PUTTTING DOWN ROOTS IN IOWA

We went from being a family with six people active, sometimes boisterous people in the house,  to a four bedroom house for two people to roam around in during the fifteen plus years we were in Iowa.  Elliott spent the last two years of high school here.  He then went off to college and on to service, but the others did most of their growing up here.  All of our children graduated from Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, which was practically unheard of in preachers’ families at the time.   Preachers usually didn’t stay too long in one location.

I signed an agreement to stay with the church to stay five years when I first moved to Cedar Rapids.    They had seen winters disillusion preachers from the South, but I wasn’t afraid of them.   We had lived through several northern winters before we moved to Iowa.  I might have questioned my decision the first winter, when the temperature dropped beyond -50 on the wind chill index, but we stuck it out.

Many people have wondered why we didn’t stay in Texas where they were bigger churches, bigger youth groups, and more exposure to the faith community to which we were committed.  I felt the Lord was leading us to Iowa, and there were numerous benefits that came to us as the result of being here.  We knew we would probably make something of a financial sacrifice, but we wanted to have quality family life.  At the time, the growing churches of the South expected a lot of their preachers, and I had seen many of them give their families less than they deserved.  I had even seen myself falling into that trap, and it had almost cost me my marriage.

Cedar Rapids not only represented a new start, it gave us an opportunity to be with a church where there was not an enormous amount of pressure to make the church grow, although I’m sure we all hoped that would happen.   I’ve never regretted the time I spent with my children during those years.  As the saying goes, “No one ever dies wishing he had spent more time at work.”

Our children chose to be involved in numerous extracurricular activities over the years – band, drama, sports, chorus and other things. I can’t tell you how many programs we attended.  The only time I remember missing any of them was when three kids had a program on the same night and it was physically impossible to be in three places at one time.

We lived in the same house during all that time.  I lived in that house longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere.   I didn’t live in the same house during the years I grew up.  I was a sharecropper’s son during the early years of my life.  When we finally settled into a house where Mama and Daddy would spend several years, I was a senior in high school.   Obviously, we put down some roots in Iowa.