A Partner with the Living Lord

The chapters which follow have been written out of many years of practice, of experience, of teaching, and of listening to persons who have engaged in the similar enterprise of becoming a partner with the living Lord. The chapters were written out of an honest desire to share, to help, and to introduce you not only to what has been of importance to me, but what has worked for me!

When a person shares a deep personal experience, listeners are often surprised that one would share in such a fashion. Yet it was out of such sharing that the meetings of the first Christians made the impression on the lives of all who heard. They were not fearful of trying to tell what the Lord had done for them. We have robbed our religious living of much vitality by failing to tell others of our temptations, our trials, and, even occasionally, to tell of our victories.

It seems there are two basic facts, which were always a part of something, which happened to those, whose stories are told in the Bible. The first is a desire to name or memorialize the place where something great happened to them. Such was Mt. Sinai, Bethel, Ebenezer and Shiloh.

The other basic fact, which is a part of the Christian tradition, is our absolute need to give. Sometimes it is merely to give thanks in song and in praise. Sometimes one gives thanks by making gifts of money or some other possession. Paul remarks in 2 Corinthians 9:5 that -- "first they gave themselves to the Lord" (RSV). After one has made this gift, everything else seems to flow as a part of life.

Out of such basic beliefs came a desire on my part to do something of permanence in memory of our daughter. Most of our friends know of the facts of her death, and it is necessary here to say only that her death some nineteen years ago made a drastic change in my faith and in my outlook on life.

One of the Psalms has an interesting phrase: "While I was musing the fire burned" (Ps. 39:3). This seems to be one of the ways my ideas came into being. The idea of a memorial to our daughter through a gift came to me sometime this past year.

While we were serving one of the pastorates in Mississippi, I purchased a forty-acre tree farm as an investment in land on which to grow trees which might help pay part of a year in college for our daughter many years later. Since the time of the purchase of those forty acres, we have made two cuttings of timber, and at the same time the land has increased in value.

This past year the church we had served in that town many years ago completed a beautiful youth building to serve the needs of the children and young people of the community. Our daughter had been a member of the Junior Department while we lived there. As a child, she enjoyed going out to the tree farm just to explore the woods and see what nature was like on a firsthand basis.

In recent years we have become interested in ecology and in nature studies. I felt it would be good to create a Wild Life Recreational Area for the young people of that church and community and place the responsibility for ownership and management in the hands of the officials of the church.

After some correspondence with the minister and the officials of that church, we gave the church a deed to the forty-acre tree farm for the establishment of the Jeanne Sells Adams Memorial Forest. The church agreed to use the land as a recreational area for a minimum of ten years. At the end of that period, the church has the right to sell the land and place the money in a trust fund. The income from the trust would be used for the work of the children and youth of the church and for the support of special projects of those departments. The reason for the ten-year period was that in ten years there will be another crop of timber, and the timber and the land will increase in value so that the trust fund will be larger.

When one makes a gift, he sometimes never knows the value of the gift.