Keep Walking

Chapter One EXACTLY 211 PEOPLE worked in the Oklahoma City headquarters of Feed The Children on January 20, 2006, when most attended a weekly chapel service to hear my story about someone they'd never met. Many, in fact, didn't know her name. Essentially, I just repeated the words I'd spoken thirteen days earlier when I preached the funeral of Lera Maybell Jones. She was my mom. Close friends, including some at Feed The Children, wondered why Mom had asked me to undertake the painful act of delivering her eulogy. "Isn't that asking too much of Larry?" was the recurring query. "How could she ask her own flesh and blood tospeakabout her?" But it wasn't asking too much. I didn't think sonot for the person who had shaped my formative years more profoundly than any other. And mine weren't the last words ever spoken about her. I, along with many others, will talk about Mom's exemplary life for as long as God gives me breath. Psychologists say that 90 percent of a human's personality is formed by age seven. Think about that. Ninety percent of the decisions that people make for the rest of their lives are based on behaviors they've learned by the time they enter second grade. Mom must have known this, and she worked the good right into me as a pup. She wanted me to be "good for goodness' sake," as the Christmas song goes, believing that God had given my childhood to her and she'd better do right by Him. "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it" (Proverbs 22:6). That scripture was Mom's words to live by, and if I'm any proof, that principle holds true. When I was attending elementary school and throwing two paper routes, neither Mom nor I had any idea I'd enter the ministry. The thought may never have crossed her mind until I brought it up when I was eleven. After that, she probably prayed more than I know that someday I would become a preacher. Mom and my dad, Floyd, were barbers who charged sixtyfive cents for a basic haircut during the 1950s. I did my share with my paper routes, and I earned twentyfour cents for every dozen soda pop bottles I found and returned to the grocery store. Mom and Dad were tithersthey gave 6.5 cents (10 percent) of every haircut to the church. I followed their example, paying 2.4 cents, rounded off to three pennies, for each dozen returned and refillable bottles. I also paid 10 percent of my paper route earnings. The tithe was honored as much in my household as each of the Ten Commandments. It may sound corny, but the word "wholesome" only begins to describe my boyhood. Our family was as innocent as anAndy Griffithrerun, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, was our Mayberry. My small childhood home is situated within six hundred miles of threefourths of the population of the United States, but we were as country as it gets. Bowling Green is one of the nation's few places where, in the time of my boyhood, a child could get lost on concrete or inside piney woods in less time than it takes to warm a car on a frosty morning, and no one had to worry about it. We came to Bowling Green when I was eight, leaving Indianapolis because my dad wanted to return to Kentucky, where he'd once lived in Allen County. My mom consented to goon the condition that we live in town. My parents owned separate barbershops. Each had gone to barber school. Mom did advanced-styling study. Her teacher was "Hollywood Joe" of New York City. She was Bowling Green's first lady barber, and possibly its first barber eveJones, Larry is the author of 'Keep Walking', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385521369 and ISBN 0385521367.