Chapter 2. Missionary to Arkansas . . . No, Make That Africa

It wasn’t my idea to be a minister. Blame that on God. I planned to go to Arkansas as a missionary doctor. At least that’s the way Miss Dennison remembered it.

At church, on my visits back to Memphis, she’d find me in the lobby or in a hallway when I wasn’t talking with someone else. Shyly, she’d ask about my work in New York, then nearly always, especially if I had preached that Sabbath, at some point she’d ask, “Johnny, do you know what you told me when you were in my kindergarten class? You said you were going to be a missionary doctor to Arkansas. Whenever you preach, I think of that.” This was our secret, her special claim on the hometown boy now preaching in New York City.

It made perfect sense–being a missionary doctor to Arkansas. Dad was a doctor. And missionaries were a regular part of our life. Visiting missionaries stayed in our home. Bedtime stories featured tales by Eric B. Hare, missionary to Burma, Josephine Cunnington Edwards, whose accounts of African missionary adventure could inspire a stone, or Norma Youngberg, whose writing was good enough that I enjoyed reading her books to my own children thirty years later. And Arkansas? When I was three or four, Arkansas and Africa were equally foreign and equally close. Arkansas was just across the river from Memphis. We went there occasionally. Africa was across the ocean, but we went there every week through books and missionary visits. By the time my own memory began forming I had sorted them out. So, as far as I can remember, I was always going to be a missionary doctor to Africa.

I know I had firm plans for a missionary career by the time I kissed Marcia Marley. That was in the car when I was six years old. Marcia’s dad was president of the Adventist Church in Kentucky and Tennessee. Along with a number of other church dignitaries, he was in town for some big occasion. The Marley family had driven to Memphis from the church headquarters in Nashville. As usual, they stayed the weekend at our house.

Sabbath morning we were headed to church, the car packed with kids from both families, too many for everyone to sit properly. At some point the pr oximity of the lovely Marcia was too much to resist, so I kissed her. I have vague memories of embarrassment at hearing my mother regale everyone within earshot all with the story of her son and the conference president’s daughter.

One of the featured speakers at church that afternoon was a returned missionary from Africa. He told stories and showed slides of his mission work. Elephants and rhinos. Thatched huts and natives wearing red mud and astonishing jewelry. He showed pictures of babies with flies in their eyes and pictures of people being carried piggyback to a clinic. He included a few shots of his family surrounded by smiling natives.

On the way home, I asked Dad why we couldn’t go as missionaries to Africa. It was so exciting, so right. He said something about being called to serve the people of Memphis, but I didn’t get it.