The Christian Appeal (May 2000)
Issue Theme: Forever a Father

The Kindest Man
by Gene Shelburne

During the recent week after my father died, hundreds gathered to celebrate his life and ministry. E-mail and snail-mail messages poured in from all over the world, often recalling incidents that involved my dad.

One thread ran through the shared memories. All of us remembered my father as one of the gentlest, kindest men any of us had ever known.

Back in the early 1970’s Dad visited the Holy Land with a group of church leaders. One of my dearest friends, John Comer, went with him. When he heard my father had died, he instantly recalled a day when he and my father rode camels amid the pyramids.

The camel drivers were as pesky as gnats, badgering their captive customers for handouts and trying to sell them all sorts of trinkets.

“I’m sorry I had to get ugly with that fellow,” my father lamented to John when the camel ride was over.

“Really, G.B.? What did you say to him?”

“I told him, ‘Sir, I must ask you please to leave me alone.’” That was my dad’s idea of “ugly.”

My younger brother Curtis recalled in a newspaper column that never once in his life had he heard my father raise his voice in anger. How many kids can say that?

Early in my father’s almost 70 years of ministry he bucked the power-brokers of a narrow brotherhood, insisting that all of God’s children should be treated as such even if they disagreed with us on some of the hot issues. For this loving, inclusive stance, he was vilified, even in the days just before his death.

Not once, even under the harshest criticism, did my father ever attack his attackers. Often I heard him praise his nastiest critic as “the finest pulpiteer of this generation.”

“Return good for evil,” Jesus teaches us. “Bless those who curse you.” That described my father to a T.

With a tone of amazement one of his long-time colleagues said, “I never heard the man say anything bad about anybody.”  When I die, I’m afraid they won’t be able to say that about me. What about you?

One scripture instructs us to limit our speech to “what is helpful for building others up. . . that it may benefit those who listen.” To do this we must “get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” Only then can we “be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

My father embodied that scripture.