Providential Reward

BROWN HAIR AND BROWN EYED REWARD TO OBEDIENCE

Funny way Providence leads to a lifetime of love. I was working at General Motors Assembly Plant in Arlington, Texas, unloading quarter panels on twelve hour shifts. At the same time I was going to college at Southwestern AoG in Waxahachie, Texas. It was about an hour drive to the campus and my little brother Michael was enrolled there as well. So, we would make the journey three times a week. As you can imagine we did not get a lot of sleep.

Shortly after the first semester, my uncle asked me to come and work with him as his assistant in Stafford, Texas--a small Houston suburb Southwest of the growing city. My Aunt Dorothy had a friend that played the piano and would come and play for their services occasionally. She told her of a pastor's daughter in Houston, who was a knock out. I told people I was quitting and moving to the Houston area and I was going to marry a preacher's daughter who was a brown haired and brown-eyed beauty. I had never even seen her but I could visualize her in my minds eye.

We met on a blind date in Alvin, Texas, at a lake cabin my uncle owned. That night when I was taking her home I got lost and had to stop and ask a policeman at a convenient store how to take her back to her home. When she leaned across the front seat and looked out the driver's side window, I thought, "Ole girl, you look altogether too comfortable in my car," which was a 1964 Aqua Mustang, with a white interior. We had that date on the weekend after Valentines Day 1965 and were married 90 days later in Dallas, where Gay Nell's uncle was the pastor. I was the luckiest groom in Texas and have always told folks when they ask me, how did you manage to catch such a beautiful lady. I told them all, "I dated her in the dark where she could not see what she was getting."

Gay Nell has never known anything but ministry. Her momma had to stay up when Gay Nell was an infant and fight the rats off of her. That is how poor things were in that day. As a result of how they lived in that era, she always said, "I will never marry a preacher." Back in that day preacher's lived off the clothes line and ate wind pudding. In other words, they just had two sets of clothes, one hanging on the clothes line and the ones on their back and they ate only what the wind blew in for them to eat.

I was blessed to marry into her family because her daddy was a faith preacher as a result of the hardships they faced in ministry during the late thirties and through WWII. The first time I had ever seen him was a year before in the Houston crusade of Oral Roberts at the Civic Center in Houston. He had been asked to pray. I really did not even realize who he was until we met him a year later and remembered that he would be my future father in law. It was humbling to say the least. As I recall, he touched Heaven that evening and I never forgot it.

Fast Forward to early March 1965 when I asked Gay Nell to go with me to hear me preach one Sunday Morning at my uncle's church. I owe him far more than I could ever repay him. He would alternate with me on Sunday mornings and Sunday nights, allowing me to begin my preaching experience. His name was Ellsworth Roach and he was the greatest preacher I ever heard. He had incredible retention of the Word of God, and when He preached the Word of God spoke to me. The church was an old school house in Stafford and when he spoke the building would shake.

Gay Nell did come to hear me preach, and on the way home that morning she told me she changed her mind. At first she was a little reluctant when it came to marrying me. I could take you to the spot on the country road where she changed her mind. I was working as an Iron Worker in those days and was making good money; some times as much as $1000.00 a week (which looks better if you type it this way). I asked her, "What did I say that changed your mind?" She said, "Oh! It's not what you said that changed my mind, it was after you preached, I decided what little preaching you were going to do was not going to hurt anything." Well that goes to show you, "the test of pride is humiliation." My grammar was hard to tolerate, but she patiently helped correct me with animism, as an instructor would teach a child.

I had been raised in a Christian Family, but that is a far cry from living in a Pastor's home. Gay Nell knew more by accident than I did on purpose, and I was her student. Sixty years later, I am far better for it. I learned early on to listen to her when it came to situations in the church. She had discernment, added to her woman's intuition, that was fool proof. She was a gift to me to help me in dealing with circumstances that she learned from her father, Hardie Weathers. When I would speak of him, I would say: "You could walk through a minefield and never set off a land mine." I believe if someone came to him and told him that someone in the church robbed a bank, Hardie would say, "Well I bet he had a good reason." Gay Nell is more than a chip off his back, she is a composite of her Mom and Dad and I appreciate the impartation they deposited in her life.

She has stood with me for over 60 years now as we have served our generation by the promises of God, fighting the good fight of faith, and laying hold of eternal life. I want to leave her a Love Note today reminding her of what they sang at our wedding:


Gay Nell has fulfilled this in my life. I found more than a good thing. When I found her it was Providential.

This is the way it happened, and I guess I ought to know, so that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Pastor Cleddie Keith