An Evangelist Named Gindlesperger . . .

Merlin D. Gindlesperger . . .

My dear mother would have loved that name. She would have mouthed it with rolling intonations. She would have let it trip lightly off her tongue. She would have danced to it, repeating it over and over until it became a drumbeat.

She would have liked Merlin D. Gindlesperger himself, too--in person. . . . Pastor Gindlesperger. A man of God who now needs something from me. Not for himself. For his Filipino friends. “A hoe, a shovel, a pan on which to bake bread. . . .” I will get to that.

The voice on the phone at the office the other day halted and leaped and retreated and came back strong: “Paul Weeks? This is Merlin Gindlesperger. Do you rememb--?”

“Merlin! What a nice surprise!”

He was glad. He might not have been so glad had he known that I sprang from a mother who taught me reverence for an unforgettable name like that. It was poetry.

And then the letter from him that followed:

“What a great joy it is for me to know how easily you recalled the experience we had together. . . .”

A bone-numbing spring night. Four or five years ago. Horse Meadow Camp in the Sequoias probably. That seems about right, looking at the map. The great campfire reduced to embers reflecting deep red on the ashes of logs that burned away the hours past midnight. Lucy, my affectionate-by-day yellow lab, now my grunting-by-night pooch, ruffled because we hadn’t hunkered down in the comfort of the camper.

Two figures wrapped against the chill. Merlin and me. Talking incessantly. Sometimes quarreling like schoolboys--voices rising, falling. Sometimes wheedling. But mostly calm and polite.

Merlin was and is a fundamentalist preacher. He is also a plumber. Merlin opened his soul. He talked deeply and sincerely of his beliefs. He spoke of man’s work and God’s work.

Life had caught up with him and he had retreated to the high mountains for a few days to fast and to think and to pray. The camp was nearly empty. We both sought the warmth of human companionship, I suppose, and that had brought two contrasting strangers to the same fireside.

I was open, too. Strangers sometimes can do that. Ex-newspaperman. Quit Sunday school at 5, or maybe it was 6 or 7. But to this day, I know I once fantasized that God, wearing a broad-brimmed hat against the sun, came hiking down from a butte west of Regent, N.D., near where I was raised, and I liked him.

Agnosticism set in early, though, even before I could spell it. The Bible stories, the hymns have permanent lodging in my head, and that is how I want it.

But, at 9, while waiting for my father to come back to the car from the nine-hole, sand-green golf course east of Mott, I looked into the endlessness of the blue prairie sky. Neither man nor child can fathom the mysteries. They will question, they will explore, they will need the God figure. But they may never really know. . . .

Merlin, the evangelist, did his evangelical best that night in the mountains. I resisted and I countered--equally as ineffectual. Lucy the dog grunted, annoyed.

Anyway, two contrasting people closed out the night. Merlin’s God is good for him, I thought with a shrug as I headed Lucy for the camper. Being a newspaperman--well, that’s a worthy calling, too, in my book.

If Merlin was the pastor that night, he was a plumber the next day.

When I awoke I found the flooring under the camper’s icebox saturated with water. I tried to locate the problem. I loosened bolts, turned screws, sweated, cursed (quietly), realized that repair was maybe a day’s drive--and an icebox of spoiled food--away.

“What’s the trouble here, friend?”

It was Merlin. “Friend” was the pastor in him. The plumber quickly repaired the trouble--with rubber tubing that had served some important purpose under the hood of his own car. But, he decided, he didn’t need tubing as long as his was. . . . Snip, snip.

I asked Merlin his address. I wrote it down and buried it behind the rumpled credit-card receipts in my wallet.

Even weeks later, the twinge of conscience pricked. Not too often. How do you express appreciation to a man who already has it from his God and who has aided you with the innards of his automobile?

The answer struck me suddenly--and for the life of me, I should resist saying, “like a bolt out of heaven”:

Merlin is a good man. He wants nothing so much in life as to get the Word to the world of man, to evangelize. I had told him that long night how there are honest, sound principles for communicating messages to others beyond the pulpit. There are techniques for making yourself understood, and knowing the avenues into the broadcast and print media to reach your audiences. Since I’d left newspapering, I’d found a career in corporate public relations to be honorable and gratifying.

I found Merlin’s address still in my wallet. I sent him an excellent college textbook on public relations. He acknowledged it. I didn’t hear from him again until the phone call and the letter.

Pastor Gindlesperger holds a Master of Divinity degree from Hamma School of Theology in Springfield, Ohio. He sought his calling near and far. He served as pastor. He served as missionary. He did plumbing on the side to make ends meet. And then he answered a call to the Philippines.

“Being in the Philippine Islands three times in the past one and a half years,” he wrote, “I have been to places and have come to know people that most people in other circumstances would not have had opportunity.

“I have been to the city of Surigao and have seen the great destruction of the typhoon after it hit just last year. I have traveled to the back side (of Mindanao) where there is no electric and where the roads are only passable in the best of weather conditions.

“I have seen and have come to know the individual persons and their families, and too--their greatest needs. Most of all they need just the opportunity to work toward their own provision, and to be given that little bit that it takes to establish themselves in doing that as a very bare essential. . . .”

He ventured by motorcycle, boat, bus and afoot into the primitive backreaches of the island of Mindanao.

He preached God’s word, he tells me--but I particularly like the part of his letter where he said that “we have established a school for young children, a weekly feeding program for children. . . . We expect to develop a self-help outreach that will eventually provide food for the families involved. We give enough funds to purchase one hundred chicks and food for their growth. . . . Another program I hope to start soon is with the purchase of a young pig. They raise it and we divide the first litter. . . .”

And he shared with me a few paragraphs he had sent to a fellow pastor in the islands:

“In these times while in the Philippines, I have grown. I have laughed with the Filipinos, I have hurt with you and I have cried with you. I have given to you until I had no more to give, then left because I could not be a burden to you in staying. . . .

“Then I came back to the United States to work hard and with many hours that I might again send more to help my brothers and sisters in the Philippines and in hopes that somehow I might again go to be with you and to help you in your need.”

But what Pastor Gindlesperger wants most is to help the poor to help themselves. Citing his letter to his friend again:

“Let me send you a shovel, a hoe and a saw and a hammer. Let me send you a magazine and a book how to make and how to do. Let me send you a boatload of things that you may make a greater country and that you may do the many things that you have not had. . . . What I send may not be the newest and it probably will have been used before.

“It may have cultivated a garden before, and it may have been used in erecting a building before, and it may even have been used to cook a meal before or bake a loaf of bread, or it may even have kept a young child warm, or just covered. . . .”

I don’t know how Merlin expects to accomplish all this, but he has no doubt at all about it--because he thinks He will lead the way.

Maybe others have some suggestions how to get the loaves and fishes. Merlin gave me his address as 39575 9th St. East, Apartment 122, Palmdale 93550.

If he can get his plan organized, I’ve promised to write him a press release.