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TBC Newsletter | |
| March 2006 |
REMEMBRANCES OF A FRIEND: FOY DAN VALENTINE |
I happen to like classical music, and one of my favorite classical musicians is a singer named George Jones. When Jimmy Allen called me last Saturday morning with the news of Foy Valentine’s death, I couldn’t help thinking of one of my favorite George Jones pieces, a number entitled’“Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes? “ The lyrics pose just the question we all have when we face the loss of the likes of Foy: “Who’s gonna fill their shoes? Who’s gonna stand that tall? Who’s gonna play the Opry or the Wabash Cannon Ball?” Indeed, we are gathered here in such awesome numbers because we know in our bones that a giant has fallen.
The first time I ever heard of Foy Valentine, I was a college student. He came to the campus of Mercer University to speak, and it was obvious before he arrived that he was a giant. The faculty heralded his arrival with perceptible excitement. Among the Baptist leaders they had known, this one above all had taken a stand for racial justice and equality. They were excited about his coming, and their excitement cause me to pay attention.
Foy Valentine walked onto center stage in those years and gave young people like me a reason to be Baptist. He provided a model of courage, a force for constructive change, a vision for a moral righteousness, even a glimpse of the Kingdom of God.
I had little idea back then how much influence Foy Valentine would have on my life. In the ensuing years he was to become, as I have often said, both my mentor and my tormentor, as well as my teacher, my model, my boss, my friend, and finally a powerful father figure.
Thirty years ago this month, Foy called to ask if I might be interested in a job on the staff of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission. I could not imagine a more significant opportunity to serve the Kingdom. He asked one question on the phone that I have not forgotten: “Are you a workaholic?” Well, I wanted the job, so I answered quickly: “Do you want me to be? I’ll be whatever you want.”
During the next five years I discovered that was exactly what he wanted. Some of you think Foy Valentine had a strong work ethic. In reality, he did not have a work ethic at all. What he had was more like a work virus. He was a tough and demanding taskmaster, the toughest I have ever known.
Some special words come to mind when I think of Foy.
One of them is color. He was a colorful character. The color, of course, was turquoise. Some of you know that he always wrote with turquoise ink. What you may not know that those of us who worked for him worked in turquoise offices, complete with turquoise telephones, turquoise walls, turquoise carpet, and turquoise mastheads on our letterhead.
He was a colorful character in other ways, as well. Take speech, for instance. Foy expressed himself with so much color that every administrative assistant I have ever had has thoroughly enjoyed answering the phone when he would call and ask for “his Sappship.” As a matter of fact, his colorful expressions “pleasured me a great deal,” and I am sure that in the days ahead I am going to “crave” to hear them again.
The word character comes to mind, as well. Of course, we know that Foy had character; what I am speaking of here is that he was a character.
Just after I went to work for him at the Christian Life Commission, we went to lunch together one day. Walking back to the office, Foy asked if I minded stopping at the bank, I believe to renew a note. The lady who waited on him said, “Of course, you will need to pay the interest that is due.” Foy replied, “I know. I have calculated it, and I owe you $6.38.” The lady at the bank said, “Yes sir, but it is our policy not to charge less than $10.00”
“It is my policy,” Foy said, “not to pay more than I owe. I will give you six dollars and thirty-eight cents.” He won.
Or, again, just three years ago, Linda and I came to visit Foy and Mary Louise here in Dallas, and Foy took me with him to get some barbeque to bring home for lunch. We arrived at the restaurant before the lunch crowd. Foy walked up to the counter and said to the man, “I’d like a pound of chopped barbeque.”
(continued)
The man behind the counter said, “Yes, sir. May I have your name please?”
“There is no one else here,” Foy said, “you do not need my name.”
I remember as well those summer visits he made to his cabin at Red River. All of us on the Christian Life Commission staff became well acquainted with the routine. He would return at the end of an extended stay, and brag about all the fish he had caught. Then he would hold out his hand, and ask you to feel the callouses on his finger which had formed from endless fishcleaning. After a couple of years, we began to anticipate this annual ritual. “Just three more days,” we would say to each other,”“ and we’ll have to feel his finger.” Maybe just now, on the other side of Jordan, he is building up callouses again. Foy Valentine was a character.
Another word that comes to mind is judgment. Judgment is a rare and valued quality, the ability to take the measure of the person before you, to take the measure of the situation around you, and then to take the measure of your own reactions. Foy once told me to take stock of a people’s judgement when hiring them. “However much judgement they have the day you hire them is the same amount they will have the day the quit,” he said. “You can’t teach it.” And over the years, experience has convinced me that he was right.
Foy himself possessed judgment in extraordinary measure. His judgments were quick, not slow, and they were generally unerring. On the rare occasions when his judgment was not unerring, it was never uncertain. For thirty years now, I have asked his judgment on nearly every critical situation I have faced. I hope I have learned enough to make it without him.
Or, try another word: courage. You cannot talk about Foy Valentine without the word courage. What he did on the race issue in the face of withering opposition was astounding. Some chose to stand in the school house door and shout, “Closed.” Foy stood in the church door and shouted, “Open.” Some stood in fear and shouted hatred. Foy stood in courage and shouted love.
The secret of his courage, I believe, is that Foy fought for more than institutions and traditions, for more than prejudice and partisanship. He fought for justice. He fought for righteousness. He fought for God. And if at times he could rap your knuckles so hard you could feel it in your toes, it was that same aggressive abandon that enabled him to stand firm in the face of Satan’s hosts.
Another word that fits him is the word intelligence. Several years ago Foy came and taught James at Second- Ponce de Leon. Our twin sons, of course, have known him all of their lives; but having heard him teach for the first time in his own adulthood, one of our sons informed me, “Dad, Dr. Valentine is brilliant!” He told me as if I had never realized it for myself. Few minds could stand on level ground with Foy Valentine.
Or try the word love. Now, Foy was not your basic sentimentalist. In the years of my relationship with him, I never heard him throw the word love around flippantly. He was never one to stand on a platform and say in phony tones, “I love you, brother.” But he was one who did the deeds of love. During the greatest crisis of my life, Foy called—sometimes every day–– to say, “How are you? Keep the faith. Never give up. Hold the fort.”
There was an interesting change in Foy over the years. In the beginning, our telephone conversations would be all business. Then the business became a way of legitimizing a personal visit we would have at the end of the conversation. In the last few years, the business nearly disappeared. He would call and say, “I don’t have anything to talk about. I just craved a visit.”
Before my congregation in Atlanta, he once called me “a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” I will cherish those words until I breathe my last.
Foy loved Mary Louise, his wife. He loved Jean and Carol and Susan, his daughters. He loved his in-laws, and oh, he loved his grandchildren. And he loved our Lord Jesus Christ. He loved Him with all his heart (which was big), all his soul (which was deep), and his mind (which was keen), and all his strength (which was prodigious). But most of all, God loved Foy Valentine. He loved him enough to give him to us; and He loves him enough that he holds Foy even now close to His heart.
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Which brings me to the final word I associate with Foy. It is the word faith. Many times I heard him say that he would like for his epitaph to be, “He stumbled toward righteousness.” Like all of us, Foy may have stumbled, but through his faith he always stumbled in the right direction, toward righteousness, toward justice, toward peace, toward love, toward God, toward that final blessed hope that we have been given.
Just about a year ago, in December of 2004, Foy wrote a column in Christian Ethics Today that expressed his faith better than I could express it for him. The column was entitled, “The Last Rose of Summer,” and in it he reflected on the last rose of the season, clinging to the stem of a rose bush just outside his study window. After reflecting for a few paragraphs on that rose, this is what he said:
“But now let’s face it. I am 81. Going on 82. Morbidness is not my stock in trade. I am not dwelling on my own imminent demise. I am basically prepared to meet God. Not quite ready for the face-to-face encounter, you understand, but not facing the experience with grave misgivings, either. Like this rose on which I am presently focused, whose petals will soon shatter, my days are also numbered. Come to think of it, they always have been. That sooner or later I too shall be the last rose of summer is a sobering reminder that I do not have the leisure of eternity to get done the things I need to do. Time has been God’s gift to me, as has been life itself. So, I am constrained to make the most of it, make things right wherever I can, get my house in order, burnish my relationships with God and others, fresh every morning – and smell the roses.
"And this last rose of summer calls to mind the prospects and hopes that attend nature’s cycles ordained by God, ordered by the Almighty in his grand scheme of things. This rose will shatter in a week or so, the first killing frost will nip the tender stem, and the leaves will yellow and fall. The sturdy rose bush itself will stand, however, and the elaborate root system will stay firmly in the ground, alive and well under whatever ice and snow may come. Then on February 14 next year I will prune the bush rather severely.
“A couple of weeks later new buds will swell, new growth will emerge, a tender stem will start pushing upward, then a tine rose bud will develop at the end of the stem, in a few more days the bud will grow enough for the red color to be seen about to break through, and then one bright, sunny spring morning I will once again look out this window to see the first rose of a new season. Bright red, exquisitely formed, inordinately fragrant, proudly alone in my small rose garden, and a little bigger than I might reasonably be expected to be, as if to demonstrate to the world that, after all, as Robert Browning put it, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”
And so it is by that faith that we come here today. We have lost a friend, a husband, a father, a grandfather, a Christian leader, a champion, a giant. But as hard as it is to give him up, we give him into the hands of the Father who made him, and in the matchless grace of that God, all is right. All is right.
