BY BOB EDWARDS
NE SEMESTER before graduating from Emmanuel Missionary College (now Andrews University) I received a letter inviting me to join the Michigan Conference as a ministerial intern. Taylor Bunch was conference president at the time, and I loved his books and sermons.
As I walked toward the administration building on a January morning, the college's business manager sidled up to me and dropped a bomb on my dreams. He quietly informed me that the finance committee had voted that I drop out of school for a year, work full-time to pay off my school bill, and graduate the following year.
I remember being angry and disappointed, but not much else. I wanted to graduate with my class, but I didn't try to appeal their decision. I just informed the College Press manager I'd like to begin working full-time.
My parents had recently gone to Africa as missionaries. In those days we didn't make overseas phone calls; we wrote airmail letters. In response to the letter I sent my parents with news of my situation, my mother wrote a blistering letter to the school. When my dad read it he said, "Josephine, you can't send that letter."
"All right, then you write one!" she retorted.
My gentle dad proceeded to do so, but when he finished, it was worse than Mother's. Fortunately, neither letter was ever sent.
As soon as I recovered from a bout with the flu (ever notice how illness follows disappointment?), I began working full-time at the College Press. I never answered the letter from Taylor Bunch.
Living Creatively
About a week later L. C. Evans, president of the Florida Conference, came into the press looking for me. "We'd like to invite you to come to the Florida Conference after your graduation," Elder Evans said after introducing himself.
I told him I wouldn't be graduating in May, and why.
He asked how much I owed the school. I can't remember the exact amount now, but I think it was $212, which was quite a bit in 1946--at least the student finance committee thought so.
"Well, would you come if we come up with some creative way to take care of your bill?" he asked.
I was delighted, and agreed immediately. During the next week one of my classmates, hearing about my predicament, lent me $50. Another classmate told my story to the little church in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where I had served as a student preacher two or three times. They voted to give me $50. That, with Elder Evans' promise, got me back in school after missing only about a week of classes.
The next spring, after graduation, I left my wife and newborn daughter (born just five days after graduation) with my wife's parents for a couple of weeks, and with some friends drove from Michigan to Florida and my new job. It was camp meeting time, and they set me to work with the other ministers pitching camp. It was hard work, but I was excited about my first job.
After camp meeting I was assigned to work with Cecil Balsar, an evangelist in Fort Myers, Florida. We pitched a tent on Main Street in nearby Arcadia. Our little family of three lived behind the big tent. We pitched two camp meeting tents end to end with a tent fly stretched between. This gave us a two-room "apartment," with a breezy living area in between.
The day before the meetings were to start, central Florida had a hurricane warning. We had to take the big tent down one day after pitching it and postpone our opening meeting for a few days. To me, it was all part of the adventure.
After we finished the evangelistic series in Arcadia, the conference shipped us off to Miami to work with Reuben Nightingale, an evangelist recently imported from California. We set up our big black tent on the corner of 19th and Flagler, just west of downtown Miami. My wife and Pauline Nightingale played the pianos for the evening meetings, and we left baby daughter, Dorothy, in a bassinet in back of our 1938 Chevrolet near the entrance to the tent. She was faithfully watched by a doting retinue of helpers.
When another camp meeting season rolled around, we were there with the rest of the Florida ministerial force at the campground at Forest Lake Academy. I heard that the famous Voice of Prophecy broadcast group was going to be our camp meeting guests. My wife and I, with 1-year-old Dorothy, were driving to Apopka Friday afternoon for weekend supplies when we saw the Voice of Prophecy Cadillac limousine heading for the campground. I made a quick u-turn (I don't know if we ever purchased our weekend supplies).
An Audition
I had heard that the Voice of Prophecy quartet was looking for a first tenor. I followed the quartet around like a puppy dog. Quartet singing was in my blood. My great-grandfather had been a singer in a quartet in Indiana in his younger years. My grandfather and father were also quartet singers and quartet lovers. I had sung in the academy quartet at Maplewood Academy in Minnesota, and in two college quartets at Emmanuel Missionary College.
Eventually, probably in order to get rid of this "pest," the quartet let me sing a couple songs with them in the ministers' room behind the platform in the camp meeting auditorium. I still remember the song we sang. It was one that our college quartet had sung, "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken." After a stanza Wayne Hooper stopped us, and he blew the pitch pipe a half step higher. After another stanza he had us sing another half step higher. And another, and another.
A couple months later, after we had returned from camp meeting, I received an invitation from the Voice of Prophecy to come to California and have a formal audition to sing first tenor in the King's Heralds quartet. By late August my little family and I were on our way from Florida to California in our 1938 Chevrolet, with diapers strung from window to window drying each morning after we had washed them out at motels along the way.
I sang first tenor with the quartet for 24 years, then worked another 19 years as scriptwriter and producer for a new daily Voice of Prophecy broadcast launched in 1971. Years later it dawned on me how God had overruled my disappointment in college to get me where He wanted me all along. Had I gone to work for the Michigan Conference in 1946 and 1947, I wouldn't have met the Voice of Prophecy just when they were looking for a first tenor.
H.M.S. Richards, Sr., used to say, tongue in cheek, that sometimes those in charge of the Lord's money are more concerned about His money than they are about His people. I still think it was insensitive of the student finance committee (God rest their now-sleeping souls) to ask me to drop out of school to work off my school debt, but I have long since forgiven them. The Lord has ways of fixing things.
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Bob Edwards, for many years part of the Voice of Prophecy radio and evangelistic ministry, is now retired and living in Malibu, California.
