Luminosity and Miss McCall

One day this past week I got up at 4:00 a.m., climbed into my Toyota Tundra truck, and began driving from our home near Concord, New Hampshire to Albany, New York where I was to speak at a men’s conference. It’s a 185-mile trip (a long drive for New Englanders but not for Texans) if you take the most direct route. But I decided on a much longer itinerary so that I could visit some places I’d not seen since I was a child sixty years ago.

Driving across central Vermont, I headed for Lake George, a beautiful lake in upstate New York where, in my childhood, my family often summered while my father, a preacher, taught the Scriptures each day at a tiny Bible conference center. When I reached the site where the conference had once existed, I was astounded to discover that some of the old buildings (probably constructed around the time of the Civil War) were still there. Now abandoned, probably condemned, they stood like haunted houses on unkempt property. It is probably fifty years since they were last used.

For the better part of two hours I walked the area, no one around to ask what I was doing. Sixty-year memories of the happiest days of my childhood surged back into consciousness.

The most prominent of my recollections came when I spied a small cabin on the shoreline of the lake where a single woman, Miss McCall, had lived during those 1940’s summers. Miss McCall would spend the mornings with children like me while parents went to a small auditorium where my father and other preachers taught all (and I mean all) the intricacies of Bible doctrine. They got into issues that I don’t think St. Paul himself ever thought about.

As a boy I loved Miss McCall. All morning long she would regale me and the other children with Bible stories and missionary tales that kept us in a thrall. The test of her ability to spin a story? The fact that I still remember many of them. It was at Miss McCall’s feet that I first heard of people like Patrick and Francis, David Brainard, John Paton, Hudson Taylor, Mary Slessor, and John and Betty Stam. A large part of the inventory of Bible stories which have formed my worldview were learned before the age of six in Miss McCall’s cabin. Folks like Daniel, Esther, Jonah, and Simon Peter came alive when she went into motion.

Elizabeth McCall died about ten years ago in her nineties. As far as I know, no Christian magazine ever wrote up her story; no flashy Christian TV show ever interviewed her; and no publisher ever offered her a book contract. Someone should have, because I can tell you there are pastors and Christian leaders all up and down the East Coast (occasionally I meet them) who will testify that they learned their initial love for the Bible and for Christian work on the Lake George shoreline with Miss McCall. Christians were formed there. And I am one of them.

I don’t know how much lasting value there was in what was going on in the auditorium with the parents and the preachers. I am tempted to cynicism when I suspect there was a lot of exchanges of Biblical information that went no where and changed no one. But lots was happening nearby in Miss McCall’s cabin. Stuff that would last a lifetime.

That Lake George property I visited last week is far too valuable not to be soon sold off as a site for someone’s trophy summer home. Soon those decrepit buildings will be gone, and it will be as if none of those simple activities down at Miss McCall’s cabin ever happened. But even if the tangible evidence of a one-time summer Bible conference is bull-dozed away, numberless lives will go on testifying to the self-effacing work of one obscure woman who believed in the power of planting stories in children’s hearts.

From my journal: Somewhere in my library is a book in which the writer mentions a visit to the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Sitting in the crowd that awaited the hourly eruption of super-heated steam and water, he became aware of a family just behind him which included bored, sullen children who simply did not want to be there. When Old Faithful finally performed right on schedule sending it’s plume high into the air all the crowd was amazed and cheered its approval. All except the children who, as I said, didn’t want to be there. When the spectacle had ended, the writer heard one of the children say, “Is that all? Disneyland was a lot better.” Next time I preach on some aspect of worship, I’m going to use that story.

I am fresh from a conversation in which the other person has told me that it’s important to have an upcoming conference on generosity at a five-star hotel because the people who are to be invited (to confer on strategies of generosity) are accustomed to such amenities and will not be attracted to anything less. Yesterday, part of my sermon was based on the words of Jesus: “Foxes have holes, birds their nests, but the Son of Man can’t find a place to lay his head” (my translation). Today I’m having a tough time putting these two thoughts together.

A book idea: Look for Susan Erikson Bloland’s In the Shadow of Fame (Viking Adult, 2005). Don’t expect a lot of distinctly Christian thought, but look for a challenge to the way you think.

Luminosity: The comments of one person, Malcolm Muggeridge (deceased) about another person, Mother Teresa (also deceased): “I never met anyone more memorable. Just meeting her for a fleeting moment, makes an ineffaceable impression. …Something of God’s universal love has rubbed off on (her), giving her homely features a noticeable luminosity; a shining quality. She has lived so closely with her Lord that the same enchantment clings about her that sent the crowds chasing after him in Jerusalem and Galilee, and made his presence seem a harbinger of healing” (from Something Beautiful for God).

Luminosity: I love that word.

Pastor and author Gordon MacDonald is chair of World Relief and editor at large of Leadership.

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