Family stories are the best. Aunt Charlotte, my mother’s only sister and my granddaughter’s namesake, loves family stories as much as I do. Sometimes we laugh and carry-on during a phone call like nobody’s business! I can seem to get Charlotte to laugh at almost anything, and we enjoy every moment of it. When we’re not discussing politics, religion, or Auburn football, we are recalling and re-telling our family stories. Aunt Charlotte and I are truly oral history junkies.
As a pastor, I am often called upon to conduct funeral services for members of our church family or for extended members of their families. Every once in a while, I get a phone call from a local funeral home about a family who has no pastor, and am given the opportunity to come and minister to them. It’s something I welcome, and know that it might be a divine appointment for a grieving family to hear about God’s love for them.
I am eternally grateful for the spiritual heritage and upbringing I received from my family. Passed down to me and to my siblings was the truth about Jesus Christ, and a solid faith in His Word. My parents took seriously the biblical admonition from Deuteronomy 11:19: “You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”
But spiritual precepts are not all that my family passed down to us. Oral history is a part of the fabric of our family. The following is another excerpt from a book I am presently penning about my late father, Coolidge Sims. His last days in an assisted living center gave me a brief season to hear him again rehearse the stories of his childhood that I had heard all of my life. One evening in June of 2012, I joined Dad for supper in the dining hall of his final residence, The Oaks.
Our conversation that memorable evening includes his version of one of my favorite family stories. Enjoy!
Have you ever heard of Russian roulette? Russian roulette is a wicked game (usually a drinking game) to “test one’s bravery.” If you’re lucky, nothing will happen and you get to live to see another day. If you aren’t you move immediately to the afterlife. (I’m not sure what happens if you chicken out, but most likely it’s fatal.)
Let me be clear– I’ve never played that game, nor would I ever play it. But have I taken stupid chances? Have I played Russian roulette with thoughtless decision-making? You’d better believe I have– especially when I was young and “invincible.” What comes to my mind is a series of events that occurred during a camping trip with four teenaged friends– at a place in the Talladega National Forest we simply called “The Train Tunnel.”
