As a full time student at HBU, Ann was required to attend
chapel once a week. They brought in some
of the best known speakers in the Southern Baptist faith community. One day the guest speaker was a man who
served a church in Hereford, Texas. He explained how he got to Hereford. According to him, Baptist preachers were
sent there for disciplinary purposes. He
proceeded to skewer his own faith community with gentle humor. If he had been sent to Hereford for
disciplinary reasons, he probably got further demoted after speaking to the
students at Houston Baptist. He went
over big with the students, but I don’t know how well he went over with the
administration.
Having thoroughly entertained his audience, he closed with
an illustration on grace that I have frequently borrowed.
He told the story of
Cinderella and described her shameful treatment at the hands of her step mother
and the ugly step sisters. Then she got
a visit from the fairy godmother – Well you know what happened next. At the midnight hour, her coach became a
pumpkin and Cinderella returned to her poverty and mistreatment, but of course dropped
her glass slipper on the way, and somehow it didn’t morph back into something
else. The handsome prince immediately
launched a kingdom wide search for the girl who wore the glass slipper. He arrived at Cinderella’s home only to find
that the shoe wouldn’t fit the privileged occupants. Of course the tyrannical step-mother and her
ugly daughters were crossed off his list.
So asked, if there were any other maidens in the home. Reluctantly, they took him to
Cinderella. He kneeled on the floor, put
the glass slipper on her foot and it was a perfect fit. Of course he married Cinderella and they
lived happily ever after. The preacher
closed his message by saying, “Young people, that’s grace.” Of course told he told it much more eloquently
than I’ve related it here, and I told it after hearing is second hand, but I’ve
never forgotten it.
Ann finished out the year at HBU, and then we moved to Iowa
where she received the rest of her college education at Mount Mercy College – a
Catholic institution, but that story will have to wait.
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