Grateful

One of my mentors was a man by the name of Larry Whitehouse.  Larry was the director of the Navigator Training Center at Michigan State University.  My wife and I joined Larry and his wife Pat about two months after we were married for a couple of years at MSU.  Then we moved to the University of Tennessee to help Larry and Pat establish the Training Center at UT.  This morning I started a project.  A few times a year Larry would pull all of the Squad Leaders, the men and women he was training together for a “Training Session.”  I taped all of them, 10, 72 cassette tapes.  I also took notes, around 500 pages.  The notes are indexed to the tapes.  Yeah, I know, a little OCD, but I wanted to be able to easily retrieve the information.

Larry is the one on the left.  I will not name the others for privacy.

The project is to transfer the 72 tapes to MP3.  I started this morning.  In the process I began to look through the notes I took 34 years ago.  I was blown away by what I read.  Not the brilliance of my notes, but the brilliance of the content that Larry shared.  To a great extent my wife and my philosophy of ministry was shaped by those six years.

Larry passed away about a year ago.  He was not perfect; far from it.  There are those who have discarded what he shared; to their own detriment.  Looking back over the notes this morning, and looking at the three cases of 24 tapes I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the impact the Lord worked in my wife and I through Larry and Pat.

The truth of the matter is that each of us, if we are walking with Christ, are in debt to those who have shared with us.