Good morning, Friends,
My Uncle Irving spent most of his life as a minister in the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, and then retired to the little town of Wilmore, Kentucky. There’s not much in Wilmore except a small Methodist school called Asbury College. There is a story that comes out of that little town which is included in one of the history books of United Methodism that tells of some great, but often overlooked Christian men and women. It’s the story of a frail little woman named Ludie Day Pickett. She was a small, timid woman, but she was a power backstage for Jesus Christ.
There was a young man who came to Asbury College from north Kentucky, and he couldn’t find a place for room and board. Most of the people didn’t know him enough to trust him, and he had kind of a Yankee accent. Finally, he knocked on the door of Ludie Day Pickett, and told her his plight. She said, “Son, I’m sorry I don’t have a room, but my son Wascomb will share his room with you.” Don’t you know she was glad she opened her home to E. Stanley Jones, and asked the greatest missionary evangelist of the 20th Century to come in and live in her home? Her finger marks were on him just as much as his own mother.
But the person that Ludie Day Pickett influenced the most was her own son Wascomb who died just a few years ago as the Senior Bishop of The United Methodist Church. Once, as he was coming back from India on his furlough, Prime Minister Nehru sent for him and said, “Bishop Pickett, you’re going back to America. You know how the people of India are starving to death. Can you go back to your people and appeal to them for the starving people of India?”
Well, Bishop Pickett was no politician, but he knew a freshman senator who was a Christian named Hubert Humphrey who said, “I’ll see if I can get you in to see that committee.” Senator Humphrey called him back that night and said, “The committee is to meet this Saturday. If you can be there, they will give you fifteen minutes to present this cause.”
He went to Washington and met with that committee. The whole time Bishop Pickett was speaking, the entire committee sat in silence. The bishop thought they were bored. After the fifteen minutes had ended, Senator Stuart Simington of Missouri said, “I move you, Mr. Chairman, we give him fifteen more minutes. Because what he is talking about is dynamite — the sharing of our country with people in need.”
All of us know about America and India. We don’t have the allies across the world that we’d like to have, but all of us know what India and America have meant, and it may have started with one timid woman in Wilmore, Kentucky, who was not ashamed or afraid to give her testimony of Jesus Christ. As Jesus said to the lawyer in Luke, chapter 10, “If kindness is what does it, then you go and do likewise.”
Authentic faith in Jesus produces kindness,
Bruce Jones, Pastor
Imagine Church
