Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / February 13, 2018 | Expresso - Pam Ragsdale

Transcript

February 13, 2018 | Expresso - Pam Ragsdale · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so a couple weeks ago a couple weeks ago I'm sitting at home and my phone rings and you know I don't recognize this number and I'm like okay.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no I got a text.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was a text.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, have you ever spoken at Espresso?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, no.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is this Connie?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: So she said, can I call you?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: So she called.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: She said, I can't believe it.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I know, but they never asked me, so here I am.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um we came up with uh funny introduction, and I decided not to use it, but I'm gonna tell you what it was anyway.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I belong to the Litwits, the Knitwits.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: We decided I'm also a Kitwit, K-I-T short for kitchen, and Teresa Jenkins said, and you're also a kidwit.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I said, No, let's not do that.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's getting too crazy.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: We could have come up with a lot of things like that.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I was born in 1953 in Bemidji, Minnesota.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody know where Bemidji, Minnesota is?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, a few miles from where the Mississippi River starts, which at that point is about 10 feet wide, and you can walk across it.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I've done that with my kids a few years ago.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: We went back when I was 48, and of course the town was totally different.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember anything because we left there when I was two.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um I have an older brother who was born in Chicago in 1952.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was born in 53 and 55.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: We moved to Iowa 10 days before my next sister was born.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And lived there for a year, and then we moved back to Pennsylvania where my mom was from, and lived with my grandparents, and then a little rental house, and in 1958, and in fact, Sunday was exactly 60 years, we moved to a farm.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I can remember that is because we moved on my dad's birthday and he just turned 89 on Sunday, so he would have been 29 years old when we moved there.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: He never wanted to be a dairy farmer because you had to milk cows.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: So my mom goes, I don't know why he ever thought he wanted to have chickens.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because you have to feed chickens and then you have to gather those eggs.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we started out with broiler hens and raised those for several years, and um on Groundhog Day, it was actually Friday night, it was Groundhog Day.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: 64 years ago, our barn burned to the ground.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: So then they went to layer hens, cage layers, which is two rows of cages with a little rack where the eggs roll out, and you have to go down through there.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: We had 8,000 chickens, so we got 6,000 some eggs a day.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that was our life for years.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, right before the barn burned down, we'd had another sister, and a couple years later we had another brother, so they're now five kids.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my older brother is 12 years older than my youngest brother, and their birthdays are 10 days apart, so um, they have birthdays coming up at the end of this month.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I grew up going to church.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Both my grandfathers were pastors, my dad was a pastor off and on as I was growing up, and um so I knew from a little child I heard about Jesus all the time, and um that was just part of our life.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: The church was open, the bark dolls were there, it seemed like.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the Church of the Brethren is an Anabaptist group, they're similar to the Mennonites and Amish.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: We did not break off from them as a lot of people think, but we um have similar beliefs, and um, they believe in believers' baptism.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was about 12, um, our Sunday school class were the oldest kids in church who were not baptized, so it was our turn to go through membership classes.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And most of what I remember from membership class was church history.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I did not remember hearing the gospel, but I had heard it in Sunday school, so I knew that Jesus had died for me.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um made that decision, got baptized.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in our church, when you got baptized, you know, here we do once backwards, we went three times forward in the name of the Father, the name of the Son, and the name of the Holy Spirit.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then later on in my life I got baptized another time.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I've always said, if it counts to go under the water, I've been under four times, I'm covered.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was in junior high, the church that we were attending was building a new church on the other side of town.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the church we realized was going to split, and my parents did not want to be part of that, so we decided to go to a different, still Church of the Brethren, but a whole different congregation.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was closer to our house.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was also a very small church.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: It happened to be the church that one of my grandfathers grew up going to.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: So my mom was kind of reluctant about going there because there were people there that knew her.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, one lady called her Ida the second and me Ida the third because we looked like my grandmother, and uh she thought that was funny.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, at that church, um, within a couple years my dad was elected to be uh one of the ministers.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um they had what they called the free ministry.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: You did not have to have been to seminary, didn't have a formal education, but part of that was he had to take some classes and do some reading, and so occasionally my parents would be gone all day Saturday to ministers' meetings.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this started causing some problems at home because they would not tell my older brother that he was in charge or say Pam's in charge today.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as the chicken chores got done, my dad was good with it.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: But if I didn't get everything done in the house, I was in trouble.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, normally on Saturday we would do laundry, bake, and clean.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And my mom and my sister and I would take turns.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: But when they were gone, I was trying to do all of that.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm all of like 14, you know, so here I am, you know, trying to get all this stuff done.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if it wasn't done and they got home, I was in trouble.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: My dad and I fought about everything for years.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And um just I was not a very happy teenager.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: So when I got old enough to go to college, I decided I was not going to go to the four colleges that were very close to my home because I wanted to go to a church's brethren college.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I picked the next closest one, McPherson, Kansas.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So in 1971, I came to McPherson and started college.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And like Connie said, I've lived here most of my life.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've been gone two years since then.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: One, two summers in college and about a year after that.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: But other than that, I've been in Kansas for the last 40 some years.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even want to remember that.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, that first year in college, um the campus church was right next to the college.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Their pastor had left and they were looking for a new pastor.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so that year they had different people speaking.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, on January 8th, right after we got back from Christmas, um, one of our education professors spoke.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I'd been going to church and I heard these guys, you know, the other people speaking, and it was just kind of like, okay, whatever.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: When Professor Hughbanks spoke, it something just said to me, he believes what he is talking about.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he was he gave his testimony, but most of the people, you know, it's just like, oh, you know, they're just saying that.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: But it really hit me.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember sitting there in church and praying and saying, Okay, Lord, you're in charge of my life from here on out.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that was one of the best decisions I've ever made because it made a big difference in everything that I did.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um when I went back to college for my sophomore year, my dad had been at the church seminary for a short class.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the first letter I get from my mom is um, we're moving to Chicago next summer.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: They offered my dad a chance to go to seminary.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I no longer have a home to go to.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now what happens?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we got through college.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: I spent one summer in McPherson.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: There was a class I had to take that summer anyway, so I stayed there.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And my parents came to visit on the way, and they had made a homemade camper.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Six of them went cross-country and halfway back.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad I was not with them.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: My mom said on rainy nights it was pretty tight in there.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Two kids above the cab, three of them where the table was, and one underneath them.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: The three sleeping this way and one this way.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: She said, I don't know where we would have put you if you'd been with us anyway.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: So they moved.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I went on and finished college in 1975.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, they're living in an apartment in Chicago.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's no place for me to go.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: So my grandmother in Pennsylvania said, Why don't you come back and live with me for a while?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I did that.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And while I lived there, I met a gal named Andy Feldman.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And Andy had grown up Jewish, but she was now a Christian, so a messianic Jew.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And she and I were talking one day about our stories, and she was telling me about all the things she had done and what Jesus had saved her from.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then she said, Well, what's your story?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of told her, you know, I grew up going to church all the time.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: She goes, Well, you don't have much of a story, do you?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, But you know, Andy, even though both my grandpas were pastors, my dad was a pastor, and I've been to church practically every Sunday of my life, I still had to decide for myself who was going to be in charge of my life, me or Jesus.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And um so, like I said, I'm glad I made that good decision.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, I only lived in Pennsylvania that time for a little over a year, and um the Church of the Brethren has a um volunteer service program that started out kind of as alternative service for guys who did not want to serve in the military.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how my parents met.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: My dad was from the Midwest, my mom was from Pennsylvania, and you're gonna hear a little repeat of that in a little bit.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, anyway, so I decided I wanted to do a year at BVS.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I spent about seven months in Mississippi trying to get a sewing program going, which didn't work.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they said, Well, how would you like to switch projects?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, That'd be okay.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a daycare center in Hutchinson that needs somebody.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hutchinson, Kansas.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Wait a minute, I've been there.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Do I want to go back?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess I do.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: So back I came to Kansas.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I worked at a daycare center, and I also was very active in the church, and one of the things I did was teach the youth Sunday school class, high school.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was a home ac major in college, and I found it real fast.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like junior high and high school kids, but for some reason they thought I could teach this youth class.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, one Sunday one of the boys brought his girlfriend with him to church, and she and I kind of hit it off.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good thing we did because we've been sisters-in-law for 37 years now.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: We joked about her introducing me to her older brother, and when she was baptized, um, her mom invited me over for dinner, and that's the first time I really remember meeting her brother.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, since I'm Brenda's friend and she's in high school, he thinks I'm 20.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm 25.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, so things kind of went on for a little while.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And a couple years later, he found out I was actually closer to his age than I was hers.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: So around Easter that year, he called and asked me out.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And 11 weeks later we were married.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Mothers do not like me to tell them that story, but he was 32 and I was 27 at the time, and we both had dated other people, kind of knew what we wanted, and so we got married.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: By Christmas, we were expecting our first baby.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And Miss Emily was born the next July, 14 days after our first anniversary.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And she was five weeks old the day he came home and said, Um, KPNL is sending me to Jeffrey Energy Center.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know anybody in Northeast Kansas.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he has a friend in Manhattan.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we came up and finally found a house in St.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Mary's.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Lived there for a couple years, and while we were there, we had a little boy named Steve in 1984.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he was not quite a year old when we decided we were tired of renting, we wanted to find a house of our own.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And one of his coworkers had a how a mobile home for sale in Delia.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we lived in Delia for about two months.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And shortly after we moved in there, I'm like, Vern, I think I'm pregnant again.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, run down to Rossville and get a pregnancy test.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I did.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Comes home the next morning.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we decided we would move the trailer to Topeka because we did not want to be in Delia with me on the road with three kids.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: His mom never drove, so the idea of me driving with three kids, he just had a hard time with that.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't bother me.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'd driven all over the place.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, we moved in September of 1985, and the next spring, we got a real funny, happy Pat St.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Patrick's Day present, my daughter Carrie.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we've had lots of fun since then.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, she was about two, we decided we were just outgrowing the trailer, so we started looking for houses.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And um a guy came to look at it and he said, Well, um, my wife and I got a divorce, and I need to be out of our house by Saturday.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is there any way I can get the trailer this week?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we're like, What?
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I had a friend who lived on Jewel Street, and there was a house advertised in the paper, so I called her and I said, What do you think?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And she went down and looked at it and she came, yeah, yeah.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we called the guy.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: We rented that house for six months.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in the meantime, we had been going to several different churches.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: We went to one church where the pastor believed the Bible was just a collection of stories.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: He had explanations for why the walls of Jericho fell and several things, and Vern and I started looking at each other, going, This is not what we want our children to hear.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we he had been going to a um another denomination, so we tried that for a little while, and one Sunday, one of the guys who was speaking puts the thing on the overhead projector.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: These spiritual gifts are still used, these are never used, and these are sometimes used.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Vern is working shift work, so he's not always in church with me.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I went home and said, Vern, who told him which gifts God still uses?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Okay.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we tried another church, and in that church, well, the pastor said, if you don't speak in tongues, you haven't been baptized in the Holy Spirit.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody come forward and just start babbling, and you'll get your gift, your tongue.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we're talking about this, and um, he goes, you know, I kind of like Topeka Bible Church when I went to my cousin's wedding there a couple years ago.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Brian Ragsdale, if any of you knew Brian and Carla, that was Brian's cousin.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um we started coming on Mother's Day of 1988.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: We're kind of on 30 years.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Found our church home, loved it.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Within a year, I was helping to teach Sunday school.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Taught four and five-year-olds for 18 years, and then moved on to being a security person for the children's area and still do children's ministry on Thursdays, did some Wednesday stuff.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um during that time I've helped with weddings.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: We had a wedding where the family backed out, and so the aunt said, Can some of you guys help?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And a bunch of us were out here before we had this kitchen.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we all said, you know, somebody needs to know what we have and where it is around here.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So we formed a wedding committee.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then I helped uh Joyce Robinson with some funeral dinners, and a few years ago got asked to help.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think that was 12 years ago now that I think about it.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um had two funeral committees going, and then when Joyce's Alzheimer's got to where she couldn't do it, Patty asked me if I would do all of them, and so that turned into that.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um have attended lots of Bible studies, learned lots about the Bible that I didn't know.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And um, one of the Bible studies I took, one of the very first ones, was on spiritual gifts.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Kathy Letch laughed all the way home.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: She and I were carpooling and she goes, We could have saved you 20 bucks.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: We know service, hospitality, and teaching are your gifts.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, that just confirmed it for Vern.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: So when I say I want to do something, he doesn't argue with me.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: So okay, a little backup back to where I talked about my dad and I never getting along.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, one question I always had in my mind was, Does my dad love me?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: I never heard him say that.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a few years ago, my husband thought I had lost it because I got off the phone with my dad and I turned around and there were tears running down my face.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, What happened?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, My dad just told me that he loves me.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Still makes me cry.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: He says it to me all the time now, but that was the first time, and I was probably 60 years old before I remember my dad telling me that he loved me.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of my searching through those years of Bible study and stuff was looking for a father to love me, and I found out that I had a heavenly father who loved me no matter what I did.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: If I didn't get all the work done, that was okay with him.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: I could keep on doing it.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just say to you ladies, if you have not ever made a decision of your own for trusting Christ, please do that because it makes a big change in your life.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.