An Unpromising Beginning
The 500 block of Oakland Avenue ran parallel to and about ten yards west of the railroad tracks. Those ten yards between the tracks and the street were owned by the railroad company and sat empty most of the time. The one exception was when the railroad used that empty land to store rail ties.
Across the unpaved road, alone in the middle of the block, sat a small four-room house, 521 South Oakland Avenue. I do not know the origin of the house, but it quite possibly had been servants’ quarters for the larger house on the other side of the block. Whatever its origin, the house was very plain. There were no closets. Clothes were hung on hooks on the walls. There were no kitchen cabinets. The house did have indoor plumbing, but there was no hot water heater. In order to wash clothes or the dishes or to take a bath, one had to heat water on the kitchen stove and mix it with cold water from the faucets. I was born in this house on December 4, 1929. My parents named me Gerald Dean but called me Jerry, and that is the name I have gone by all my life, except in legal and financial documents.
My parents were Emmett and Lillian Bridges. Both had grown up on East Texas cotton farms, and both had dropped out of school after eighth grade to work on the farms. They were married about 1924, and Dad started raising cotton on rented land. Their first child was born June 4, 1926, and was named William Jackson but was called Jack. Sometime after Jack was born, my dad realized he could never succeed raising cotton on rented land, so he sold what little assets he had and moved the family to Tyler, Texas, a town of about twenty thousand people. His plan was to go to a business college and study accounting. However, he got sidetracked.
He took a job with a farm supply store which also had a cotton brokerage business. The owners of the company talked him into studying cotton grading so he could become their cotton buyer. The problem was that buying cotton was seasonal, and Dad spent the rest of the year as a clerk in the farm supply store. Humanly speaking, this was not a good decision. Though Dad had dropped out of school after eighth grade, he was very intelligent and was especially good at math. I’m sure he would have made an excellent basic accountant. However, viewed from the perspective I now have, I am confident that God was sovereignly directing that seemingly bad decision. God is as much in control of our bad decisions as He is our good ones. This does not mean God causes us to make bad decisions any more than He causes us to sin. But He does allow us to sin, and He does allow us to make our bad decisions.
When I was born I had four physical defects. The first and most obvious was that I was cross-eyed. For those not familiar with this term, it means that while one eye looks straight ahead the other eye is turned toward the nose. The second and most difficult to deal with is that my right inner ear was not fully developed. As a young child I was not aware of my deafness in that ear, but I became increasingly aware of it and the accompanying inconvenience as I grew older. It was not until I was eighty-two that an ear, nose, and throat doctor discovered the cause of my deafness which I had had all my life.
The third and fourth defects were deformities in my breastbone and spine. Actually, these two were not significant in my growing up years, but both became quite a problem in adult life. Then to add insult to injury, I became left-handed in a right-handed world. I did not get off to a good start physically.
My parents were members of a “fundamentalist” church. That word did not have the derogatory ring in those days that it has now. Nevertheless, it was a small, separatist church. My mother was a homebody who never learned to drive and didn’t socialize much in the neighborhood. In fact, her whole social life took place in the church. Dad worked from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week. With church activities on Sunday, he had no time for neighborhood socializing.
To sum it up, my parents were financially poor, education dropouts, and religiously and socially isolated. This was not a good beginning for me.
My brother, Jack, started school when I was only two years old, and there were no boys my age in the neighborhood, so I grew up alone until I started school at age six. We had no toys, so I played in my imagination. My favorite was pretending to be an over-the-road truck driver complete with all the sounds of engines revving up and gears meshing, which I heard in the real trucks in my neighborhood.
Finally the day came in 1936 for me to start school. Our school system did not have a kindergarten grade at that time, so I started in first grade. Again, because my mother was a homebody, instead of taking me to school the first day, she sent me with my brother, Jack, who was entering fifth grade. All was well until we got to the school, and then Jack did not know what to do with me. He was so bewildered he started to cry and the principal came along, asked his problem, and got me safely to my first-grade class.
Years later, as I thought back on my early childhood from the advantage of knowing what I had learned about the providence of God, two verses of Scripture helped. They are Psalm 139:13 and 16: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. . . . Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.”
First of all, I realized that God had created me to be physically the person He wanted me to be, birth defects and all. When I look at David’s phrase, “you knitted me together in my mother’s womb,” I can think, “David, you did not know anything about genetics that we know today,” but the truth is, the Holy Spirit, who guided David to write those words, knows infinitely more about genetics than the most brilliant scientists. So when He guides David to say, “You knitted me together in my mother’s womb,” He is saying that God so controlled the genetics that I became physically exactly the person He wanted me to be. The same is true about the fact that the days that were ordained for me, including those early difficult days, were written in His book before one of them came to be.
So I was born physically exactly the way God wanted me to be and to parents who were poor, uneducated, and socially isolated, all because that was the plan God ordained for me before I was born.
But if you fast-forward my life to the present, you have to be amazed at what God has done for a cross-eyed, partially deaf boy growing up in poverty alongside the railroad tracks. As I think of myself, I am continually reminded of the words of Psalm 40:1-3:
I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.
Though David’s reference to the “pit of destruction” and the “miry bog” overstates my situation, the idea of God drawing me up and setting my feet upon a rock is exactly how I view God’s work in my life.
Furthermore, all that God has done, He has done solely by His grace. Apart from Christ I deserve nothing but His eternal judgment. In fact I could easily appropriate the title of one of John Bunyan’s works, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. And I readily identify with Jacob, who was himself an amazing illustration of God’s grace, when he said, “I am not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps” (Genesis 32:10).
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