Month: July 2017

Salvation – Part 2 of 3

My brother, John F. Stith Jr., drove to East Gadsden Baptist Church to talk to the preacher, Dr. W. Albert Smith, but Smith wasn’t in at the moment.

“I went into the auditorium and sat on the first pew,” John wrote, waiting on the preacher to arrive. “The summer sun shone through the ten-foot high windows, the soft colors of the glass muting its harsh brightness. As I sat there, I found myself more and more embarrassed. What in the world was I going to say to this man whom I hardly knew, and who didn’t know me at all?”

John F. Stith Jr.
John F. Stith Jr.: “…God turned my life around.”

“Then I thought, if you want to talk to someone, you could talk to God. And I answered myself: ‘What do you mean, talk to God? That’s praying and you don’t know nothing about praying; you never prayed in your life.’ After considering the truth of this for a few minutes, I countered with: ‘It’s true you don’t know anything about praying, but you do know how to talk!'”

“So right there in the quiet, sunshine filled space of the first pew, I got on my knees: ‘God, I don’t know nothing from nothing about all this; but if there is anything to this salvation business, I want it. I want to turn my life over to you; to be and do whatever you want from now on.'”

 “No lightening flashed no thunder rolled. Everything was as still and peaceful as it had been before. But in retrospect, I know that from that minute, God turned my life around. I began to see beauty in people who had not even been in the range of my vision before. The scriptures came alive with meaning as I approached the Bible from the stance of my new relationship with God. ‘Old things passed way; all things became new.'”

Continued tomorrow: Salvation, Part 3

Salvation – Part 1 of 3

In 1953, two or three years after he grabbed me by the back of my belt and the collar of my shirt and threw me out of the syrup factory, my brother, John F. Stith Jr., became a Christian.

Here is his story, in his own words:

John F. Stith Jr.
John F. Stith Jr.: “There was a void, an emptiness I could not explain.”

“I have never worked any harder at a job than I did at the job of making Pioneer Syrup Company a success,” John wrote. But he wasn’t successful.

“Nothing I did seemed to be right. Each quarter the accountant who kept my books told me: ‘You’re losing money.'”

One day in the summer of 1953 John was working in syrup factory, alone, when he realized something was missing in his life.

“There was a void, an emptiness that I could not explain or even describe,” he said.

He had joined the church when he was 12 or 13 years old.

“I went to church as I had done before I joined the church; when I read the Bible, which was seldom, it was as meaningless as it had always been. In short, nothing really happened to me.”

“As I grew older…I went to church less and less frequently. I did absolutely nothing to further my spiritual growth. And interestingly enough, there was no one who seemed to care or to want to try to help me in such growth.”

He said he had an idea that the void he felt had something to do with the church.

“So, I told Mary [his wife] I was going down to see the preacher and I took off.”

Postscript: The “factory” John referred to was not on the farm. After Dad sold he farm in 1951 he relocated the syrup factory in a building on old Anniston Highway just outside Gadsden, AL.

Continued tomorrow: Salvation, Part 2.