FEELINGS

FEELINGS

FEELINGS (AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LESTER LAIRD)


INTRODUCTION

Feelings! They are there whether we like it or not. Feelings affect much of what we do. Pleasant, happy feelings make us want to repeat an action. Miserable, wretched feelings have a tendency to program us to react negatively and avoid what has caused the pain within. My life has been full of feelings. Looking back over almost seventy years of living, I can see how forcibly feelings have molded me. Would I have wanted it otherwise? Perhaps. Nevertheless, whether I like it or not, my life has been shaped by feelings. Well do I remember one former deacon castigating me impolitely and rudely. When I questioned his insulting and abusive behaviour, he yelped, "But I never thought it would affect you like that!" I guess not! You see he did not have to live through the grief that I went through due to his inconsiderateness. Would that we would do as Jesus tells us to do in the Golden Rule, "Do to others as you would have them do to you." In other words, try to feel what people are going through and let that be your guide in life as to how you will treat them.

CHAPTER ONE ... BEGINNINGS

I cannot imagine what feelings went through a young mother's heart almost seventy years ago. Her husband had just been declared dead on a Montreal operating table. She was about to give birth to twins and had five additional mouths to feed. Having met her husband on the Canadian prairies sometime after she immigrated to Canada from Scotland at the tender age of sixteen, she married dad and together they had seven children. One set of boy/girl twins died near birth on the prairies.The five other children were healthy and survived during the "dustbowl thirties". Unable to make a go of it, the family went to Prince Edward Island where their dad had been raised as a farmer. When he died during a brain operation in Montreal, his wife, Jean, actually by birth certificate "Margaret Jane", Laird was left penniless with five children and a set of twins due three weeks later. I was one of those twin babies (the youngest). I often used to say to my twin sister that I was at least a gentleman and let her come out first. Even yet we refer to each other as "wombmates".

The day I was born, my mother was to have more deeprooted feelings. She heard my aunt and the midwife who delivered us talking outside the farmhouse bedroom where I was born fifteen miles from Charlottetown. They were saying, "The girl's going to make it, but the boy is a blue baby and will likely die." In alarm, mom called to them to bring me into the room, put me on her right arm and to leave us alone for a little while. One month before she died, she told me, "Ï prayed over you and asked God in mercy and love to spare you, my infant son. You see, I wanted to name you after your dead father. I made a convenant with the Lord that day. I promised that if God would spare you, Lester, I would do everything I could to influence you into becoming a pastor. Nothing has given me more pleasure in life than seeing you serve the Lord as a minister of the Gospel of Christ. I did not want to tell you this story relating to your birth until now, for I did not want you to feel that you had to become a pastor."

Many have commented during the years of my upbringing that I seemed to have had an outlook that betrayed a maturity way beyond my years. I attribute this to the fact that I never knew my father and felt that I would die young as he did so I had better make the best of life while I could. My outlook always was different from other teenagers around me. I just seemed to have to make each moment count. This resulted in high marks at seminary and at university because I could not live with the mediocre. Both at seminary and University Of Toronto, I ended up highest in my class. In my third year at the University Of Toronto, I joined twenty other students for a dean's banquet. We were the highest students at the university. Right across from me at the table was a young man who was the highest sudent in mathematics at this prestigious, world class university, biggest in the Commonwealth. To this day, I have a twinge of guilt as I think of him inasmuch as I didn't say much to him that night about Jesus Christ, my Lord. A week after the dean's banquet together, he took a gun and blew his brains out saying he had nothing to live for! Could I have made a difference I If had been able fearlessly to share more openly with him the saving Gospel of our Saviour that night? And how many more are there who, like him, are waiting for us to tell them how Christ can make life worthwhile !

CHAPTER TWO ... KNOW THYSELF !

My dear wife, Maureen, ended up crying on one of our dates when I told her I was sure I was going to die young. I told her I didn't think I'd ever live to see our children, if we had any, grow up and produce offspring. So what I have now is God's merciful gift to me. He has given us fifteen grandchildren at last count. They are healthy and strong and are being raised in the ways of the Lord. Daily their folk read the Bible and pray with them. Nothing turns my crank more than to see these beautiful grandchildren expressing their love for the Saviour and desire to follow Him! Our kids seem to love making babies, so the grandchildren just keep coming. I've already told my kids that the earth has been replenished and they they needn't try to do it unilaterally anyway! But they insist on having more and more kids of their own. Oh well, they have the bucks to support lots of kids since each of them has at least three university degrees beyond highschool, and good paying jobs. I have always tried to champion in them an excellent education inasmuch as I have five degrees myself including my doctorate. And so our life goes on into the next generation.

It takes a long time for a person to understand himself. Socrates used to say, "Know thyself!" Obviously this is the most imporant generator of feelings within. Inasmuch as I have been diagnosed as being bi-polar, thankfully, I have a fine Christian psychiatrist helping me to sort myself out. He has assisted me in putting the pieces of my life together. For example, one of the blights of my life has been homosexual tendencies which have arisen due to having of necessity a dominant mother and no father as I grew up. My psychiatrist has enabled me to see that I should not carry around with me a guilt complex because of this abberation in my life as a pastor. No one could be more greatly opposed to homosexuality than I. The Bible is clear in this matter. Homosexuality is an affront to a holy God (Romans 1: 18 - 32, I Cor. 6: 9 - 11, etc.). While this quirk in my inner psyche has caused a lot of pain for me, it has also impinged greatly upon my wife. I thank God for her patience and love and understanding. It has made a heterosexual marriage possible along with a life including children and grandchildren. In fairness, I told her of these tendencies before we were married so she would have no illusions about the man she would marry. Even then, however, there have been times when it has been very hard for her to bear it. For example, her feelings would go right off the chart when she would sense that I was being attracted to some handsome young man. God has been good in keeping our marriage together. Without Him, we would surely have flown apart in many directions. Our stabilizing influence has been Jesus, our Lord. Rightly the Scriptures remind us, "Ï have set the Lord always before me. Because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved."( Psalm 16:8) I am of all men most blessed - thank you, Lord Jesus.

CHAPTER THREE ... UNCONDITIONAL HELP

Reasoning way beyond her ability, mom, with only a grade four eduction, made a fateful decision when I was just six months old. She would move us all to Sarnia, Ontario, where her folk from Scotland had settled. I'm afraid her family had little time, however, for seven needy children. I can only remember them ever taking an interest in us when there was a funeral of a family member and money was needed for flowers. At such times they would come and collect from my dear mother who could hardly put food on the table for seven children! It hurt when they would come around. Often I felt like saying something to my uncles and aunts but I never did. True to the Scottish way, they were heavy drinkers. Perhaps as a result they did not have much excess money. Only my mother's half sister treated us with any compassion. She was a positive influence in my life.

Where unconditional help came was from our local Baptist church. We started going there when I was three. Dr. Hal MacBain, a leader in our Canadian religious ranks, was to remain my pastor for twenty-seven years. He founded Temple Baptist Church. Then he became the head of our Fellowship Baptist Foreign Mission enterprise and was our boss when we went to Japan as missionaries. He married Maureen and me. Hal also did a lot to mentor me and help me in my formative years even down to telling me what girls in the church to go with and what ones not to go with. One girl who had the "hots", as the young people say, for me actually called her cat "Lester". I remember when her family invited me over for a meal, while I was sitting relaxing before the meal, she shouted, "Lester, get off the table!!" SInce I wasn't on the table, I wondered what was going on until I found out she was giving a command to her pet cat. That ended my romance with her, for I could not see how a relationship could work if she were telling me constantly to get away from the table!!

I asked Pastor MacBain if he could suggest any shut-ins I could visit on my way home from school to gain experience on how to be a pastor. He suggested Aunt Mary Barnes, a New Yorker who had moved to Sarnia after marrying a man from Sarnia, an older widower. Aunt Mary had been a head nurse in a New York Harlem Hospital and was very outspoken. She had a heart, however, and took me under her wing. She taught me excellent bedside manners for the sick. As best she could she left me some money to go to university. She used to call me her "little parson" while Hal MacBain was he "big parson". I became like a son to her, for she never had any of her own. I spent time with her right up to when she died a very painful death from cancer. She hired my mother to look after her instead of hiring registered nurses. She insisted that mom be paid the same salary as an R.N. over the protests of her rather miserly husband. There are several folk I can't wait to see in Heaven. First of all, I want to sit for a long time and bask in the radiance of Jesus, my Lord. Then I want to meet my dad. Lastly I want to see mom and Aunt Mary, these two dear women who were my mother as I grew up.

From the time I was four, I knew in my heart I was destined to be a servant of Christ. I remember telling them at my ordination when I was twenty-two that, like Jeremiah and the prophet John, I felt called to the ministry from my mother's womb. My twin sister and I used to play church. I was always the pastor and she was the pianist. Often we had baptismal services when I would attempt to baptise the dog in the Baptist way (total immersion). The dog would struggle and very solemnly I would ask my twin sister Betty to leave the pretend piano and come and help me. Together we managed to immerse our little dog in the waterhole, fed by a spring, in the field where we played. You can see that by the time I went to seminary, practically speaking, I was almost trained to be a pastor.

Pastor MacBain gave me much latitude at the church. For example, he asked me to lead the Junior Choir when I was fourteen (the oldest one in the choir was thirteen). I led the citywide Youth For Christ Choir when I was sixteen. As a church we were frequently on the radio and Dr. MacBain would often feature me either in music or speaking. His dear wife, Mamie, was a wonderful pastor's wife and showed me what qualities to look for in a prospective pastor's wife.

The church helped us in very practical ways, too. One Christmas my mother had made as much provision for us for Christmas as she could. Often she would start in January to buy gifts for all of us for the next Christmas. Well, this particular year had been difficult for the family and mom was not able to save much to buy Christmas presents. She sat in the kitchen on Christmas eve with my oldest brother, Gord. According to him, she started to cry. When he asked her why she was crying, she lamented, "Ï have nothing to give the kids this Christmas. They are going to be so disappointed when they wake up." My brother suggested they should pray about it. As he and mom prayed, there was a noise on the large veranda that wrapped around the condemned house where we lived. By the time they got outside, no one was there. Instead there were two hampers, one full of food (including a large turkey) for Christmas and the other filled with toys. We never did have to ask where these generous gifts came from. We knew it was God's people who in love were giving to us to bring joy in the name of Him Who gave His all at Christmas!

Sometimes such love backfired a bit. Can I ever forget the day two couples came ostensibly from the church to help my mother out. One wanted a boy to fill out their family and the other a girl. They reasoned that if they adopted my twin sister and me it would help mom out. In the shadows, I was going through contortions wondering if mom would give us up. She made it clear to them, however, that she NEVER could give up any of her children. She fearlessly said that if she should die in the process she would keep us together and somehow, with God's help, provide for us. What a mother! I well remember her carrying three jobs at the same time to keep us together and sleeping three hours a night. Finally after three years of such torment, her health broke and we had to nurse her back to health and strength again.

CHAPTER FOUR ... EXPANDING HORIZONS

God has gifted me with an operatic type voice which has fascinated the world of music for a some time. When I was six years old, my grade one teacher enrolled me and my twin sister in the local Kiwanis' festival. We were dressed in kilts and did a highland dance and sang. We were coached a bit by my mother and a lot more by our music teacher at school as well as our Grade One teacher. To make a long story short, we won hands down the first prize in that music festival for the whole of Lambton county. It was very gratifying for me to see others affirm what I knew God had put into me.

When I was just eleven year of age, my music and grade one teacher took me to hear the Columbus Boychoir which had come to Sarnia to sing to the rave reviews of critics and others. The staff auditioned me with a view to my joining the choir school. I passed the test with no difficulty and they agreed to give me a generous scholarship which would cover most of my tuition and other expenses. It did not, however, cover travel costs or money needed for special outfits for the choir tour. When I went home and excitedly told mom what was happening, she simply said, "Son, go to bed! There is no way I can afford anything toward this project. Go to sleep and forget about it!" I cried myself to sleep that night.

My Grade One and Music teacher, however, would not let this issue die. They contacted service clubs in the area to help me. The Kiwanis Club covered all my wardrobe needs while a women's sorority club sponsored me for the rest of the cash needed. Mom would not have to pay anything for me to go to Princeton, New Jersey, to study music. Off I went to the Columbus Boychoir school, situated on the old Lambert estate. Lambert was the inventor of Listerine mouthwash. Well do I remember crying myself to sleep night after night because of homesickness. Finally, I became acclimatized to the situation and began to study in earnest at the boychoir school.

Through a freak coincidence (really the hand of God), the choir master and director of the school started to work with my voice. He was fascinated. He said that I had one of the rarest alto boys' voices he had ever heard. Consequently he gave me a lot of extra training and took me to the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, to demonstrate what he was teaching. I went on every tour while I was at the school. I was on television and radio, sang the lead opera part in one of Mozart's operettas. What training! What an experience!. I well remember one time when the director became quite angry with me. I had arranged for us to have evangelical Bible studies in a basement room. He was quite liberal in his theological stance, So he was opposed to my having such Bible studies. I complied with his wishes and did not continue such studies. In the meantime, I prayed and asked the Lord to bring a gifted seminarian from Princeton University to us to lead the Bible study. Since such a student would be of the same denomination as our director, I felt I'd have a sure ringer if such a seminary student could be found. Thank God, it all worked out well. The seminarian came to us weekly for months to fulfill his practical experience requirement. He also turned out to be an evangelical Christian! The director could hardly go against such a person leading the Bible Study.

Another bone of contention was my attitude to movies, smoking, drinking, etc. In no uncertain ways, I made it clear that a Christian should abstain in these areas and let their light shine for Christ. Again the director angrily confronted me. One of our boys had managed to land a lead role in the Dan Daily film, "Meet Me At The Fair". But he developed a guilt complex since he was acting in a Hollywood film. The director blamed me for this. Anyway, Chet finally sort of gave up his Christian values and went ahead with the film. Nevertheless, I had a clear conscience before the Lord.

With the boychoir, I travelled to forty-six states, sang a lead role in the Carnegie Concert Hall, and in Riverside Church,originally Baptist and by then the largest Protestant church in America where Dr. Norman Vincent Peale was the renowned pastor. Virgil Fox was the world famous, eminent organist there. You should have heard him play, "Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty!" on Riverside's huge pipe organ one of the ten largest in the world!!, Several times, I was on the Ed Sullivan Show (TV), and sang with the group of shepherds for John Carlo Menotti's Christmas Opera, " Amahl And the Night Visitors", etc. My horizons were greatly expanded due to exposure to a much bigger life than I have ever envisaged as a boy. Try to picture with me what it was like the first time I flew into New York City. The highest building I had known in Sarnia, my home town, at the time was ten storeys. Now I was looking at buildings over one hundred storeys! In fact there is every reason to believe that my family, the Lairds from P.E.I., way back when, owned the property the Empire State Building is situated on. Inasmuch as the Emp[ire State Building had squatters' rights, however, our family could do nothing to gain financially from this revelation. We were paid a paltry sum for ninety nine years, the time of the lease. Beyond that it never has been clear what our family should have received as fair compensation for the ownership of this famous New York property.

My life changed most dramatically when I was twelve years of age. Through my aunt and uncle, by belief Nazarenes in Rochester, New York, I had been persuaded to go to a humungus youth summer conference in New York state. There I gave my life to Jesus and and unequivocably surrendered to Him as my Saviour and Lord. Never have I regretted this step. Having received Christ at the tender age of twelve on the brink of manhood, I was, with God's help, able to withstand the temptations of sex, drink, drugs,and aimless living. All through those difficult teen years I had the inner assurance that Jesus would be with me and help me no matter what. Thank God for such a Friend as Jesus!

Chapter Five ... In Search Of a Life's Partner And An Adequate Education.
When I finished high school, I enrolled at the Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto and studied for a Batchelor Of Theology degree. Later, I took studies toward an honours B.A. in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University Of Toronto. Dean Gordon Brown was my mentor and a great inspiration to me. Few men were as gifted as the dean in Biblical languages, teaching and pastoring. He came across as very cynical and almost sarcastic. But he quickly drove from us laziness, ineptitude, and mediocrity. According to him, nothing but the best would be good enough for the Lord's service. He was one of the most misunderstood men I have ever met. With perseverance, I found the fatherly tenderness that lay buried deep within him. This came through one night when he invited me over for supper in my third year at university. I had already completed my B.Th. at C.B.S. Frankly, I had been struggling intellectually at the university. After all, six of my seven main professors were ordained clergymen. Theologically, they were very liberal (what we called "modernists") and did not believe the Bible. They treated God's Word as just another book. I suppose it was inevitable that I would clash with them one day. Systematically they sought to tear ever ounce of evangelical, Bible-believing fervor from me. By the third year I was ready to throw in the towel, so to speak. I said to Maureen, my wife whom I had just married, "What would you say if I no longer believed the Bible to be the Word of God"? She started to cry and could only choke out, "Go see the dean! Go see the dean!" Hearing of my plight, the dean invited me over to his home for supper.

Contrary to what I imagined, he did not present academic rebuttals to what my university profs were saying by making a pitch for my head. Instead he appealed to my heart. He asked me how much I loved Jesus and how my spiritual life was going. Then he gave me his earth-moving argument. "Son, if you once let the fence of authority go in one area it will surely fall in all areas. You cannot in one place say the Bible is not the Word of God and set yourself up as judge over the Bible. Either ALL of it is God's Word, or none of it is God's Word!" His reasoning was used of God to rescue me that night from the savage jaws of self-aggrandisement and human reason . Jesus either had to be Lord of all or He could not be Lord at all! In child-like humility, I bowed the knee to my Saviour and Lord again and felt secure inside once more. Self and reason can be tyrannical masters! At that time another momentous decision had to be made. The University Of Toronto was offering me a scholarship for Ph.D. studies with them and the federal government picking up most of the tab. At the behest of the Lord Himself, I turned down that highly prized offer, since I knew it would propel me even more into the world of academia and take me away from the Lord. As a result of that decision, the way was now open for us to go to Japan as missionaries. Before that, I was invited to teach on staff at Central Baptist Seminary. Dean Brown and I became even closer as academic colleagues. I have many memories and happy feelings about those days together.

I met my wife, Maureen Mellon Plunkett, in Toronto at High Park Baptist Church when I was installed as their student youth pastor. Prior to that I had served at Bethel Baptist in Orillia as their associate. Although I was only eighteen at the time, I preached more than the senior pastor. He had a bronchial condition and many a Sunday he could not deliver a sermon. We were on the radio more than any other church in Ontario at the time. In fact, the pastor gave me a Thursday night half hour slot of my own. I turned it into a call-in hymnsing special. People could request hymns and Christian songs which I would play and sing for them. Usually they would be dedicated to someone having a birthday, or a departed loved one, etc. The program became so popular that many set up speakers on the small Muskoka Lakes and broadcast the programs over the whole lake. I grew immensely in preaching and people skills during that time. Even though I was frightened out of my wits sometimes by the microphones and the consciousness that we were broadcasting to thousands of listerners, I learned to use the mass media to get the Gospel out to many.

While at High Park Baptist Church, I met Maureen Mellon Plunkett. She was one of the girls at the church although she had immigrated from Scotland. Maureen had come to know Christ at the Tent Hall in Glasgow under the ministry of our beloved friend, Dr. John Moore. The dean had cautioned us about never taking out girls from the church lest their family would ultimately be dissatisfied and trouble would arise in the church. At the time I was boarding with Bob and Martha Wilson from Dovercourt Baptist. Martha was an unusual seer into the character of prospective girlfrends for me. Of all the ones I presented to her, she said, "Maureen Plunkett is the girl for you, Lester!" And how right she was!

I carried on a whirlwind romance with Maureen. We were engaged in Montreal where I had been invited to sing for a week-end conference. Dr. Sid Kerr was pastor there at that time. Paul Kerr, his son, was the Jewish-looking campaign manager for my election bid as president of C.B.S.'s student body. We failed in the attempt, but we had a lot of fun trying. At that time, I didn't think there was a serious bone in Paul's body! Dr. Hal MacBain was the speaker at the conference. Pastor Kerr got a place for Maureen to stay and we had a wonderful week-end. When I told him she was wearing an engagement ring that nobody noticed, he sighed, "I told MacBain that girl had a rock on!" Maureen gave her testimony at the church (she was also going to the seminary at the time). The gist of her testimony was that when she came forward in church and gave her all to the Lord, the Lord sent me into her life. That was too good for Ian Bowie to miss. He reported later to me that at least ten girls came forward in church the next week to give their lives unreservedly to the Lord! I never did learn whether any of them got husbands through such ploys!

To the dismay of some stodgy members of High Park Baptist, I was engaged to Maureen in just three months. We were married less than a year later. So anxious was I to get married that I remember going to Pastor Harold Fife, my boss and the assistant minister at our wedding, and asking him if we couldn't move the wedding up by three months. Fortunately he talked me out of such nonsense. He said, "Lester, maybe the folk will think you and Maureen are pregnant. And they won't know until you have been married for a few months what to think!" At any rate, we didn't get married then but waited until May 27th, 1961, the appointed time. Neither of our parents were in a position to help fund the wedding. Dear Dora Russell substituted for Maureen's mother. The deacons and their wives and other loving friends pitched in, too. We had a spectacular wedding with 350 in attendance. Maureen's wedding dress cost a modest $65, but it was beautiful. She looked ravishing in it. When the wedding was over, we had no debt. It was an example to our dear young people of what a Christian wedding was all about. I remember we had a Volkswagen Beetle, my first and only car up to that point. I had the car painted black (it was sky blue before) and I parked it in the centre of Queenway Volkswagen Motors right in the middle of all the new cars there on the Lakeshore in Toronto. By this means, the young people from High Park Baptist who were determined to get the car and mess with it by putting corn syrup with lettering on it could not find the car. If they had succeeded, they might well have caused the engine to burn out with the corn syrup melting down into it. etc.

Chapter Six ... TO ETERNITY AND BEYOND!!

This next chapter of my autobiography about our years in Japan as missionaries will be written in the near future, Keep tuned.... If you have any comments so far, please let us know via our e-mail. I hope you will be able to buy this autobiography
under the title,"Feelings" in the near future. My publishers have asked that I not put any more installments on the internet for now. Please pray. Thank-you.