Grandpa's Conversion

Just last week I found out something I never knew. My Grandpa Dauber was not raised in a Christian home.

For some reason I thought that my great-grandparents had been Mennonite from way back when, and that somewhere along the line my grandpa had become Southern Baptist and raised his six kids in that denomination. I thought my dad was a third-generation pastor. I was wrong, but at the same time was enlightened and encouraged by God's promise to save a whole household.

What my dad me told last week, as we were just chatting in his living room, is that his dad, my grandfather, was the first one to come to faith in Christ. Grandpa, whose name was Chet Dauber, was sixteen when he attended one of those "old fashioned tent revivals" in his hometown of Inman, Kansas. I don't know who invited him, or if it was just "something to do"on a weeknight when the sun went down in rural town. Maybe some girl had something to do with it.

The details would thrill me, but the story is that Grandpa went to the tent revival and responded to the invitation of salvation through faith. I imagine he heard about the God who loves him, the Christ who died to forgive his sins, the hell he would endure if he refused God's invitation, the heaven where his spirit would live eternally upon his physical death, and the Holy Spirit who was about to empower him from on high while he walked upon this earth.

Details missing, the story thrills my soul. Grandpa became a child of the living God when he was a teenager. He then went home and told his mom to go the next night to the revival. She did. And she also, became a child of God. My grandpa and his mother's lives were so remarkably changed that it was evident to their other family members. Eventually (I don't know how long,
Chet's dad became a Christian, and then followed each of the children in faith.

My Grandpa loved the Bible. I remember his very thick, black, weather-beaten Bible always visible in the living room of their tiny two-bedroom house in Sterling, Kansas. He had grown so in love with God's Word from the time he was saved that he was compelled to share it far and wide. He became a circuit rider--a preacher on horseback--and was often gone for days, preaching in different towns.

He was not on salary. Daddy tells of how Grandpa would preach in exchange for dinner in the hosting pastor's home. Sometimes the pastor's wife would send home leftovers for the family.
At other times the congregations would take up a small collection and hand it to him on his way out of town. Grandpa had quite a sense of humor. He said usually he was given two or three pennies per message. "My sermons weren't worth a plug nickel back then."

Eventually Grandpa gave up circuit riding, but remained a full time Southern Baptist preacher. Apparently he was also the song leader. I have a collection of hymnals, my favorite being the one with his handwriting in the front with the page numbers of songs from a certain Sunday service.

That big, black Bible touched my dad's life, and he, too, became a pastor, interpersed with an engineering career at Edgewood Arsenal. He remembers the "safety guy people were afraid of" on post. His name was Jim Cannon. That "safety guy" is now my own pastor.

Grandpa's conversion did not happen like I'd always thought. But I thank God that he took a farm boy by the sixteen-year-old collar and got ahold of his heart. He saved him, forgave him, empowered him, and gifted him with evangelism, humor, and song. I see those things daily in the lives of my own children. What a treasure.

I'm sure my Grandpa Chet and my Grandma Kathryn "prayed me into the kingdom" also.
I just wish sometimes they were still alive to see their greatgrandchildren doing their own brand of circuit riding on the mall grounds of Baltimore. Thank you, God, for Grandpa's conversion.

Yee-ha!