Squarehead

 January 29, 2022

My children have heard this story before, but last night’s post brought it again to mind; it bears repeating.

I was not an eager convert to Christ. I remember riding my bike through the neighborhood on a Sunday morning, cheerfully waving to my friend Jack as he gloomily sat in the back seat of his parents’ car on his way to church. So when my mother decided we should start going to church, I was, to say the least, greatly disappointed as I joined the ranks of gloomy backseat kids.

We tried the church where Jack’s family went, and if one had to go, this was the least of religious evils; Jack and I made the best of a bad situation by goofing around and not paying attention. That lasted all of about three weeks, when mom announced we were going to a different church down the road. The next Sunday, I found myself reluctantly, but firmly ensconced in the third pew, left hand side. 

That was Sunday mornings. I hadn’t counted on Sunday School, Sunday evening youth group, or Sunday evening services. I was trapped!

A strange thing happened though, on one of these Sunday evening youth meetings. We met in one of the larger basement rooms, just off the kitchen, and on this particular evening, an elderly gentleman stood before us with a contraption he had wired up on a table in front of him. He was short and stocky, with a bald, and what he later described as, a “German square head.”

The contraption on the table consisted of a light fixture wired to an extension cord with one of the dual wires cut. One side was wired directly to the plug, but the cut wire had one end sitting in a bowl of water with the other end stretching from the bowl to the plug which he had inserted into an outlet.

He began to talk from Matthew 5 where Jesus spoke of being salt and light in the world. As he spoke, he began stirring salt into the bowl of water. Slowly, the lightbulb began to glow until it shone brightly through the room. “You are the salt of the earth,” he said. “You are the light of the world.” I don’t remember much else that he said other than asking if any of us wanted to receive Jesus Christ as Savior. I raised my hand.

A few minutes later, I was standing just outside the door, talking to our pastor’s wife. I bowed my head and prayed. The following Sunday morning when the invitation was given, I stepped out of that third row pew and walked to the front of the sanctuary, professing publicly my newfound faith in Christ—all due to a simple talk by an old “German square head.”

My grandmother was widowed about that time. The pastor had daily visited my grandfather in the hospital as he lay dying of the cancer that would all too soon take his life. Pastor Ellis’ faithful witness paid off, and when shortly before dying, my grandfather finally professed faith in Christ, my grandmother did, too.

She was terribly lonely, but about two years later, she married an older gentleman whose wife had passed away some years before. And so it was, that the old, bald, German square head who led me to Christ became my grandfather, Poppa Helwig. God is good…no, much better than good; God is great…all the time!