I only know bits and
pieces of Doc’s early life since marrying his baby girl. This many years later,
I find my spouse the last living member of the expanded family that belonged to
Doc. He was a life-long Oklahoma general practitioner who spent a short stint
in Houston, TX. I’ve heard numerous stories not repeated here. Some family
members remembered a time when Doc wrote off more than one million dollars in
bad debts that his depression-era patients could not pay, a reminder that there
had been better financial times.
By the time I met Doc he
was still vigorous and dynamic, but was aging and old. I could easily envision
him a force to deal with, standing six feet in his stocking-feet and ranging
from 250-300 pounds. Four sturdy sons by Mary all towered over him, his baby
standing 6’4 ½”. When I came along, I
found a man well into the latter years of his eighty-plus span. It had been an
impossibly-long journey that had begun in North Carolina.
There, he was someone’s
five-year-old mixed-birth male child, propped up on a plank in their part of
the departing wagon-train. His responsibility was to hold the reins and hold
their team of oxen on course as they began their personal “Trail of Tears”. Dee
Brown described that journey in her gut-wrenching record in her best-selling
narrative, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. “Doc” made the
journey as far as Lead Hill, AR. There,
he began his new life as a Razorback.
In that new and hostile western
environment, he carved out his own niche, having grown up fast as a
five-year-old. He paid the necessary toll - physically, mentally, socially, and
spiritually, utilizing sheer grit and gumption. He graduated from the
University of Arkansas before Oklahoma became a state. He paid for his medical
education by working as a fireman shoveling coal, shuttling back and forth
between Little Rock and the Crescent City.
A former translator for
the nearby Indian Court, Doc was concluding years of working hard as an
entrepreneur that provided the livelihood of several tenant families. Doctoring
a wide-swath of east-Central Oklahoma’s impoverished, Doc served without fear
or favor anyone unable to afford regular medical care. Simultaneously, he kept
his hand in Oklahoma politics.
When his first wife died
prematurely, he married a young Kansas girl whose New England descendants migrated west
to build new in business and cattle. At some point, Doc and youthful Mary
Woodard experienced a religious conversion following their marriage and were swept up in the Reformation
of the Oklahoma Church of God. There, for three exciting years Doc proclaimed
the Gospel of the Reformation Saints.
When the leadership
exercised more exuberance than sense, Doc’s preaching days shortened. They
offered to ordain him into gospel ministry, with which he had no problem.
However, he had the good judgment not to throw out the baby with the dishwater!
When they insisted he burn his medical books and renounce his medical training,
he forthrightly rejected their extremism and never again preached.
He taught the bible to
his growing family. He supported the church in many ways, yet refused to
dissect their theology from the good sense God gives most of us. That forever
changed Doc’s life, leaving him warped in many ways. It left his family
searching and sometimes sickened, often striving to make sense of what was not
always a pretty scene.
Mary held steady! Exposed
to the gospel by Nazarene friends, she spent her life in the Oklahoma Church of
God. Ever faithful, she completed her eighty-nine years long after Doc’s
chaotic death. She followed faithfully; trusting God as her medicine, until
departing from the East Tulsa Hospital she checked herself into.
For years she had awoke
at five a.m. and done her devotions at the end of the path behind the house, before
waiting on her family. Her final day, as every day; she enjoyed her audience
with God while hospital staff fluttered about tearfully. Boarding her final
flight, she left no doubt among the staffers of the Divine Presence and her
final home-going--a whole other story.
I became part of this
scenario long after Doc’s departure from church; yet, he was never far from it.
That ordination committee did what they knew to do. Yet, in their zealous
ignorance they possibly ruined one that potentially far excelled them as a
powerful witness. Their gross misunderstanding was short-sighted and unnecessary.
Some of life’s lessons
are more helpful than others; I leave that for your determination. For myself,
I believe God alone determines such judgments. At times, people expected me to
draw conclusions of immortal import, but I am happy to confess my
infallibility.
Believing the best is yet to come,
we all look forward to
the best of all judgments possible
. . . Walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com.
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