home. It was tiny: twenty feet by twenty feet. The kitchen was so small it was difficult to even call it a kitchen. Everyone ate on a card table in the living room. There was only one bedroom, but there was indoor plumbing. In the living room was a chair and a sofa that could be pulled out as a bed at night. There was storage space underneath the sofa, which served as a place for the two boys' clothes.
But the other items under the sofa gave Gladys second thoughts about her younger son's intelligence. Somewhere between twenty and one hundred books lay under that sofa. They were the great classics of English literature. The younger son could read; at least, he could read until someone asked him to read out loud. He loved books and he would read anything. Gladys saved up enough money to buy a set of encyclopedias. Her younger son eventually read the entire set.
As Gladys wondered about this boy's intelligence, she drove him all the way to the state capital, walked into the place where IQ tests were given, and announced in a loud voice, "My son is either a moron or a genius, and I want you to find out which it is." Gladys, a blue-eyed Irish girl, had a very quick wit. When they handed her the results of the IQ test, the story goes, she looked at the results, looked up at the instructors who had administered the test, and asked, "Is this the IQ of my son or is it the IQ of the entire state of Texas?"
Still, the boy kept failing classes. Now old enough to understand what an IQ was, he drove to a college in another part of the state and asked to take an entrance exam. According to the way the story was told, he made the highest grade ever on that entrance exam. Six months later, he enrolled in college at the age of fifteen. In fact, he was the first person in his entire family tree to graduate from college. Gladys was present at his graduation, and one of her dreams had been fulfilled. Just a few weeks later, she graduated from college herself. The other son had returned from the army, went back to college, and he, too, graduated shortly after his mother.
Gladys had one other goal in life. She wanted to write a novel and see it published. That never happened. But everyone in her family and neighborhood remembers the day Gladys went down the street yelling, "I sold a short story. I sold a short story!" In one hand was the letter, and in the other hand was a $10 check for her short story entitled "The $100 Tip."
The boys grew up and both married. Gladys received her master's degree, the first one ever given in the field of dyslexia. She was the first person in the state certified to teach students with the learning handicap of dyslexia — not being able to spell or do math — but at that point she already had ten years' experience educating her own son. Eventually Gladys became one of the nation's leading authorities on dyslexia.
Gladys lived long enough to see her older son's four children grow up. They were each brilliant and each rose to the top of their professions — two lawyers and two judges. She did not live long enough to see her younger son's two daughters grow up. One daughter earned two master's degrees in education and management and the other became a college English teacher.
Gladys lived long enough to see her older son become superintendent of schools in the very educational system where he had failed the first grade three times. She also lived long enough to see the bane of her life, that "slow learner," become the author of more than two score books, which have been translated into some ninety-nine languages.
Word reached the younger son while he was on a speaking tour in Europe that his mother was dying. He immediately returned to the United States, but not before he stopped by a publishing house where he received the first copy of the first edition of his third book. When he walked into his mother's room, he fell at her feet and began kissing her feet and covering them with tears.
He placed into her hand a church history book and then read the dedication page, which read:
This book is dedicated to GLADYS EDWARDS, who, again and again, gave away all her substance and lived out her whole life on this earth for two who called her Mom. She was my all-time number-one fan and one of the dearest treasures God in His merciful providence ever bestowed on a son. See you again, Mom, in realms of blazing light where none can be found except we be found in God.
Gladys is my mother.
CHAPTER 2
THE DAY I MET HELEN KELLER
Helen Keller was considered to be the most famous woman of not only the nineteenth century but also of the twentieth century. Her story has now been told for four generations. Movies have been made of her life. Anne Bancroft won an Academy Award for portraying the life of Miss Sullivan, who brought Helen Keller out of a world where there was neither sight nor sound. Patty Duke's portrayal of Helen Keller as a child will forever go down in Hollywood's legends as one of the greatest acting performances of all time.
It is one thing to meet one of the world's greatest and best-known people; it is another to meet them under the most unusual of circumstances. In fact, I'd say it is nothing less than momentous when you meet that person in one of the greatest moments of her life. It turned out also to be one of the most memorable moments of my life.
I was in Jerusalem. I was nineteen years old, and I had been living in the Holy Land. At this point, I was living in Jordan. I made it my habit to go as often as possible to a place called the Garden Tomb.
An English general had discovered this tomb, which many believe to be the place where Christ was buried and resurrected. The general's name was Gordon, and for a long time it was known as Gordon's Tomb. Later, under the loving care of Episcopalians, a gate was built in front of the tomb, and the place became known as it is today: the Garden Tomb.
One week earlier, many visitors had celebrated Easter there. Now it was time for me to leave the Holy Land to journey to Rome to study archaeology. I rose early in the morning, made my way through the streets of Jerusalem, and came to the gate of the Garden Tomb.
As soon as I walked through the gate, I realized that two people had entered before me and were inside the tomb itself. After a while I began to realize that one was a woman, but the voice of the second person was a complete mystery to me. I had never heard a voice quite like it. It had no intonations; it was the flattest monotone I had ever heard. I then realized that whoever was in the tomb had a great deal to say.
Once through the narrow door of the tomb, I saw a hand stretched out toward heaven. Shortly afterward I discovered who was visiting in the tomb at that moment.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Stories I Love To Tell"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Gene Edwards.
Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction, ix,
1. Poor White Trash, 1,
2. The Day I Met Helen Keller, 15,
3. The Miracle at the Wailing Wall, 21,
4. Thank God You Got Off the Phone, 27,
5. A Tale of Two Coins, 31,
6. A Fairy-Tale Wedding, 35,
7. Jonah Revisited, 41,
8. The Man They Could Not Hang, 45,
9. A Can of Oranges, 51,
10. Great Discoverers, 61,
11. His Open Eyes Opened Mine, 69,
12. Don't Be in Such an "All-Fired Rush", 75,
13. Will Daughter Be Like Mother?, 81,
14. Two Amazing Conversions, 85,
15. The Dirt Farmer, 91,
16. The Power of Hospitality, 95,
17. Hotel Room 15, 99,
18. Remember Peter, 103,
19. The Preacher and the Lynch Mob, 107,
20. Memba, 113,
21. The Unseen Hand of God, 119,
22. What the Stunned Surgeons Found in the Operating Room, 147,
23. The Mystery of da Vinci's Last Supper, 155,
24. Not by Words, Not by Deeds, 165,
25. A Second Paul of Tarsus, 177,
26. The Ice Tower, 195,
Acknowledgments, 209,
About the Author, 211,
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