A Reunion in California

      The reunion took place in the early nineties, but I have to go back to 1953 to tell the story. In that year I came off the farm in Clyde, Texas and enrolled as a college student at Abilene Christian.   The Korean veterans were returning to school, and we had a record enrollment that fall.  I was among the last of the freshmen to enroll, and they didn’t have enough teachers for the mandatory freshman English class.  Della Pack, wife of Frank Pack, one of the Bible professors,  was pressed into service and I was assigned to her class.   

     For some reason that I still don’t understand, she thought I had the potential to write, and provided the first encouragement I ever received to pursue that discipline.   She was filled with warmth, kindness, understanding and patience.  She taught be the basics of English composition.  When I wrote A Sense of Belonging, she was one of the two persons to whom the book was dedicated.

When I entered my junior year, I enrolled in one of her husband’s classes, and subsequently took every class under him that I could get.   Frank Pack was raised in Tennessee, and became a preacher.  Later he received a PhD from Southern Cal.  He was one of those rare individuals with high academic credentials, who had an equally powerful pulpit presence and was able to communicate with the common man.   He was the kind of man who could hold his own in a group of scholars discussing complex philosophical and theological issues and talk to a farmer about his crops.  

     While he was in California he met Della, who was from Kansas.   I consider both of them among the most significant mentors in my life for different reasons.  It was always a pure joy to be in their presence.  Brother Pack (I never could bring myself to call him Frank, although he was known by his first name by most of the people in the churches he served) taught in Abilene for several years until he was made chairman of the religion department at Pepperdine, and was also selected as the pulpit minister of the Culver Palms church in Los Angeles.

     Now fast forward to the nineties.  A Sense of Belonging had just been published, and I was invited to present some of that material at the Pepperdine lectures.   Just before that time I happened to see Brother Pack at the lectureship in Abilene.   He told me that he was teaching from my book in his Sunday School class, and asked if I would come to Culver Palms and teach a lesson from the book on the upcoming trip to Malibu.   In the first place I was absolutely stunned to learn that he was teaching from my book, and I was overwhelmed that he wanted me to come to his Bible class and share some of the material. I was honored and intimidated at the same time.   

     I spent the first five minutes or so in class singing the praises of Frank and Della Pack.   After the class a lady came up to me and said, “You have no idea how much damage you have done to this church.”   I was horrified.  I was trying to think what kind of slip of the tongue had gotten me into so much hot water.  Then she said, “We’ve been trying to teach Frank Pack humility for thirty years, and you destroyed it all in five minutes.”  I was able to breathe again when I realized she was kidding.  She said, “I had you going there for a minute didn’t I?”  She most certainly did.  Obviously she her relationship to the Packs was a little different from mine.

     The  Packs invited us to a brunch at the Los Angeles Yacht Club. I couldn’t imagine being so generously treated, but they acted like we were doing them a favor.  Sad to say, their health declined soon after that and they both died.  We never saw them again, but we have remarkable memories. 

On my last trip to California, the Culver Palms church invited me to preach for them on the Sunday after the close of the Pepperdine lectures.   Everyone seemed to be anxious to share Frank and Della Pack stories with us.