That’s what a member asked me years before while still in the parish. I asked a question about my house, and he responded, “That depends. Is it your body bag house?” This needs no explanation, does it? You know what he means. The house you expect to die in. Well, we have one now.
I would’ve said to anyone 2 1/2 years ago who said relocating was harder than retiring that they were crazy. Turns out they would be right…in my case anyway. But a house opened up 7 miles outside of the city on which two of our kids with their families also live, and we decided while relocating now after 26 years in the same house would be hard, it would be impossible…for us anyway…5 years from now. That’s how this plaque came to be discovered.
Before continuing listen to Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me”. I haven’t purchased it, yet, so I can’t share it. This plaque is fuzzy in the picture so you can’t read the names. I’m glad for that; it’s too much to share. But I’ll read you the inscription which says more about them than me: “Presented to Paul R. Harris. Then dated August 1979. Then goes on to read, “A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. Proverbs 18:24.”[i]
There are 12 names on the plaque. Five men and seven women. Really we were all kids in our 20’s. They presented it to me 47 years ago when I left San Marcos Baptist Academy for seminary. I was best man at one of their weddings. An usher at another. One of them was best man at my wedding. One of them I dated. Two others I would’ve liked to. But all of them had a role not in building the house that built me but in leading me back to the Lord’s House.
I went to work at San Marcos Baptist Academy after the Marine who was in the same officer program I was with in the Army bailed as my roommate at the then Southwest Texas State University. No biggie, except my new roomie was a Vietnam Navy Seal who liked to drink and come back to our room ready to fight. He was so drunk it was mere slap fights. Two slaps and put him to bed. Then I saw an ad in the campus paper for live-in proctors at SMBA. Free room and board and a modest stipend for supervising a high school boys’ dorm.
That’s where I met the people on this plaque. Being hellbent but not realizing how far and fast I was heading, I wasn’t looking for anything by taking this job but a place to myself. But I did sign up to go to a Bible Study on James taught by one of the girls because she was attractive. The book on James the study was based on almost killed me, but I needed killing. Then I talked to one of the guys who preached to me the Gospel, and it was like a match was struck. No matter how I tried to live my life like that proverbial candle in the wind, that Light wouldn’t go out. It would gutter, dimly burn, but it never went out again despite my best efforts. Miranda’s 2005 “Kerosene” is apropos here.
Those two years led me to delaying my Army service and going to seminary. I originally planned to attend Southwestern Seminary, a Southern Baptist institution, with one of the guys on that plaque. He told me that since in all our discussions I would never give up infant Baptism or the Real Presence I had better go to a Lutheran Seminary and find out if they’re true since I would never find that out at a Baptist seminary.
So I did, and here I am 47 years later heading for my body bag house and thinking of these 12 souls. I was the only Yankee; they were all from Texas. The last time I saw any of them was over 30 years ago. I was invited to a reunion in 200o but declined and another in 2005, maybe 2010, which I would’ve gone to but had a prior commitment. I don’t think they believed me, but it was true.
These are definitely the people who built me up enough so that I could glimpse my Father’s House again, the one my parents had raised me in, and to see there was a Light unto my path there. So if I am on the way to my body bag house, I’m also on my way, I hope, to be reunited with them in our Father’s.
[i] I know what you’re thinking. All the modern translations have the opposite meaning for the first sentence. Only the NKJV agrees with KJV as you would expect, but so does Young’s Literal Translation. Hmmm?
