The closest friends that Paulette and I had in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, were Jim and Marguerite (“Magee”) Drummond.  The friendship started when we moved in next door to them during the summer of 1973.  The day we moved in, Magee brought over a freshly baked apple pie, and our friendship only grew from there.  They were already retired at the time, and neither of us was yet thirty, but for some reason they liked us.  Over the succeeding years we spent many an hour visiting with them, usually on their little enclosed porch, often with one of Magee’s pies – the apple and mincemeat were the best.  They were both fine Christians and were models that we both tried to emulate.  Unfortunately, in 1980 Jim suffered a severe heart attack and his health slowly deteriorated until he died of congestive heart failure about fifteen years later.

Jim was a big baseball fan, especially liked the Braves and Red Sox.  Every morning he would carefully read everything about the games played the day before in the sports pages of the newspaper.  Perusing the box scores, Jim would make notes in a little notebook.  In those days the Sunday paper carried the individual statistics for all of the major league players, and he would clip it to look at during the following week.  Paulette and I were fans also, and some conversations with Jim were about baseball.  We eventually moved to another house, which was about two hundred yards behind the campus baseball field, and we spent many a weekend afternoon watching the games.  I could never bring myself to watch baseball on TV, however; it was just too boring (maybe not as boring as golf on TV, but boring nevertheless).  Jim could never watch baseball on TV either; he said that he got too excited!

Jim was always an active church member and served in many capacities.  He was Sunday School Superintendent for several decades, board member, worked on the building and yard, visited, and served on many committees, but his biggest love was singing in the choir.  He had sung in choirs since his teenage years at the Congregational Church in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.  Jim’s church, Bethabara Moravian, had built a new sanctuary in the late 1960 s, and during the planning there was great debate about whether the choir should be down in front, where they could be seen by the congregation, or up in a loft with the organ (a pretty nice pipe organ).  The loft won, but while they argued about location, they never thought about handicap access.  As Jim’s heart disease progressed, it got harder and harder for him to make it up the stairs to the choir loft.  Finally, he couldn’t climb the steps with his frail body (probably about 120 pounds), but he still wanted to sing.  I think the solution came at his suggestion.  Two of the men in the choir linked their hands to form a seat, like a fireman’s chair carry, and carried him up.  He continued to joyously sing for over a year.

The Joy choir invites you to join them.  They would welcome you.  I know; they welcomed me.  Read Psalm 149:1-5, and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Jim

Today’s Reading: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%20149:1-5