Thomas C. Oden - A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir

www.IVPress.com/academic

InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400,
Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com
Email:

2014 by Thomas C. Oden

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Pressis the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple
Images: Photo of Thomas Oden: InterVarsity Press

ISBN 978-0-8308-8019-5 (digital)
ISBN 978-0-8308-4035-9 (print)

To Edrita

The love of my life

who helped me hear Gods footsteps

All school work came to a halt when every kid in my third grade class went out to the cotton fields during harvest time. A faded yellow school bus took us a few miles out of town to pull bolls. We sang and laughed at the thought of briefly escaping from the classroom.

I dragged a long white denim sack my grandmother had made for me. It had a harness to loop over my shoulder which allowed me to pull it through the long rows of cotton as I stripped the cotton fibers from their shell. The barbed husk of the boll was there to protect the soft cotton fibers I was pulling out. The trick was to get the cotton out without getting our hands bloody from the sharp edges of the cotton husks.

A single row of cotton was a quarter mile long and took a long time to work, but row after row we worked as fast as we could. We competed to see how many pounds of cotton we could pull in a single day. Then we dragged those long, heavy sacks full of cotton to one of the Ford Model T trucks, where it was weighed and soon taken to the cotton gin. An overseer supervised the weighing, and we were paid cash immediately. For a third grader it was the most money I had ever had in my pocket. Though exhausted, I also felt like I had accomplished something big.

Then there was baseball. It was the sweet spot of my life. Maybe it was because Mickey Mantle and I were born on the same day and year in Oklahoma, but I have always been captivated by the game of baseball. Whenever Mantle and Joe DiMaggio were on the same field, my ear was glued to the radio.

I kept up with the St. Louis Cardinals when Dizzy Dean was pitching, Enos Slaughter was hitting over .300, and Johnny Mize was breaking records for home runs. I always thought of baseball as the perfect game. It contains the exact combination of distances and speeds to make a competition both fair and unpredictable. Even today I still love watching the story of a game unfold with all of its maneuvering and strategizing.

I was blessed by baseball, but more so blessed by a grandmother who prayed for me every day, even though I did not pay much attention to all of her prayers. I always knew that she and God would be there for me. In her own way she led me to believe that sooner or later I would get some hint from God about doing something I could do that really needed to be done. She planted seeds of belief in me which let me trust that providence was at work in my life, and that our free choices are being encouraged by Gods grace.

Jackson County. The flat land made me aware of the big sky. From the top of the water tower you can see for miles. My childhood was spent in a small town in the short grass country of Oklahoma. The town of Altus sits in the middle of windy wheat fields and silently grazing cattle.

Nearby are ancient granite mountains in the distance that turn purple in the late evening sun. The Navajo Mountains are about six miles away to the east and the Quartz Mountains fifteen miles to the north. The Oklahoma red granite mined there is the oldest and finest anywhere.

Before statehood this was fertile grazing land for nomadic Native American tribes like the Comanche and Wichita, who once roamed these plains looking for buffalo. Finding and collecting arrowheads was my first venture into the world of discovering that ancient hidden world. I felt the privilege of holding a bit of history in my hand.

During the frontier years from 1866 until statehood in 1907, six million Longhorn cattle rambled through our county grazing on prairie grasses all the way from Abilene, Texas, to Abilene, Kansas, on the Old Western Trail. Our family acquired the deed to some property that touches the slopes of one of the Navajo Mountains where the North Fork of the Red River meanders south as if it were looking for Texas. It became a place for family retreat, natural wonder, conservation and exploration for turtles, wildflowers, and an occasional porcupine.

Altus was as far from the centers of power as you could get in Oklahoma, hidden away in the extreme southwestern corner of the state. The dirt roads in the county were often impassable after the prairie thunderstorms. After World War II a few were asphalted. Many nearby towns that were once thriving have virtually disappeared. Only a few lonely remains of farmhouses still stand. Many rural churches and schools have almost vanished as well, and some are used for barns or storage.

Everything in Altus was within walking distance. It was an eight-block walk to get a haircut downtown and a three-block walk to the park, tennis courts and high school. Beyond that was a sea of wheat fields and cattle ranches.

No one famous or wealthy lived in my hometown. They were farmers, laborers and small-town folk. Life was not easy, but the love we had in our family felt like all we needed. We did not think of ourselves as restricted or left behind. This was the center of the world so far as I was concerned. We lacked nothing essential.

Everyone knew that if they were going to make something of their lives, they would have to do it for themselves. No one attributed success or failure to a persons environment or external causes. They assumed that most outcomes were due to the effort of the person or lack of it. If someone messed up, we would more likely ponder how a hurtful habit might be a lesson for us to avoid.

A can do spirit was what most clearly characterized that independent and confident small town. But the lack of rain and an abundance of dust depleted farm incomes. That led to many homeless men on the move looking for odd jobs. Strong and good men on the road to somewhere would knock on our door needing food, but they were always willing to work for it. Even though they were on the move, all we needed to know was that they were persons who had fallen on hard times and were hungry. We never turned any of them away. My mother would always find something to feed them, usually what we would be eating that day.