FRONT-PORCH GOSPEL: Good stuff

Welcome to the “front porch” this week.

This week, we take an intermission from our “This life story begins in 1973 (Kind of),” as we need to do occasionally. But here’s an uapdate: We are about ten chapters ahead of where we are in the paper in our rewrite of this story, and we have the publisher of a Georgia university press asking to see the completed novel/memoir – thus, we are pressing on and hope to complete near the end of the year. I will say, the best is yet to come from Doocy, Corrina, Mama, the boy in the blue truck, and the rest.

Thanks to the Ellis County Press for resurrecting a classic style of publishing a novel via newspaper. I think this is really “good stuff.”

And, speaking of good stuff…

I must’ve been in my second year of teaching – 1985 – when a young lady named Allyson, a teacher down the hallway, came to my open door as I was teaching off of the overhead projector. She had a routine question or perhaps needed to borrow some overhead markers (of which I had plenty). As she tells it, I was engrossed in either teaching grammar or literature from the old-timey projector. I suppose I was young and spry enough that she was impressed with the intensity of the performance, magnified by the sweat running down my face, red-blue-black-green markings all over my hands and up my arm a ways, and the concentration to the task at hand, literally, that required her to stand outside the door for a full minute or more.

I still remember finally turning and seeing her standing there patiently. Ironically, this was our second year of teaching together, but it was a big school, and we barely knew each other until that day. As it would turn out, Ms. Allyson and I would prove to be kindred spirits, and I soon found that she was and is an excellent English teacher. From that day forward (and for the next six years), we began to share ideas, even bringing our classes together often for team teaching, which was not a thing at all back then. She became my classroom comrade just as Randy Weisinger became my basketball-coaching comrade on the other end of the school, down at the gym. It’s easy to see why our years at North Shore High in Houston were probably the best teaching and coaching years of our 30-year career.

Of all the things that Ms. Allyson shared with me – besides her being one of our great “balcony people” through the years, and still is – was the writing of Robert Fulghum, the author of “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” I think often about some of the Fulghum stories we would pull out and teach to our students, and I think the one that stuck with me the most was one called, “Good Stuff.” As with all the others, I owe Ms. Allyson for coming by one day with a copy of that story and saying, “Coach Bowen, I thought you’d like this story.”

40-years later now, I pulled it out to use again.

In the story, Mr. Fulghum tells of the time that his just-starting-school-age daughter Molly brought him a paper sack sealed with paper clips and duct tape and said, “Daddy, you can take this to work with you today.” Fulghum shrugged, took the bag to work, opened it during lunch, and discovered an array of items – two hair ribbons, three small stones, a plastic dinosaur, a pencil stub, a seashell, a marble, a small doll, and thirteen pennies; then he promptly put it all in the trash with his lunch scraps. That evening, Molly asked him if he had her bag, informing him that it contained some of her favorite “treasures.”

Fulghum realized immediately that he had goofed.

“It was a long trip back to the office,” he said, but he made the trip, retrieved his daughter’s treasures just ahead of the custodian, brought them back home, and delivered them safe and sound – though the brown paper lunch sack was even more wrinkled and torn than before – back to Molly.

He was pleased that, some days later, Molly even entrusted him with her bag of treasures again, which was a regular reminder to him that the biggest treasure the bag contained was not to undervalue the value of little things, especially when they come from a child.

Even though Fulghum doesn’t mention the expression “good stuff” in the story itself, I am glad that he chose that for its title because it gives me a simple way to remember a powerful idea. We all have a great deal of “good stuff” we need to keep duct-taped in a brown paper sack. You understand.

Through the years, that story has inspired me to collect my own “good stuff,” but mine usually have not been physical items but rather things such as quotations, Bible verses, or just curious ideas or stories that I’ve run across that may seem to be small but make for a good newspaper or book column – well, such as this one, I suppose.

Recently, it occurred to me that one place where I keep my “good stuff” is in my big, goat-skin KJV Bible. It was the first Bible I paid well over a hundred dollars for, but the things inside are worth more than the physical leather Bible itself, and I don’t mean only the treasures we find in the scriptures but the treasures of some of the things I tuck in the back of the Bible. I am not sure why, but just this week, I revisited Ms. Allyson and Mr. Fulghum in my mind, along with the array of items stashed in my Bible. I did, and perhaps that fact illustrates its power.

In my ‘good stuff’ in the Bible, there is a copy of a song, a picture a child drew for me, two articles – one a long one from a periodical for which I write and one a short one from the Purcell Register –  the rough outline of a sermon, along with a few other items. In time, perhaps, we’ll pull out those items one by one and tell their story.

The one item that is most pertinent now is a one-page outline of a little sermon that I keep tucked away there, perhaps for “emergencies,” called “Let’s Talk About Faith.” Ironically, the one-page outline is not one I had written but the notes the amazin’ blonde took when I delivered the sermon from years ago, which proved to be better than an outline I found later from my own notes. That message, as simple of one as I can ever remember writing, has become a treasure to me, reminding me that a study of God’s Word, though simple at times, proves to be something “more to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold” (Psalm 19:10). That scripture, by the way, was one of the first scriptures I memorized half a century ago, which, in itself, is some “good stuff.”

I can’t say that our simple little faith sermon would prove to be much of a treasure to you, not at all. You may read it hurriedly and not give it much thought before you brush it off in the trash can with the rest of the scraps of your day and not think any more of it.

But be careful. When you discover how important it is to me, you may find yourself having to rush back to the office of your mind and retrieve it from your mental wastebasket.

Truth is, I probably never realized how long Fulghum’s story would stick with me when my teaching comrade came by one day and laid it on my desk and said, “Coach Bowen, I think you’ll like this.” It probably got hidden away for days beneath an avalanche of five-paragraph essays and “Creek Book” writings. (More on that later.)

But the day would come when I would stumble across it again, take time to pick it up, smile at my own lack of previous appreciation, and say,

“Hmm, this really is good stuff.”

Coach Steven Bowen, a long-time Red Oak teacher and coach, now enjoys his time as a writer and preacher of the gospel. And, after a ten-year hiatus, he’s also returned to work with students at Ferris High School as well.

In addition to his evangelistic travels, he works and writes for the Church of Christ of Red Oak at Uhl Road and Ovilla. Their worship times are 10 a.m. Sundays and 7:30 pm. Wednesdays. Email coachbowen1984@gmail.com or call or text (972) 824-5197.