Memories of Charles F. Smith

I was asked to say a few words at my father’s memorial service this past weekend along with one of his step-daughters and a fellow doctor he discipled. The following is adapted from my tribute.

 

My father was known as a Bible teacher, yet he never went to seminary. Instead, he went to bed.

He went to bed for three years with tuberculosis. In 1946 he and my mother were newly married. She came down with rheumatic fever—treatment: bedrest. He was diagnosed with TB--treatment: bedrest. They lived with my grandparents.

He was in medical school at the time. It was a routine annual chest X-ray. When they looked at the previous year’s routine annual chest X-ray, the diagnosis said “Active tuberculosis.” 

It had been filed.

In those years they didn’t have the antibiotics that we have today. The treatment for TB was bedrest. 

Dad spent three years in bed pouring over his Bible and Christian books. Mostly his Bible. The one thing I wanted from my father when he died in February at the age of 102 was his Bible from that time period. The margins are crammed with pencil notes, so tiny as to be illegible to my eyes. (I have to remind myself that he was in his twenties.) It’s not what those notes say that means so much to me; it’s what they represent—the value my father placed on Scripture. 

The important parts are not things he would need to go back and look up. (“Now, what did I put in that note? On, no! I can’t read it.”) No, the important parts took root in his heart and guided all his choices: 

·      his choice to become a medical missionary (although that never happened, in part because of health concerns); 

·      his choice to support missionaries, making his first financial commitment before he even knew what his post-med-school salary would be;

·      his choice to foster missionary kids when they came to the States for college. (One of those grown foster kids preached his memorial service.)

·      his choice to teach the college Sunday school class and pass on his enthusiasm for the Word of God and for missions to a new generation. (Some of those former college students who became missionaries spoke to me after his service.)

·      And his choice in later years to disciple men, sometimes together with their teenage sons, studying what it means to commit completely to the Lordship of Christ as a man of God.

In my teens we had the practice of family devotions after dinner. We would sing a couple hymns from the old InterVarsity hymnal (“Praise the Savior, ye who know Him/Who can tell how much we owe Him?” “Who is on the Lord’s side? Who will serve the King?”) Mom played the Allen organ Dad had bought her, and then we studied the Bible together. Dad taught me that the Truth didn’t need to be afraid of questions. It might take some time to figure out the answer, but God was not threatened by my uncertainties. He wasn’t hiding. His truth was there to find in the Bible.

In adulthood, my dad and I disagreed strongly on certain issues. Both of us started from Scripture, but we sometimes reached very different conclusions. But there was one thing we agreed on: Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and coming again, according to the Scriptures.

Thank you, Daddy.