I climb into the beat-up white Ford pickup. The seat is torn, the rubber of the steering wheel worn down to a nub. The passenger seat is piled high with checkered red-white-and-blue tablecloths and woven baskets. I stick in the key and turn the ignition. The engine rumbles to life, even with half the dash lit up. I grip the steering wheel hard, fighting back tears, even as a preaching radio station booms over the engine noise.
"He took our sins to the grave, and the third day he rose again..."
The summer morning sun is bright and hazy. There's fog in the North valley. From somewhere comes the smell of sausage gravy and maybe biscuits. This truck smells like sweat, and soap, and something more. I can no longer fight back the tears as I press the gas and rumble downtown. This is a farmer's truck, the truck of a man who bucked more hay bales than I could count. The truck of a man who learned how to make do, who made sure his loved ones didn't go without, the truck of a man who fixed his own stuff last, and of a man who never stops working. Composure regained, I turn left at the stop sign. The blinker appears to be working, at least according to the dash. I can't hear the clicker.
"We have to present the gospel in a way that they can understand..."
I don't know the voice on the radio, but I'm sure he does, the man who should be driving this truck. The voice on the radio has a nice long Texas drawl and I suspect he wears a nice suit. His voice has a nice-suit-sound to it. The man who drives this truck doesn't have nice suits, although I usually see him pull on a worn jacket over a worn button shirt right before Sunday service begins and as he steps to the pulpit. From my seat next to the flag, I have a different vantage point than most. I'm Sunday school director, music leader, deacon. I sit in front, but to the side, at this small rural Baptist church, facing the congregation. I see worn work blue jeans and muddy black cowboy boots. He shifts subtly because his hips hurt and he faces the people with white beard, blue eyes, a traditional Santa Claus, but something so much more.
"Every time I preach, there are people out there, there will be somebody out there with a scowl on their face..."
I should turn the radio down as the words are making me cry again, but I can't touch the dial. This is Dale's truck, Dale's radio, Dale's volume. It should be Dale behind the wheel, not me. He's an hour away, stuck in an ICU where I can't go, and he's been there this past week. Worldly medicine is a miracle when it works and I grip the wheel harder, praying. The whole world is upside down right now. "Farmer Dale" is how Hollister knows Dale, Dale Grubaugh, Pastor Dale Grubaugh, the man who grew up on a farm just a farm truck's ride from the sandy river bottom of the Bourbeuse River. "North Ozark River Country," he calls it lovingly and he fished there more times than he can count.
"There is power in the gospel. How does that work? I have no idea?"
The life of a rural Ozarks pastor is not easy, not glamorous. The work is painful, emotional, heartbreaking, the pay often poor. People run to their pastor when life is hard or broken or ending, but when things brighten up, the man upon whose shoulder they were sobbing? He was just doing his job, doing what we pay him for. Life is hard for a rural Ozarks pastor. Nobody really cares to minister to the minister himself. He knows God, right? Let God do that. Big-time churches have it figured out, of course, and big-time gospel tellers can afford their suits and their ties and their nonprofit statuses. For a man who instead goes, called to the wilderness, called to care for the broken? That's a different story.
"Sin is a cancer of the human soul that has affected us all..."
Sin is a strange thing, that darkness that breaks the human heart, and perhaps God's heart as well. Gospel preachers walk that fine high wire in the woods, even as we belt out hymns of holiness and love and light. You can't have light without the dark, but we hold no space for our men of God. They cannot falter, cannot fall, cannot be imperfect. No wonder so many overeat, seeing as how gluttony is our most forgotten sin. Tradition says cards are a sin, the devil being in them, and once the same was said of the fiddle. Drinking, cussing, that's the work of the men on the river, or the men on the mountain, or the men in the field, but if a minister walks up, everybody stops. The minister cannot also be a man of the mountain, or the river, or the field. Men of God are cursed with expected perfection, all for their desire to serve. Through it all, we never make peace with the dark.
"Died, buried, but on the third day God raised his son to life..."
I pray for miracles but God's will be done. That's what I'm supposed to say, right? My faith is Dale's and my faith is something different from Dale's. We've worked together some 16 years, sweating, laughing, sometimes crying our way through 16 years of church travail and love, of lost jobs and found, of devastating health and good, through the fear and hope and sweat and victory of a StateoftheOzarks community and farmers markets in all weather, downtown art walks and crazy StateoftheOzarks Festivals on the street in Hollister every September since 2017. It has always been Dale's face our people see first in the wee dark hours of the morning of the festival, welcoming them to our brand of the Ozarks. And he always frowns at me because I cuss too much.
"He became sin for us, shed his blood..."
I pull onto the open lot for the Hollister Farmers Market and turn the truck off. People I know are already there, some just to help, some to set up and sell their wares. I am grateful. I have 240 pounds of red Amish-grown tomatoes waiting to be sold. Even so, I feel out of place. This isn't my market. This is Dale's market. Farmer Dale, the "'Mater Guy," it shouldn't be me doing this, it should be him. But this is a new day with an old truck and if there's one thing Dale has taught me it's this: Don't ever give up. I shake my head, pulling myself together. There's work to do and I will do it and make him proud, our best farmer, pastor, man.
[StateoftheOzarks note: Late on July 7, 2024, Dale Grubaugh, pastor of Smyrna Baptist Church, manager of the Hollister Farmers Market, and publisher of StateoftheOzarks.net, suffered a stroke. At the time of this writing (July 14, 2024), he is currently isolated in Cox South Springfield ICU with visitors limited to immediate family. Prognosis is cautiously hopeful, and we appreciate prayers and concern in what we hope will be a summer of Dale's recovery. All StateoftheOzarks events and farmers markets will continue as planned during this admittedly difficult season.]
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