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    Stories I Love to Tell
    Stories I Love to Tell
    Stories I Love to Tell
    Ebook144 pages2 hours

    Stories I Love to Tell

    By Gene Edwards

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    About this ebook

    America’s beloved storyteller will guide and thrill your imagination with these classic tales. Join Gene Edwards as he recounts his favorite stories from more than 50 years of travel and ministry.

    Considered the “Paul Harvey” of Christian writers, Gene Edwards is one of America’s most beloved authors. Stories I Love to Tell, his new book, is a compilation of tales that continue to move audiences. From stories about a chance meeting with Helen Keller at the Garden Tomb in the Holy Land to an astounding Jonah experience inside a whale to stories about a child growing up in a one-room shack, Gene knows how to spin an old-fashioned yarn.

    During the last four decades, Gene has amassed an enthusiastic, dedicated readership. Stories I Love to Tell will delight and entertain devoted fans as he relays story after astonishing story. You will want to grab a hot drink and huddle around the fireplace as America’s seasoned storyteller transports your imagination to another time and place.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Nelson
    Release dateFeb 20, 2018
    ISBN9780785218746
    Author

    Gene Edwards

    Gene Edwards grew up in the oil fields of East Texas and entered college at age fifteen. He graduated at eighteen from East Texas State University with a bachelor's degree in English history and went on to earn his M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Gene is part of the house-church movement, and he travels extensively to aid Christians as they begin meeting in homes. He also conducts conferences on living the deeper Christian life. As the beloved author of over 25 bestselling books, many consider Gene’s signature book to be A Tale of Three Kings. A simple retelling of the relationships between King Saul, King David, and the young man who wanted to be King, Absalom. His book The Divine Romance, has been called a masterpiece of Christian literature. Gene and his wife, Helen, reside in Jacksonville, Florida, and have two grown children.

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      Book preview

      Stories I Love to Tell - Gene Edwards

      OTHER BOOKS BY GENE EDWARDS

      The Divine Romance

      A Tale of Three Kings

      The Prisoner in the Third Cell

      The Chronicles of Heaven (five volumes)

      The First-Century Diaries (five volumes)

      The Day I Was Crucified

      The Story of My Life as Told by Jesus Christ

      © 2018 Gene Edwards

      All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

      Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Emanate Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson. Nelson Books and Thomas Nelson are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

      Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

      Any Internet addresses, phone numbers, or company or product information printed in this book are offered as a resource and are not intended in any way to be or to imply an endorsement by Thomas Nelson, nor does Thomas Nelson vouch for the existence, content, or services of these sites, phone numbers, companies, or products beyond the life of this book.

      Epub Edition January 2018 ISBN 9780785218746

      ISBN 978-0-7852-1869-2 (HC)

      ISBN 978-0-7852-1874-6 (eBook)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956695

      Printed in the United States of America

      18  19  20  21  22    LSC    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      DEDICATION

      We all think highly of our family physicians. My family physician is extraordinary. He did not end his medical knowledge with earning his MD, but began with it. He spends a good part of every day learning all the fields of the healing arts. For every condition or disease he seems to have a half-dozen ways of treating the malady. I consider him to be perhaps the best physician among the finest. It is unlikely I would be alive today except for his applying the best of medical knowledge as known by internal medicine specialists plus alternative approaches which aid the healing process. With profound appreciation to my doctor, Stephen Grable, MD

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      1. Poor White Trash

      2. The Day I Met Helen Keller

      3. The Miracle at the Wailing Wall

      4. Thank God You Got Off the Phone

      5. A Tale of Two Coins

      6. A Fairy-Tale Wedding

      7. Jonah Revisited

      8. The Man They Could Not Hang

      9. A Can of Oranges

      10. Great Discoverers

      11. His Open Eyes Opened Mine

      12. Don’t Be in Such an All-Fired Rush

      13. Will Daughter Be Like Mother?

      14. Two Amazing Conversions

      15. The Dirt Farmer

      16. The Power of Hospitality

      17. Hotel Room 15

      18. Remember Peter

      19. The Preacher and the Lynch Mob

      20. Memba

      21. The Unseen Hand of God

      22. What the Stunned Surgeons Found in the Operating Room

      23. The Mystery of da Vinci’s Last Supper

      24. Not by Words, Not by Deeds

      25. A Second Paul of Tarsus

      26. The Ice Tower

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      INTRODUCTION

      I learned early in my childhood that storytelling is a unique and often oblique way of making a point. Long before the invention of the microscope, the writer of Proverbs predicted that someday there would be discovered secrets in the snow that none had ever imagined. I hope that as you read these stories, you will discover secrets that the Holy Spirit gives to you exclusively.

      CHAPTER 1

      POOR WHITE TRASH

      There are, in every generation, men who are admired for their simple upbringing of being born and raised in a log cabin; two such people were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. But then there are those who could tell a story that would make being raised in a log cabin look like paradise.

      Gladys did not grow up in a log cabin, or even in a dugout. Gladys grew up in a storm cellar, which is essentially a hole in the ground to climb into when a tornado is approaching. It usually goes down into the ground about six feet and is usually about six feet wide and six feet long. Some have concrete or wood walls; others are simply the dirt itself. Gladys knew storm cellars as her home. In fact, the words poor white trash were often used in reference to her parents, her sisters and brothers, and herself. The term was coined before the Civil War and was simply meant as a reference to white people who were living on the same level as the slaves. The term persisted after the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. It still had the same meaning: whites living on the same level as the poorest of all the people in our nation. It was a term used for the strata of human society that she would break from.

      The story of Gladys’s fight to leave the chains of poor white trash is as heroic as any tale you will ever hear.

      Mr. Brewer, Gladys’s father, had a terrible phobia of tornadoes. He felt certain that one day he was going to be sucked up into one of them, so he confined his entire family to living in storm cellars. He was also an alcoholic. The way the family made a living was to follow the local cotton fields of Oklahoma during the five months of the cotton-picking harvest. Each one of the children was to pick one dollar’s worth of cotton per day. It was an almost impossible task, but nonetheless it was the expected lot.

      Gladys understood that the way out of the life she was living was to get a high school education, something which no one in her family tree had ever accomplished. The possibility of actually graduating from high school seemed beyond reach. Five months of the year Gladys was in the cotton fields of Oklahoma, and the rest of the year her parents and other three siblings did whatever they could to earn some money. The great question in her life was, how many miles are there between the cotton fields—where she was on her knees picking cotton all day—and the nearest grammar school? Getting to that school and managing to receive a full year’s education simply seemed impossible.

      This is what Gladys’s life looked like.

      Her father and mother had managed to put up six beds in the storm cellar that they borrowed and lived in. The cotton sack that held the cotton she picked every day was her mattress. Inside that cotton sack were two things: a paper sack, which held the totality of all her clothes, and her books.

      On days when it was raining hard, there were no workers in the cotton fields. Gladys would rise long before daybreak and walk to the school. It was not unusual for the first person to open the schoolhouse door to find Gladys sleeping in the doorway. There she would ask her teacher for the assignments for the week. She begged for damaged copies of the books so that she could draw from them for the coming week. She did her schoolwork at night by candlelight, not in the storm cellar but on the ground above it. Gladys was an A student.

      Gladys would have her teachers check the work she had done and then return to the cotton field to pick cotton late into the night until she knew she had picked enough cotton to reach the standard of one dollar’s worth per day. When the teachers of the school began to understand who Gladys was, they gave her books to read and gave her special work and assignments to study for the coming year.

      In good weather, she slept on her cotton sack waiting for the cotton to be weighed, not at the end of the day but at dawn of a new day. If there were light showers during the night, Gladys would simply take shelter inside the ten-foot-long canvas cotton cover that was part of her life.

      Food came from the legendary side-of-the-road grocery store and gas station. It was the custom of some of those cotton-field owners to allow the poor white trash to come in and use the stove for a few hours when the stove was not being used.

      On some of these vast cotton fields, the owners had erected something which could only be called the shell of a house. There was a roof and walls, nothing else. There were door frames but no doors; window frames but no windows; rafters of the attic rather than ceilings; four rooms but no kitchen and no furniture. Nearby was an outhouse and a dug water well along with the faithful water pump everyone was free to use.

      Bathing was something that took place at night when there was no more work to be done. Her sister would pump the water while Gladys soaped herself all over, if soap was available. Her sister made sure that there would be no males anywhere nearby. At times, the owners of the fields showed Gladys grace and favor, and she might be allowed to use a tub that would be placed in the backyard and filled with water. This was the only known bathtub for blacks, whites, and even the owners of the field. A bathtub would allow you to actually take a bath, which was a luxury out in the burning hot plains of Oklahoma.

      Oklahoma was well known for droughts that often lasted one, two, or three years. Although cotton is a hot weather crop, needing little water, still there were years so severe that virtually no cotton grew. Those were the times when Gladys could actually sit in the classroom.

      On Sundays, it mattered not the name of the church, Gladys was in church. Sometimes, because of her bare feet and tattered clothes, she would sit in the foyer or slip into a back row and flee during the closing prayer. She later said, I always drew strength from a scripture, a sermon, or songs, to inspire me to believe maybe it can be done!

      At the age of nine Gladys owned her first pair of shoes, secondhand shoes given to her by one of the gracious owners of a cotton field.

      In her seventeenth year, one of the drought years, Gladys graduated from high school. The faculty provided her with a new dress and a pair of shoes. When she was given her diploma, she received a standing ovation, but she received something more than that on that hallowed day.

      In those days, when a high school education was so rare, Gladys could now teach kindergarten and the first, second, and third grades. But

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