Now 63 Years After My Tribute to Pastor and Father

I REMEMBER:

Hearing of how very early in his career, he slept on the benches of the tabernacle

where he held his weekly services.  There was no parsonage and very little salary

in those days.

After his young wife had died from Scarlet Fever, leaving him with two very small

children, he was sitting along side his friend, Ernest Marsh, on the platform, when

he nudged Ernest , pointing out my 19 year old mother who was attending the service that 

night, and said, “See that woman?  I’m going to marry her.”  He

approached her after the service and asked for her name and address for his

mailing list.  That was April Fools Day.  They were married 2 months later on

June 6.  It was a long and blessed marriage.

Daddy accompanied Mom to buy a rarely purchased new dress on one occasion.

She narrowed her choices down to two and was having trouble making up her mind

as to her favorite, (it would probably be her last purchase in a long time) when he insisted

 that she take them both.  

Much later, when I was married with 3 little children and living on a teacher’s salary,

He sometimes stopped my our house carrying a sack of groceries “things that were on specials  and  they were just too good a deal to pass up”.

It was important to him for his family to set an example, so when he descended the

Church platform and walked to the piano, we knew it was time for us to join him, tho’ often

 we sat in our seats shaking our heads “no”…at least for a few seconds until he caught our eye. Once he told Paul that he disowned him because he refused to play his trumpet at church.  

And once when Lody was sitting with some friends, rather than in the family pew where we all  usually sat, and she was not paying proper attention to the service,  Daddy paused right in the middle of his sermon, and said, “Lois, go sit with your Mother!”  

Although traditionally in-laws have less than loving reputations, Daddy’s son-in-law once said of him,  “If ever there was a man who will make it to heaven, it will surely be Ralph Schurman.”  

And one of the most widely known and admired evangelists in our denomination said from the pulpit,  “I have traveled the country and been in thousands of churches, meeting thousands of ministers, but never  have I met a man who reminded me more of Jesus Christ than Ralph Schurman.”

Once when a neighboring college offered to confer on him an honorary  doctors’ degree, as colleges  and universities so often do, Daddy deferred the honor by saying “I’ve gotten along just fine all my life, known just as Ralph Schurman.”

One of us asked him one time, “If you had a choice, how would you like to be remembered?” His prompt response:  “He was a good man.”  

He was that!