For Blake’s twenty-eighth birthday in August, Danielle and I carried him to see a Texas Rangers game in Arlington, Texas. We stayed with our good friends, Cokey and Emma Kelley in Newark, Texas, where I was their pastor for seven years at First Baptist Church.
Early that morning as we sat on their patio drinking coffee, I looked at the house next door and thought of Al Pothoff. Al and his wife Lucille lived in that house next door to the Kelleys thirty years ago when we were in Newark. They were members of our church, and Al was a faithful participant in our men’s Sunday School class. Al did not have an extensive knowledge of the Bible, but he did know one verse well, and frequently quoted it. It was John 13:17 in which Jesus said, “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.” In fact, Al liked that verse so much that he could figure out some way to inject it into almost every Sunday School lesson.
His tendency to do that was like the local politician who loved Patrick Henry’s famous saying, “Give me liberty or give me death.” On any occasion when the politician had the opportunity to speak, he used those words of Patrick Henry—“Give me liberty or give me death.” In fact, he used the words so much that the locals got tired of hearing them. One year as they approached an Independence Day program in the park, they knew that they had to invite the politician to speak, but they did not want to hear Patrick Henry’s words anymore. So, in order to avoid that, they decided to assign the politician a topic for his speech in which he could not possibly use Patrick Henry’s famous phrase. They asked him to speak on the subject of “Horse Colic.” When the time arrived for him to speak at the Independence Day rally, the politician got up and began his speech by saying, “I have been asked to speak on the subject of ‘Horse Colic.’ That requires a definition. ‘Horse colic’ may be defined as an undigested morsel of horse food moving up and down the esophagus of a horse crying, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’” Al Pothoff was about that ingenious when it came to working into the Sunday School lesson the words of Jesus, “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.”
To tell you the truth, I had never paid much attention to that verse of scripture. But, thanks to Al, I became very familiar with it. And the more familiar I became with it, the more impressed I was with its truth.
Jesus spoke those words to His disciples at the conclusion of His washing their feet at the Last Supper. They had been fighting for the chief seats at the table, but Jesus gave them an unforgettable lesson in servanthood by washing their feet. And then He said that this was the way to true happiness. He also warned them that it was not enough to admire these things. They needed to do them. Thanks to Jesus and to Al, it’s an assignment that I have not completed, but one that I can’t forget.
