A Cloud Of Witnesses: Portraits of Faith
“He spoke as one having authority, and not as the scribes and the Pharisees.”
Deacon Proctor has been like a spiritual brother to me for many years, and we have enjoyed deep mystical communion. He is tall and broad with a flat top haircut and a severely twisted hand. His black hair has an ever-widening section of white on one side, and he has suits in an array of various colors.
Once I remember him teaching about the verse in Isaiah which says “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.” He looked at the arms of his suit and shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s funny, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to wear this suit today, because it has a bleach stain on the side, but it illustrates this passage. “ The suit was appropriately wine-colored, with the white spot near the pocket.
The deacon’s movements are marionette-like, the tilting of his head, the raising and lowering of his arms and shoulders. Affectionately known by Elder Foster as “Brother Love”, he is a tremendously gifted teacher and man of faith. He was the Sunday school teacher before I was appointed to the task, and I was quite terrified about teaching after him.
I have never heard anyone teach as Deacon Proctor does. He is like a great waiter at a restaurant. A bad waiter can ruin even the best food. A professional waiter can make any meal even better, by presenting it with grace and style and timing. This is how Deacon Proctor serves the Word of God. He presents it with love, simplicity and clarity so that even a child could understand it. It is evident that he is a man who loves to study in order to gain more wisdom.
I asked Deacon Proctor one day about his deformed right hand. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders and said, “It was from an accident a couple of years ago. I was working on someone’s car motor with a rag in my hand. I got distracted while I was talking and the rag was pulled into the fan belt along with my hand. It tore my hand up but I never felt any pain. In the hospital, the doctor kept saying ‘Why don’t you quit being so macho, and let me give you some morphine?’ and I kept telling him it really didn’t hurt. I know that God kept it from hurting.
“Two weeks before the accident happened, I had a vivid dream about a cat clawing up my hand, and I asked Mother Foster what she thought it meant. She avoided me for a week or so after that, like she thought I was weird,” he said chuckling. “After this happened, we all understood it. The Spirit was warning me in advance.”
Another deacon from the church told me that it was incredible to him how Deacon Proctor never complained about his hand being mutilated, or about having to live with the inconvenience of it from then on. He behaved almost as though nothing had happened.
Deacon Proctor was also in a terrible wreck while driving a huge concrete truck, and he struck the driver side of a small vehicle. He says he jumped out and checked the man’s breathing and pulse, and he was sure the man was dead. He said, “I began to weep and kept pointing at the man and crying, ‘You can’t die, no, you can’t die.’ The ambulance came and the medics couldn’t revive him, so helicopter came and took him. I found out later that the man lived and he is doing fine,” he said shaking his head. “I really believe the Holy Ghost raised the man, because I kept pointing at him and saying he couldn’t die. He explained how Jesus told His disciples that they would do greater miracles than He did, and the scriptures say God quickens the dead and calls those things which are not as if they are.”
The deacon frequently has dreams and visions and hears the voice of the Spirit. On one occasion when I was feeling great anxiety, I had heard an inward voice say “Trust in Me.” I went to church the following Sunday and Deacon Proctor said to me, “The Lord told me this week that I just need to trust Him.” This surprised me, because I had not told him about the voice that told me the same thing.
Here is one of the most interesting dreams that the deacon told me about:
I dreamed that I was at a crowded fair surrounded by games and noise and music and bright lights. A man walked up to me and said, “Follow me” and then began to walk away. I decided to do what he said so I walked right behind him. The man kept talking to me over his shoulder, and I kept trying to get a look at his face and to hear him better. With all of the noise and confusion of people around me, I could hear his voice, but couldn’t understand his words. I never got a look at the man’s face, but I kept following anyway. The man kept walking in all different directions, and I stayed right behind him the whole time. The moon was really large up in the sky, and it had a face on it, which seemed to be watching me.
The next day, Deacon Proctor mentioned the dream to a co-worker at his job, because he wondered what it meant. The co-worker said quickly, “It looks to me like God just wanted you to follow him, and he wanted to see if you would or not.” The deacon almost cried when he heard it, because he knew that it was true. I added that I thought the face on the moon was the face of God watching from above the whole time while Deacon Proctor was following Him on the ground. Even with all of the distractions and amusements that could have lured him away, he did not turn aside. I thought the fair represented the worldly temptations that can keep us from following God.
The deacon says he was talking with Elder Foster one day when the Spirit told him to go to his son’s house and pray. He and Elder and Mother Foster walked to the house and no one was home. So they returned to the church where coincidentally, the deacon’s son pulled up a few minutes later with his girlfriend in the car. The deacon told him about his sense of urgency to pray for him. His son was not a believer, but he accepted the prayers of the three of them.
About a week later, a sense of heaviness came over the deacon during street services, and people noticed that he was acting strangely and pacing about. Right after services were dismissed, Deacon Proctor learned that his son had been stabbed in the neck by the girlfriend that had been in the car when they prayed for him, and he had been rushed to the hospital. The deacon hurried there to see his son and the bleeding was so bad, that the family did not think he would make it. But miraculously he did survive, and Deacon Proctor says that it was because of the prayer of intercession that had been offered a few days before, prompted by the leading of the Spirit. He said he shudders to think of how it would have ended up if he had not obeyed the Spirit and prayed.
Deacon Proctor has encountered many trials at work and the Lord has been faithful to protect him. He told us one day at church about a series of events that happened to him.
One of his knees was hurting very badly one day at work and he mentioned it to one of his co-workers. The man began to mock him and said that he was just faking it to get out of working. Deacon Proctor ignored the man, and didn’t say anything. The next day that man came in with his knee in so much pain, that he could barely walk on it for several days.
Then one day his elbow was hurting and he complained about it to someone, and they began making jokes about it. That person developed a pain in their elbow that became so unbearable that they ended up having surgery on it.
Then a supervisor was bragging to people about how he was going to get the deacon fired and give his job to someone else. The next day that man was fired, and Deacon Proctor was promoted into his job. When reports got around about these events at work, the other employees became afraid because they realized that the deacon was under divine protection.
Deacon Proctor and I talk from time to time about the need for a true revival of the church, and he told me about one that occurred years ago in Saint Augustine. Tent services were held outside, and an evangelist named Walter Camps came to lead them. The revival went on for a month, and the Spirit moved so intensely that all of the bars in the surrounding area had to close, because they had no customers.
The deacon said he used to mock people who fell down when touched by preachers on television and other services he had attended because he thought it was a pretense. But at this revival he went to the altar for prayer, and Reverend Camps asked him what he wanted prayer for. Deacon Proctor told him that he wanted prayer for his mind. The evangelist gave him a peculiar look then he put his hand on the deacon’s forehead, and Deacon Proctor fell down unconscious. He testifies that ever since that day, he has never been the same and he has no more of the problems that he had at the time. He also doesn’t doubt God’s power.
I feel immensely honored to know a great man of faith such as Deacon Proctor who is so wise, and yet so humble before God and man.
OLIVE TWIST ©2012
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