My parents still lived in Claxton, not far from where we were now living in South Clinton, and it was just over the hill. At about this time my Dad decided he was going to move.
You see my youngest brother Todd who was sixteen years younger than me, had a lot of allergies. Bull Run Steam plant wasn’t but 4 miles down the road, and it produced tons of ash. The ash fell everywhere, and on everything, and Todd was highly allergic. So Dad found this farm for sell in a tiny community 40 miles south, called Paintrock, and made the decision to buy it.
There were 83 acres of rolling, wooded land with maybe seven or eight acres cleared for planting or running livestock on. He’d offered us an acre patch if we wanted to build a house. I had close to $11,000 of profit from selling the house, so I took him up on it.
At this point in my life, I’d, virtually, never had held a hammer in my hand; except for the taxi we built twenty something years earlier out of them roller skates. Being the person that I was, and not afraid to fail, I took to the task of starting to build a new home for my family.
When I say I knew nothing about hammers, nails and boards, I mean I didn’t know a level from a square. But a feller working with me at K-25 did. So every day at work I’d ask him to tell me what to do.
Didn’t know I had to start with a hole in the ground to put a basement in, but O.C. nurtured my daily projects one or two days at a time. As time went on, the house was starting to take shape, and looking pretty good. The joke at work was; that I’d flush the toilet and the lights would come on. But with all the advice I was getting, it was a sturdy, nice looking house. After all, I was spending eight hours a day working on it. Didn’t sleep a lot those days, but sure got tons of nails drove in.
I was resting in my walk with the Lord in these days, but nothing was happening in my life that anyone one could sit up and take notice about. So, one night I was talking to my heavenly Daddy in a matter-of-fact way. My prayer was; “God…..If this is all there is to my walk with you, I think I’ll go back into the world”. Instead of being slapped on the side of the head, or just taken out of this world, He spoke back to me in a very soft voice. “Ross, it’s not, sit back and watch what’s fixing to happen”.
Well I had a neighbor, Ed that would lend a hand once in a while, and one evening said he had to leave to go to this meeting called Full Gospel. I think I kinda hornswoggled him into not going to that meeting and helping me instead. So we kept on working but a few hours later my buddy Darrell called and asked me to go to the same meeting. Thinking that maybe there’s something to this get-together, I went with Darrell. Wasn’t a very nice thing to do to Ed, but back then I really wasn’t in touch with my feelings.
The meeting was very different from anything that I’d been used too, but still enjoyable just the same. On the way home Darrell asked what I thought of it, and my answer was; “I liked it, all of it but that speaking in tongues stuff”.
Now Darrell liked to argue and I did too. It sure wasn’t like him to let this go, but God had closed his mouth that night, and it kinda made me mad. You see, If he’d argue with me, I’d win the argument. Wasn’t to be so that night, so I went home frustrated. I went to bed that night, still aggravated.
“God, I don’t know what this baptism of the Spirit is, but if it is of you, then I want it”. Don’t exactly know how it happened, but something sure did. My life in an instant was changed, I mean completely rearranged. My eyes were opening to deep things that I’d never realized existed. Folks, this was a very pleasant experience. It was like I’d had a pair of welder’s goggles on all my life and someone reached up and flipped them off my head. I could see things that imagination couldn’t dream of.
I finished building my house that spring and we moved in. Our beautiful little family was snug in our new home, and it was paid for, and the best part was I built it all by myself.
For the next three or four year I was probably hard to be around especially to the people I worked with. Not sure my feet ever touched the ground and I was learning things from God on a daily basis. I’m talking insights from God were coming at me in rapid succession. I saw and heard depth that my mind, brain, ears, eyes and heart sure weren’t smart enough to invent or imagine.
One day at work a supervisor asked me what God was doing in my life, so I began with that morning, expressing what He was doing. Four hours later, as I was going backward in my testimony, I was all the way back to yesterday. This was a fun and enlightening time in my walk.