Our Father

Discovering Family

Carnell

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498218740
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

When you are young, how do you reconcile so many contradictions in your surroundings? How do you explain being Christian in the face of racial segregation in the church? What do you do with an inquisitive mind in a culture that discourages questioning? These questions clashed for Mitchell Carnell in an unexpected experience in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Episodes in his life that had remained separate suddenly came together. Everything changed from that point forward. This is Carnell's story as seen through his eyes as he struggled to explore his journey of faith and to determine God's plan for the rest of his life after experiencing unimaginable loss and heartbreak. Mitchell's journey begins in a small provincial town in South Carolina and brings him to one of America's most beautiful cities and to a historic church that encourages an enlightened faith. His story is heavily influenced by family, friends, mentors, hardships, heartaches, great loves, great joy, and overwhelming sorrow. It explores the consequences of experiencing personal discrimination and the satisfaction of not being defeated by such injustice. Carnell's struggles shed light our own struggles and will help us come through them stronger and with an empowered faith.

1

Discovery and Reflections

“London—what a romantic and exciting place to go on our honeymoon!” Carol announced, catching me by surprise. The only place she had ever talked about wanting to visit was Hawaii. It never occurred to me to suggest London. I could hardly contain my enthusiasm. Going to London would be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream—an answer to prayer. I don’t know when or why her change of heart took place. Her only explanation was that we would be living in Charleston, South Carolina, near the ocean and could visit the beach anytime.

Carol grew up in a very poor family in a decaying section of Huntington, West Virginia. She had virtually no travel experience and little organized church experience. I grew up in a cotton mill village in upper South Carolina and have been in church all of my life. This is a second marriage for both of us. Carol’s first marriage ended in bitter divorce after twenty years, and my Liz died unexpectedly of an aneurysm after thirty-two years of marriage, long before her time. Carol and I dated (strange term for people our age) for seven years.

After fabulous trips to Stonehenge (Carol’s favorite), Bath, Stratford-on-Avon, Oxford, Edinburgh, Cardiff, a dinner cruise on the Thames, and strolling the streets of London, we saved the last full day of our honeymoon for touring Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey—not a very savvy decision. After a much longer walk than we expected from the Big Red Bus stop, we discovered that the lines at the Palace were too long for any reasonable expectation of getting in. Disappointed not to get inside, we saw as much as we could see, enjoyed the park, and reluctantly moved on.

The same story greeted us at Westminster Cathedral. We again saw as much as we could possibly see. We tarried awhile just to soak it all in and promised ourselves that we would come back on our tenth anniversary. We headed for St. Paul’s Cathedral. This time we were smart enough to go by taxi, which was an adventure itself.

I believe that some things are pre-ordained. Although St. Paul’s was crowded, we managed to get inside. What a breathtaking, soul-stretching, holy place! We were simply overwhelmed by its beauty and grandeur. Every step revealed a new treasure. Neither of us had ever experienced anything that came remotely close to this. Every nerve in my body tingled with the sheer majesty of it all, and I could hardly believe I was here. All of the guidebooks put together could not prepare one for this. How could anyone possibly digest it all? As magnificent as the cathedral is, and as elated as I was to be there, my real epiphany was yet to come.

At 11:00 a.m. the public address system came on. The priest introduced himself and then said, “At this time each day we pause and say together the ‘Our Father’ prayer.”

Then the most unbelievable thing happened. Voices belonging to people from around the world, of every language, of every color and hue, every nationality, handicapped and whole, male and female, child and adult, gay and straight, prayed aloud together, “Our Father.”

For the first time in my sixty-five years, the full meaning of the opening words caressed my soul in a way I had never experienced before. Here in this ancient house of worship, in this ancient city with my new bride, the true meaning of “Our Father” coursed through my veins. I was awestruck. There was no turning back. It was the beginning of a new understanding of my journey of faith. I could hardly contain the sensation of oneness in God that engulfed my entire being. I knew that my understanding of God had taken a quantum leap. “Our” took on a meaning far greater, far more profound, than its three characters would signal. This must be what Saint Paul had felt on the road to Damascus. “Who are you Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” Acts: 9:5 (New International Version).

As I struggled to comprehend this unexpected revelation and gain some perspective, my thoughts drifted back to my childhood. Incidents and experiences that had remained separate and unexplored for their meanings for all of these years began to come together, and a pattern began to emerge. Two years later, I discovered a prayer by Pam Kidd in Daily Guideposts 2001 that expresses the same phenomena that God can take a life that is in pieces and put it together according to his plan1 The pieces of my life were slowly coming together. I understood that my revelation at St. Paul’s is not the result of an isolated incident; rather, it had been a lifetime in the making.

In Dr. Scott Walker’s book, Understanding Christianity? Looking through the Windows of God, he puts it this way: “We can not know anything about God—even discern God’s existence—unless God chooses to reveal God’s self to us.”2 God was certainly opening a window for me.

My friend, Dr. Monty Knight, introduced me to perhaps the best summation of what I was experiencing, with a passage from The Quest for the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer.

He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’, He commands and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they will pass through in His fellowship, and, as an infallible mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is.3

This was my time, a time for the pieces of my life to come together. What grand design had brought me to this point?

While my grandmother Carnell was living, my dad’s side of our family held annual family reunions. These were great affairs with aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. The food was unbelievable because all the aunts competed with one another, and each one had her own specialty: country ham, fried chicken, roast turkey, cornbread dressing, ambrosia, sweet potato soufflé, potato salad, apple pie, peach cobbler, pineapple-upside-down cake, pecan pie, German chocolate cake, and beans of every description. If you had confronted the aunts with this fact, they would have denied its truth, but I knew which offering to head for first before it was scooped up by others. None came close to equaling my mother’s fried chicken and made-from-scratch biscuits. Hers were simply the best. Unfortunately, I didn’t appreciate these gatherings then as I do now. How I wish I had paid more attention.

Some of my earliest memories are of Northside Baptist Church, a mill village church in Woodruff, which was a few doors diagonally across from our house. We had a wonderful pastor, Roy R. Gowan, whom we called Preacher Gowan. He and my dad were the best of friends and he was in our home often. It was only natural for Dad to invite him to the family reunion under the great spreading oak trees at Aunt Sally Lou Hanna’s house. It was just as natural for him to ask Preacher Gowan to return thanks before the meal. At one of our gatherings, as soon as Preacher Gowan said, “Let us bow our heads and close our eyes,” my Great Aunt Anna Brown said in a loud voice, “How are we supposed to eat with our heads down and our eyes shut?”

At that moment, had he possessed the power, my dad would have deleted Aunt Anna right out of our family. I had never seen him so embarrassed. I never thought of this incident again until this visit to St. Paul’s.

Years later we were at the wake for my Uncle Calvin. I was sitting with several of my aunts, my sister, and a few cousins. Somehow the conversation got around to my Uncle Jack, who had died a few years before. One of my aunts had a vicious tongue, and she said about his widow, who was one of my favorites, “Well, Jack is dead. She’s no longer part of our family.” Her pronouncement horrified everyone present. Then, as now, someone or some group is always trying to get rid of part of God’s family. Some group is always trying to establish a set of rules that will exclude those they do not like. They strive to make the Bible say something that it does not say. Dr. Tom Guerry tells the story about a member of his former congregation in Morganton, North Carolina, who would often ask, “That’s in the Bible, isn’t it, preacher?”

“No!” Tom would say, “I don’t believe it is.”

“Well,” his friend would add, “If it isn’t, it ought to be.”

As I stood in St. Paul’s during that most reverent of moments, these long forgotten memories flooded over me. I could hardly cope with my revelation. Never before had I paid any attention to the significance of that little word in “Our Father.” Never again would I be able to ignore it. “Our” is a powerful word.

What I am learning as the message at St. Paul’s continues to seep in is that there are no limitations on who can call upon God. To paraphrase Revelation 22:17 (NIV), “Whosoever will, let him/her come.” Before this revelation, “whosoever” was just another one of those fly-by words—like “our.”

1. Kidd, Daily Guideposts 2001, 22.

2. Walker, Understanding Christianity?, 8.

3. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 401

2

Woodruff and Northside Baptist Church

In the time just after the Second World War, Woodruff, South Carolina, was not an ideal place to learn about the brotherhood of man. We were a small provincial cotton mill town seventeen miles from the nearest city of any significance. The returning GIs did begin to change things. They had seen the outside world, and they came home different from when they left. Uncle Jack came back from Europe with a much broader outlook than anyone I knew. Many of his new viewpoints were soundly rejected by the other adults. Even though I was just a boy, he and I had long discussions because I listened to him. I was absolutely fascinated by his adventures. He rarely discussed the fighting, but he did tell me about the places and people. Most of all, I knew that I agreed with what he said. He was my hero. In my childlike way, I realized that the world was somehow different outside my little part of it, and he ignited in me the desire...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Discovery and Reflections
• 2. Woodruff and Northside Baptist Church
• 3. Off to College
• 4. Beyond the Ivied Walls
• 5. Marriage—The Liz Factor
• 6. Home at Last
• 7. Hard Lessons
• 8. My Darkest Hours
• 9. Surrender
• 10. New Beginnings
• 11. Playing God and Failing Miserably
• 12. Grace upon Grace
• 13. Friends and Mentors
• 14. Autumn
• Bibliography