Becoming Dallas Willard E-Book

Gary W. Moon

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 557

Beschreibung

- ECPA 2019 Christian Book Award Finalist - 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalists - BiographyDallas Willard was a personal mentor and inspiration to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers. His presence and ideas rippled through the lives of many prominent leaders and authors, such as John Ortberg, Richard Foster, James Bryan Smith, Paula Huston, and J. P. Moreland. As a result of these relationships and the books he wrote, he fundamentally altered the way tens of thousands of Christians have understood and experienced the spiritual life. Whether great or small, everyone who met Dallas was impressed by his personal attention, his calm confidence, his wisdom, and his profound sense of the spiritual. But he was not always the man who lived on a different plane of reality than so many of the rest of us. He was someone who had to learn to be a husband, a parent, a teacher, a Christ follower.The journey was not an easy one. He absorbed some of the harshest and most unfair blows life can land. His mother died when he was two, and after his father remarried he was exiled from his stepmother's home. Growing up in Depression-era, rural Missouri and educated in a one-room schoolhouse, he knew poverty, deprivation, anxiety, self-doubt, and depression. Though the pews he sat in during his early years were not offering much by way of love and mercy, Dallas, instead of turning away, kept looking for the company of a living, present, and personal God.In Gary W. Moon's candid and inspiring biography, we read how Willard became the person who mentored and partnered with his young pastor, Richard Foster, to inspire some of the most influential books on spirituality of the last generation. We see how his love of learning took him on to Baylor, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Southern California, where he became a beloved professor and one of the most versatile members of the philosophy department.The life of Dallas Willard deserves attention because he became a person who himself experienced authentic transformation of life and character. Dallas Willard not only taught about spiritual disciplines, he became a different person because of them. He became a grounded person, a spiritually alive person as he put them into practice, finding God, as he often said, "at the end of his rope." Here is a life that gives us all hope.

Leseprobe

Becoming Dallas Willard is dedicated to the founding board of the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture and The Dallas Willard Center and Research Library for Christian Spiritual Formation:

To Eff and Patty Martinfor your vision, passion, and generosity, and being so much like Dallas yourselves.

To Gayle Beebefor your courage, integrity, and leadership.

To John Ortbergfor your contagious love and deep appreciation for Dallas.

To Wally Hawley for your ability to see the future before it appears to the rest of us.

To Jane Willard and Becky Willard Heatleyfor your willingness to enter into such a painful and joyful process so soon after the loss of your dear husband and father.

And to my mother, Euree Strickland Moon,who gave me a love for writing and telling stories.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Richard J. Foster

Preface

PART ONE: FIRST THIRTY YEARS

1 Keep Eternity Before the Eyes of the Children

2 There Are No Unwanted Children

3 Coming of Age in Rural America

4 Running into Jane

5 Running into God

6 Academic Awakening

7 Which Path to Take?

PART TWO: THREE KINGDOMS

8 Early Years at USC

9 King and Queen of Campus

10 Formation at Home

11 Accidental Birth of a Movement

12 So Long as We Are Doing the Work Ourselves

PART THREE: FINISHING WELL

13 Ideas That Matter for Time and Eternity—Part One

14 Ideas That Matter for Time and Eternity—Part Two

15 Thank You!

16 Healing Light

Afterword by John Ortberg

A Letter from the Willard Family

Acknowledgments

Timeline

Interviews and Correspondence

Notes

Renovaré Institute for Christian Spiritual Formation

Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture

Formatio

Praise for Becoming Dallas Willard

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Copyright

Foreword

Richard J. Foster

If we are fortunate, once in our lifetime a human supernova presence streaks across our mental and emotional horizon, and the intensity of this light changes us forever. Dallas Willard was such a supernova for me.

The gnawing question is, exactly how did a person with the rare combination of exceptional brilliance and unadulterated goodness come to be? Brilliance is often marred by arrogance. Goodness is often combined with an absence of rigorous intellectual effort. So, how did this unique blending of brilliance and goodness happen?

This is precisely the complicated, even tangled, issue Gary Moon seeks to unravel in Becoming Dallas Willard. And he does so with unusual success.

Weaving a story that stretches all the way back to the heart-rending losses Dallas experienced in the Missouri Ozarks, and all the way forward to him becoming an international authority on Edmund Husserl and his philosophical system known today as phenomenology. Both sides of the story are crucial to understanding how Dallas Willard became such an extraordinary person.

The pain-filled losses of childhood are almost too much to bear. His mother dying suddenly . . . his father making a tragic moral choice . . . Well, perhaps I had best leave these stories for you to discover from the book itself.

There are also amazing graces. As a child of nine, Dallas becomes convinced that “Jesus Christ [is] the greatest person that ever lived, and I wanted to be on his side.” As a teenager he reads every book in the high school library. (“Oh, it was a small library,” he once told me.) This leads him to adventure stories like The Count of Monte Cristo and the sweeping histories of Flavius Josephus, a book his father buys for him. And then his favorite, Plato’s Republic, a book he carries with him all through his time as a migrant agricultural worker. And more.

Now, to speak of Plato’s Republic leads us to consider the brilliant side of this man. Over the years I have been around a fair number of genuinely bright people, but Dallas, I think, is the only person I have known that I would place in the genius category. I once asked him if he had a photographic memory. He demurred. Well, if his mind was not photographic, it certainly was close.

Scott Soames, the department chair of USC’s School of Philosophy, says that Dallas was “the teacher with the greatest range in the school of philosophy, regularly teaching courses in logic, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, history of philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, including both sides of the split between analytic philosophy and phenomenology.”

It is in discussing the brilliance of Dallas that Gary Moon’s skills shine brightly. Somehow, don’t ask me how, he is able to take concepts like “metaphysical realism” and “epistemic realism” and make them understandable for ordinary people like you and me. Even more, he skillfully shows us how these concepts are absolutely critical for Dallas’s teaching on, for example, the invisible realities of the Trinity and the kingdom of God.

Dallas, of course, is best known for his writing and teaching in Christian spirituality. I would consider The Divine Conspiracy a masterpiece and his most important work. The Spirit of the Disciplines lays a philosophical, theological, and psychological foundation for the practice of the Christian spiri­tual disciplines in ordinary life. Renovation of the Heart is a careful unpacking of how the human person can be formed, conformed, and transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ. And Hearing God is the best book on divine guidance I have ever read. Other books and essays by Dallas are out there in abundance.

Of course Dallas’s brilliance, as important as it is, is far from the whole story. He possessed in his person a spiritual formation into Christlikeness that was simply astonishing. Please understand, Dallas and I had a working friendship for more than forty years, so, believe me, I knew the warts and the wrinkles. Still, I saw rich character-forming realities deepen and thicken in him over many years.

I am struggling for the words to share with you what I mean. To put it negatively, Dallas was amazingly free from manipulation and control. To say it positively, he showed graciousness and kindness to everyone who came in contact with him.

Every society, every culture, every age needs models of a life well lived. The deepest, most fundamental reason for studying the life of another person is so we can learn to live our lives more fully, more truly, more authentically. This is why Becoming Dallas Willard is a genuinely important book.

On Wednesday, May 8, 2013, I am boarding an early morning flight to Detroit when my cell phone rings. It is my wife, Carolynn, sharing the heartbreaking news that only a few moments earlier at 5:55 a.m. Dallas Willard stepped from this life into greater life. Flurries of calls come in from magazine editors wanting a statement. I turn my phone off (not to airplane mode, but off) and step into this missile of steel that will soon be hurtling across the country. I sit in the packed flight, alone and isolated with my thoughts.

A great light has gone out. I shudder. Already, I miss him desperately. Right now, the world feels more empty, more vacant. Indeed, it feels like a much darker place.

For some reason my mind drifts to the Lamplighter, the unassuming restaurant where Dallas would meet with students and visitors without number. In years long past I too had sat with Dallas on multiple occasions in one of the nondescript booths of the Lamplighter, munching on my Reuben sandwich, discussing and dreaming the future together.

As I ruminate on our past conversations, the restaurant’s name begins to take on an almost prophetic dimension: Lamplighter. Isn’t this precisely what Dallas has been lo these many years, a lighter of human lamps? In so many ways he lit my little lamp. Indeed, he has been lighting the lamps of so many folk, near and far.

You see, the providential presence of God brings to us just what we need, just when we need it. Our age needed Dallas Willard’s vibrant example of how to live well, and his life-giving writings of hope and promise.

Today, the supernova has flamed out. How shall I now live? I do not know. But, in the words of the childhood song, I will seek to let my little light shine in the midst of the darkness.

Preface

And they shall live with His face in view, and that they belong to Him will show on their faces. Darkness will no longer be. They will have no need of lamps or sunlight because God the Lord will be radiant in their midst. And they will reign through the ages of ages. (Rev 22:4-5, paraphrase)

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

The Holiday Inn Express in West Plains, Missouri, was not somewhere I expected to find a connection with Dallas Willard. But there it was. The sign right across the street, framed in the window of my second story room: “Willard Brothers Motor Sales.”

I’d gone to southern Missouri as part of my research, hoping to get a feel for the small towns and farming communities where Dallas Willard grew up—those small one-store villages where his family struggled to make ends meet during the years of dust bowl and depression.

The Willard Brothers whose car showroom I could see from my hotel room were part of that same story. A conversation with one of the brothers revealed that the business had been in operation since 1945 and that the founding Willards grew up in one of the small communities that Dallas had called home—Rover, Missouri. For almost seven decades the mission of the Willard Brothers dealership has been to provide “superior customer service” from a staff that is “friendly, knowledgeable and desirous of helping others make the right decision.”

The mission statement made me smile. It had a kind of Dallas Willard ring about it. All his life, he applied his friendliness, knowledge, service, and desire to help people make the right decisions—life-changing decisions—in an arena far away from his hometown. He didn’t remain in southern Missouri. But something of southern Missouri always remained in him.

He Lives in a Different Time Zone Than the Rest of Us

Life is the sum of your experiences. At least that is what Dallas Willard said.1 By that measure every person’s life is unique.

But what about an extraordinary life; how is that formed? What experiences produce an existence like that—one so radiant that it begins to draw others to it? Where does a person from depression-era rural Missouri, who was educated for years in a one-room schoolhouse, gain the ability and the courage to shake the foundations of the evangelical church and challenge the most sacrosanct assumptions of the academy? And how does that person come to live a life that matches his words?

How, to put it another way, does someone become Dallas Willard?

Dallas was one of four siblings. Each shared the same DNA and much of the same environment and experiences. But one of Dallas’s siblings, his older brother Duane—who had been a fellow classmate with Dallas for many years as an undergraduate and graduate student, and like Dallas became a professor of philosophy at a major university—stayed away from church until he lay on his deathbed, humorously referring to what was so sacred to Dallas as, well, “dung” would be putting in politely.2 Why? Why would one brother walk away from a church that did not have answers for his pain, while the other dug deeper through personal layers of pain and theodicy to find a faith that did, and a God who was always with you?

Dallas Willard’s life deserves serious study because he became a man who experienced authentic transformation of life and character. It only took a few minutes of watching his life to know that “he lives in a different time zone than the rest of us.”3

But that was the last part of a long journey. It was the experience of those who encountered Dallas as a fifty-plus-year-old professor who spoke with self-assurance and wisdom while employing precise definitions about topics ranging from philosophy to Christian spiritual formation. The brilliant professor loved by his students; a devoted husband and attentive father, who always lived what he taught with great calmness and confidence.

This—the respected spiritual guide—is who Dallas became. But before that? Before that, there was another Dallas: someone who had to absorb some of the harshest and most unfair blows life can land; someone who knew about death and loss, poverty and deprivation, anxiety, self-doubt, and depression; someone who learned about grace and love and mercy while sitting in the pews of churches not offering much good news about life here and now; someone who, instead of turning away, kept looking for the company of a living, present, and interactive God.

The man many people knew during the last decades of his life was a markedly different person from the man who lived through the first decades of the journey. Dallas Willard was a man who taught about transformation from the things he learned and put into practice throughout the ups and downs of life. When asked how we find God, he often said, “God’s address is at-the-end-your-rope.com.” That is the man I would like to introduce to you in the pages of this book: the man who became Dallas Willard.

He Lived During an Important Time in Church History

But before we begin the story, it is important to say something about the religious context Dallas Willard lived in. While serving as the religion editor for Newsweek for decades, Kenneth L. Woodward began writing about religion in America. Hehad a front-row seat, and published his reflections in Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama. He witnessed dramatic changes in religious life in America across the later decades of the twentieth century, the decades of Dallas Willard’s adult life and ministry.

Early in his career as a college student and budding journalist Woodward saw the United States awash with religious belief. “To be American,” he writes, “was to believe in God, and when surveyed in those days 98 percent of Americans answered accordingly.”4 The parents of the baby boomers were church and synagogue builders—at the fastest rate in the nation’s history. These buildings were filled with worshipers and Sunday school attenders. Christian schools, colleges, and seminaries thrived. William Randolph Hearst was “puffing” Billy Graham, who in turn filled football stadiums with converts and offered advice to presidents.

Yet, in the course of Woodward’s and Willard’s careers, the religious landscape changed dramatically. Before the turn of the century there were numerous indicators that religious involvement was in free fall. Faith was no longer a “family hand-me down.” Attendance at mainline churches was on a steep decline. One in four Americans claimed no religious identification, and one in two would admit to only moderate or intermittent concern for religion. The “Nones” (those with no religious affiliation) were increasing faster than the nuns.

The evangelical church, in particular, was losing its authority, and some, such as Mark A. Noll, in his shocking book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, were making the claim that the scandal of the evangelical mind is that “there is not much mind there.” The evangelical church was saving souls and losing minds.5 And it was also losing members to expressions of spirituality inside and outside the church that offered avenues to a here-and-now experience of God.

Between the age of Eisenhower and the era of Obama, the light of most churches was fading, and there was a growing need for someone who could talk with the authority of lived experience about Jesus’ number one teaching point (life in the kingdom of the heavens here and now), who could describe what it would mean to become friends with the invisible Trinity, and who was respected by the academy. During these decades of decline an important voice began to ring out, and it made the audacious claim that pastors could once again become “teachers of the nations.” In the decades between Eisenhower and Obama, such a voice, simultaneously humble and confident, began to be heard.

The Flow of the Chapters

The flow of this book is presented across three parts. In part one, we walk with Dallas through the years of his youth and his coming of age in rural Missouri. Then we observe as he becomes a husband and father and goes through spiritual and academic awakenings. The first part ends with Dallas beginning his career in the philosophy department of the University of Southern California.

The second part is focused on 1965 to 1985. During this time Dallas began to live in three worlds simultaneously. This is beautifully illustrated in the three memorial services held after his death. We look at his life through the lenses of the philosophy department, his family and closest friends, and then the little church he so hoped would become like the one described in the book of Acts, and his earliest partners in ministry.

In the final part we look at the person he became and the collection of his key ideas. Across the decades Dallas Willard became a lamplighter for thousands of individuals from various vocations and walks of life. We end our journey through his life by staring into some of the flames that he set ablaze.

As I spent time traveling to the places Dallas lived and meeting the people he knew throughout his life, I began to develop a sense of his surroundings—sights, sounds, even smells. Thus, at the beginning of a number of the chapters, I have taken the liberty of painting a picture of what it might have been like to be Dallas living in some of those moments. Those opening scenes are based on accounts from the people I interviewed, but are filled out a bit from my imagination (and in some cases rearranged chronologically) for the sake of helping readers put themselves in those scenes.

One final word of explanation before you step into the life of Dallas Willard. In an effort to reduce clutter in the text, I have placed at the end of the book the references to the hundreds of hours of interviews and other communications with dozens of individuals.

Part One

FIRST THIRTY YEARS

1

Keep Eternity Before the Eyes of the Children

What does it mean to be saved? It means eternal living here and now; a life of interaction with Jesus here and now, and that is the only description of Eternal Life in the New Testament, John 17:3.

Dallas Willard, “The Gospel of the Kingdom”

Maymie stood up in the overstuffed hay wagon as it bounced over the rocky ground of the Willard farm on Greasy Creek. She was wearied by her life as a farmer’s wife. The work was unending and often seemed unrewarding. Her three oldest children were scattered about the farm doing chores or homework, her youngest toddled around under his siblings’ watchful eyes.

Maymie and her husband, Albert, were hauling fodder and feeling the deep chill of winter in the air. But even in late January, the work continued, the cows still had to be fed.

Maymie was trying to keep warm as she helped with the fodder. But then a terrible sensation, the mountain of hay began to shift under her feet and started to slide. She felt herself losing her footing and in a split second weighed her choices. She jumped from the wagon. Maymie’s leap and resulting fall dramatically changed the course of her life and each member of her family, especially the life of her youngest son, Dallas Albert Willard.

In the 1930s America and other parts of the world suffered through the Great Depression. Missouri was hit particularly hard. For farmers on the rolling and rocky plains of the “Show Me State,” the decade was not only depressed, it was also dark and dirty. The bottom of the Dust Bowl was in the neighboring states of Oklahoma and Texas, but Missouri farmers felt the impact of being on its rim. Farm production was curtailed by the economic crash and choked almost lifeless by dust bowl conditions.

In 1933 the situation became even worse. First, the chinch bugs invaded and ate their way through the crops. “The bugs would clean up the wheat if they could find it,” one farmer recalled. “Then they would head for the oats. When the oats were gone, they would finish up the corn.”1

The drought of 1934 was so severe some farmers fed their cows leaves from the trees because they were the only thing left that had some semblance of green. In 1935 the problem was too much rain. In 1936 the grasshoppers moved in—mostly in the northeastern part of the state. The “plagues” in Missouri were reaching biblical proportions.

And in the middle of this depressed decade Dallas Albert Willard was born, on September 4, 1935. His first name was taken from the county of his birth, Dallas County, Missouri, which was originally organized under the name Niangua in 1841. The word Niangua is from an old Native American phrase meaning “I won’t go away.”2 But during the early years of his life, the people Dallas loved very often went away. The loving embrace of his mother would be felt only for a brief season.

Dallas’s middle name was taken from his father, Albert Alfred Willard. Albert was the third child and first son of Joseph M. Willard and Susan Rhoda Spurlock. “Grandpa Joe” was a circuit-riding Methodist evangelist who had met Rhoda on one of his preaching tours into northern Arkansas. Apparently when he sang “Just as I Am,” Rhoda responded with a yes to both Joseph and Jesus.

Albert was born on March 12, 1894, on a farm near the small village of Rover, in Oregon County, Missouri. He was one of what would become over one hundred first cousins. The Willards and Spurlocks were fruitful and multiplying clans.

The Willards trace their lineage back from Joseph Willard through ­eighteenth-century farms in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and possibly further back to Simon Willard, who lived in the county of Kent in England in the early 1600s.

Dallas’s Willard ancestors founded the town of Concord, Massachusetts, served as an acting president of Harvard College, and condemned the Salem Witch trials. A direct ancestor, Dallas’s great-great grandfather Martin Willard split some rails by the side of a young Abe Lincoln.3 The same preacher who married Abe’s sister, Sarah, married Martin’s brother, James Willard. It is likely that James Willard attended the same church, Little Pigeon Baptist, as the Lincoln family.

Not much changed across the next three generations. Dallas’s father, Albert, grew up on his parent’s farm near Rover, Missouri, attended small country churches, and experienced the harsh realities of life.

In 1914, at age twenty, Albert moved north to Douglas County, Missouri, near the town of Ava, to care for his great aunt Polly (Willard) and her husband Nate Lowe. The Lowes had no children and promised Albert an economic leg up: they would give Albert their land and log cabin if he would take care of them.4 While he was in that community, he began attending Bethany Baptist Church and met his future wife, Maymie Joyce Lindesmith.

Perhaps they first met before seeing each other in church. Nate and Polly’s farm bordered the Lindesmith farm. Albert had the habit of singing while working in the fields. It is nice to imagine that Maymie may have heard his strong bass voice singing his favorite song, “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” as the notes drifted across on the wind.

Several years later Albert and Maymie became an attractive couple. He was tall and square-jawed with thick, dark hair he managed with a straight-line part and tug from left to right. His eyes flashed intelligence and trust. Maymie was also tall. Of German ancestry, she had dark hair that framed a face with eyes that were round and inquisitive. She had a passion to absorb life and then turn her experiences into words. She came from a family of educators and would soon become a teacher herself. She was already an aspiring writer.

On July 25, 1918, before marrying Maymie, Albert enlisted in the Army. He could have received an exemption since he was the caretaker for Polly and Nate Lowe. However, Maymie’s former boyfriend at the time reported to the draft board that Albert had not registered. So Albert was called into service.

Albert and Maymie Willard

Clearly Maymie’s other suitor had some reason for hoping that the on-again, off-again relationship between Albert and Maymie could be turned off permanently by Albert’s absence. In a letter from Bessie Cunningham to Albert’s younger brother, Arthur, Ms. Cunningham wrote, “Maymie was here this evening. I believe she and Albert are still at ‘outs,’ but I think it will come out all right.”

Albert went off to war and became a mechanic, an automotive maintenance specialist, with the 10th Division. But he finished his basic training just a few days before the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.

Albert enjoyed writing, and later in life was known for his dramatic recitations of poems he and others had written. The last stanza of his “Poem from World War I” reveals some of his humor.

Well, I guess we were the luckiest guys that ever started out,

for when we left Camp Funston, ’twas to get the Sour Krouts

and I’m sure we bluffed the laddies, for we didn’t fire a gun

and now the war is over and I didn’t get a hun.5

His division completed a mopping up tour of duty in France in 1919. And things turned out well for Maymie and him. On October 10, 1919, the couple was definitely at “ins.” They eloped.

Maymie was living away from home in a boarding house while teaching in a nearby town. On the first weekend in October 1919 she went home to visit her parents. Early Monday morning, October 6, her sister Eva took her back to Round Lake, riding double on a horse so that Eva could take the horse back home. Before leaving Eva, Maymie had given her younger sister a note to give to their parents. She told Eva, “Albert will be picking me up on Friday and we’re going to get married.” Maymie was not old enough to marry without her parent’s consent, so she wrote her own permission.

Maymie in 1919

Albert and Maymie were married the following weekend. The couple was soon back in church to face the congregation, Maymie’s parents—and possibly her scorned ex-boyfriend—as husband and wife. Albert was twenty-five and Maymie seventeen.

The Writing Bug

Albert and Maymie lived in Douglas County for the next few years, during which time their first child, Joseph Ira (known as J. I., after both grandfathers),6 was born. In 1924 the young family moved to Long Lane in Dallas County, where Maymie taught in a nearby school and Albert worked as a salesman.

In 1926 the family of three moved to the small town of Buffalo, Dallas County. The town was deeply in debt. After the Civil War, Buffalo had taken on almost $250,000 in bond debt in hopes of luring a railroad that never came, and it struggled for decades under the weight of that debt.7 But even without a notable industry or railroad, there were enough seed mills, grocery and dry goods stores, stables, and blacksmiths to provide for the material needs of the surrounding farms. And there were also four churches to provide for the souls of the people.

The move to Buffalo may have been a concession to Maymie. She was outgoing, determined, and perhaps even more of an extrovert than Albert. One family member described her as “a shaker and a mover,” making quick impressions and becoming very popular.8 Given her family’s relatively affluent background, she was more likely at home in town than in the country. They moved into a house in town. It was modest in size but featured a large front porch. Their business, a dry goods store, and their new church were just a few blocks away from their front door.

But the Willards’ time in town was short-lived. In June of 1929 Albert traded the house in town for a farm a few miles south of Buffalo, near Red Top, on Greasy Creek. (It is not known why the creek was named Greasy, but many churches in the area, including First Baptist of Buffalo, used it for baptisms; so perhaps it was all the washed away sins that gave the creek its name.)

Why did Albert move? Maybe he had seen some of the warning signs of what would become the Great Depression. Perhaps he even foresaw the oncoming storm of financial problems and wanted to get some land where his family would have a dependable source of food. There were now four mouths to feed; a second child, daughter Fran, was one at the time of the move. While the details of what happened to the dry goods store are not fully known, Dallas speculated that because of the depression Albert and Maymie had allowed so many people to purchase items on credit that the business simply had more flowing out than in and became insolvent.9

While details of Maymie’s readjustment to farm life are not known, a poem she wrote for the local newspaper—The Buffalo Reflex—may provide insight. Maymie often submitted original poems, essays, and suggestions for write-ups concerning the accomplishments of her children, particularly those of her oldest son, J. I.

’Tis sad to be bit by the writing bug.

No work, no rest, no sleep.

No time to visit one’s neighbors;

There’s barely time to eat.

The work piles up around me so,

My furniture and floors are a sight!

I get my mop and dusting cloth

—Sit down and start to write.

The hubby comes in requiring lunch

To my shocking, remorseful surprise.

I honestly had no idea ’twas noon.

When I write—my, how time flies!

He calmly but firmly suggests

I allow him to start a fire with my trash

That he might prepare for himself and kids

A bit of toast and some hash.

Abashed and enraged, I plunged to work

And toiled till the sun had set.

The house became neat and tidy again

But hubby’s words, I couldn’t forget.

So, next morning ere the dew is all gone

I attack the yard so sadly in need.

I rake and hoe and gather cans,

Burn trash and cut the weeds.

Then thinking it scarcely time for lunch,

And truly in need of some rest,

I dare to sit and pen a few lines

‘Bout the beauty of the scenery, west.

For as I worked in the sweet scented open

With Springtime’s orchestra attune—

I found my resolve to quit writing was broken.

The bug sealed my doom.

So I sat searching for adjectives

To describe the trees, hills and sky,

And forgot my family’s existence

Till husband again stood nigh.

So the bug bites me day after day,

Making me want to write

A poem about the trees I see;

A story about the folk on my right.

Tho’ Spring is my favorite season

I’ll be somewhat relieved when it’s gone.

For when it departs it usually takes

My writing bug along.10

Albert may have anticipated the economic collapse of the country, but he had no way of foretelling the coming dust bowl and agricultural plagues. Tiring of farm life he ran for an elected county position. In 1934 he was elected county collector of revenue, and in the summer of 1935 he rented the farm and moved the family—Albert, Maymie, J. I., Fran, and the newest member, Duane—back to town.

Their rental house was small. Dallas later recalled the house to be modest—perhaps containing only two rooms. Whatever the case, it was in this tiny house that Dallas Albert Willard was born and lived the first eighteen months of his life.

After a year and a half back in Buffalo, in the spring of 1937, it was determined that the renter at the farm was not working out very well. The rent was not being paid—perhaps as a result of the unexpected cloud of grasshoppers. The Willard family, running low on options, packed up and moved back to the farm on Greasy Creek.

For Maymie it was an unhappy return to farm living, and there was growing tension in her relationship with Albert. They had frequent spats during this time. And it continued to be tough work farming the land. Later in life, Dallas remembered how rocky the land was on the farms in southern Missouri. “My land’s so poor, so hard and ‘yeller,’” Hank Williams sang in “Everything’s Okay.” Dallas recalled the next line: “You have to sit on a sack of fertilizer to raise an ‘umbreller.’”11

Albert had hoped to protect his family, but economic depression and natural disaster had overwhelmed them. And there was another storm coming: one that would prove far more damaging to the Willard family than any locust.

Dallas at age two

Keep Eternity Before the Eyes of the Children

In a touching photo of the Willard children taken during this time—most likely by Maymie—a sixteen-year-old J. I. wears overalls and holds his two-year-old brother, Dallas, in his lap. Nine-year-old Fran and six-year-old Duane are huddled together. They seem a happy, close family. Which makes what happened next all the more tragic.

Not long after the photograph was taken of the children, Maymie jumped from the hay wagon. The impact of her fall caused a hernia. She needed surgery, and that meant a trip to a larger town across the state line, into Kansas. There was a good hospital in Springfield, Missouri, about thirty miles away, but Albert had bought an insurance policy through the Susan B. Allen Hospital in Topeka, Kansas, 218 miles from their home. So that’s where he drove Maymie. Myrtle Pease Lindesmith, Maymie’s widowed mother, came to stay with the children while Albert took his wife on the grueling trip to Topeka, over dirt roads and two-lane blacktop.

It is no small wonder that Maymie arrived at the hospital with a developing fever. The surgery had to be put off for two weeks. While she was recovering from her fever, Albert made a brief trip back home to Greasy Creek to be with the children.

From her hospital bed, Maymie wrote poems to her children as a substitute for her loving presence. On February 2, 1938, J. I.’s seventeenth birthday, she wrote him “A Mother’s Wish for Her Son.”

Another milestone on life’s way

Is passing dear lad of mine

Another year with all its joys

and sorrows lie behind.

It seems but yesterday to me

since your sweet chubby hand

Was clasped in mine so strong and brown

That you might firmly stand.

May this new year that lies ahead

Be just the very year you need

With friends and joys and work to do

But always time for a golden deed.

And may the Father’s loving hand

Hold yours now brown and strong

And lead you in His infinite way

As thru this mile you tread along.

Maymie continued to get worse. Sensing what would be her fate, she penned a poem, “Somehow It’s Best,” on February 5, 1938. The words reveal a heavy heart searching for answers for what she sensed was about to happen.

I cannot see, why it must be

my health should fail me so

That at this time in my very prime

all toil I must forego.

But surely there’s a reason

why that I must lie and wait

And suffer pain and dire distress

and humbly pray for a kinder fate.

Perhaps I failed to appreciate good health

when it was mine,

And closed my eyes to others’ needs

when on beds of suffering they reclined.

How little did I appreciate

what home and loved ones meant

Until my Lord saw my great need

and to this hospital I was sent.

Maybe He saw my crying need

was patience for each day

To quietly wait His counsel wise

to lead me on the way.

Perchance He saw my need of love

implanted in my soul

To help poor fallen fellow-men

to grasp the Heavenly goal.

I may have on my strength relied

which caused my Lord to see

That through pain and helplessness

I might obtain humility.

Perhaps my faith in God and man

was faltering and weak

I know not why—but know

’tis best, to beg for mercy at His feet.

One day later, February 6, Maymie found the strength to write a poem for Fran, titled “Little Pal O’ Mine,” on her tenth birthday.

Maymie’s fever finally went down and Albert returned to Topeka for the surgery. On February 11, Albert was told that his wife was doing well and he should go get some sleep at a nearby motel. He had been there for only a short while when he was called at 11 p.m. and told to come back. He drove through a dense fog. It was about 1 a.m., two days before Valentine’s Day, when Maymie turned her head on the pillow and whispered, “Albert, keep eternity before the eyes of the children.” Those were her last words. She died on February 12, 1938.

Albert called Maymie’s mother. She gathered together J. I., Fran, Duane, and Dallas, and told them that their mother had died. J. I. jumped up and exclaimed, “Oh, no! I’ve not been living the way she thought I was.” He had written his mother a Valentine’s Day card and mailed it the day before she died. The hospital returned it to him, unopened.

The funeral director confirmed what the family had begun to fear. The surgeon had done a bad job. A different hospital, a different doctor, and most likely Maymie would still be alive.

Albert had lost his older sister and felt the pains of grief and confusion when he had been the same age as Dallas; so he must have had particular empathy for his youngest child.Certainly two-year-old Dallas didn’t understand what was happening. During the wake, while his mother’s body lay lifeless, he tried to climb into the casket to be with her.12

Becoming Dallas Willard

Dallas lost his mother before any permanent images of her could be painted across his young mind. He had only ephemeral impressions of a few places where she had been with him.

Very late in his life he still fondly remembered the curved benches in the church where she held him as a child. “The old curved seats of the First Baptist Church in Buffalo often reminded me of her,” he recalls. “I know she was there with me. And I can see a place called Bennett Springs, near the house where we lived when she went away. There is a pond nearby. I know she was there, gathering watercress. She had an angelic presence.”

Bennett Springs is a beautiful act of nature. Crystal clear spring water comes up from deep underground and fills a large basin the size of a small pond. The banks are lined with vegetation. A wide creek exits the spring-fed pond and travels south. Dallas’s precious memories of his mother drew his mind to this Eden-like location. During an interview, seventy-five years later, as he recounted these cherished images, a smile seemed to kiss his face.

Because Dallas could not recall the face of the love of his early life, it is moving that the greatest theme of his writing would become the reality of experiential friendship with an always-present and loving God. As we shall see, people Dallas loved as a child kept exiting his life. He became drawn to a good and loving God who lived in the heavens—the enveloping atmosphere of the here and now—who is always with his children and embraces them in love and never lets go.

Eternal living, he would later discover in the words of Jesus, means entering into a transforming friendship with the Trinity, a community of love that will never go away.

2

There Are No Unwanted Children

A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?”

Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart

On September 7, 1939, a report appeared in the Jefferson City, Missouri, Post-Tribune.

Mrs. Helen Elson, 36, a Dallas County farm woman, was acquitted last night of first degree murder charges in the killing July 27, of Henry Fair, 54. Mrs. Elson testified, Fair, knowing her husband was in Kansas City, came to her home and made proposals which shocked her. She said she fired in self-defense. The state charged Mrs. Elson killed the farmer at her home after a drinking party. Fair was shot three times with a revolver.

The event caused a scandal in the farming community known as Wood Hill and the shops and offices of the nearby town of Buffalo. The county reverberated for months with the gossip about Helen Elson, Henry Fair, and Myrtle Green Fair, the widow left behind on what was known at the time as the “Fair farm.” And it was not long before the “Fair farm” became known to Dallas Willard as his new home, and Myrtle Green as his new stepmom.

In his first book, In Search of Guidance, Dallas recounted the following episode:

A little child lost his mother to death. He could not be adequately consoled and continued to be troubled, especially at night. He would come into the room where the father was and ask to sleep with the father. This little child would never rest until he knew not only that he was with his father but that the father’s face was turned toward him. He would ask in the dark, “Father, is your face turned toward me now?” And when he was assured of this, he was at peace and was able to go to sleep.1

While it is now known that Dallas was not writing specifically about himself, the story may reveal a metaphor of his young life. “How lonely life is!” Willard continues.

Along with the pain of being left alone, he also was told that the mother he so deeply missed and could not visualize initially did not want a fourth child. In a moving talk he said,

So many of us were unwanted children by our parents. . . . My dear mother was grief-stricken because she was sick when she conceived me and she was chaffed in her spirit about it. And I never got to know her because she died when I was two. But my sister and others talk about how she would pray and ask forgiveness for not wanting me. And there’s a lot of rough stuff in life we have to get over. . . . [But] you are wanted. There are no unwanted children. There’s a place for every one of them in God’s economy.2

It fell to Dallas’s father to raise him. Dallas later described Albert as a “non-descript farmer, who later dabbled in local politics.” And he painfully recalls that following the death of his mother his father became a “crushed man, feeling somehow responsible for her death.”

Immediately after the funeral, Albert’s parents, Joe and Rhoda Willard, moved in to help care for the children. From this time period—the spring and summer of 1938—on the farm at Greasy Creek, Dallas remembers a white-rock rooster that was taller than him. “It scared me to death.” He remembers the little spring on the farm that still had wisps of his mother’s presence in the air and how enchanted he was with the creatures that lived in the water.

By the start of the next school year, fall 1938, the family decided that Dallas and his brother Duane would live with Albert’s brother Arthur and his wife, Bessie, in Dora, Missouri, about thirty miles away. In exchange, Arthur and Bessie’s two daughters, Wilma and Elsie, would move in with Albert, J. I., Fran, and Albert’s parents, Joseph and Rhoda. This decision was motivated by the hope that Aunt Bessie could replace some of the two little boys’ longing for a mother. The girls could also be friends with Fran.In a time when first cousins were almost as close as brothers and sisters, it was a logical decision, but it meant another move for the little boy.

In the late spring of 1939, the boys returned to Greasy Creek to live with Albert.

Dallas learned to swim later that year. “My oldest brother [J. I.] took me out in a snake-infested creek when I was four years old, on his shoulders. I loved my brother and trusted him—up to that moment. [But] he swam out from under me, and forthwith I swam immediately. And I’ve been swimming ever since.”3

It is unlikely that J. I.’s behavior was exactly as Dallas remembered. His loving older brother was probably no more than an arm’s reach away, and it is doubtful snakes were in view at that particular moment. But the fact that Dallas remembered this event so clearly and chose to describe it in just this way reveals something of the way he experienced it as a four-year-old. In this powerful image we see love and trust followed by sudden abandonment and fear, and then the joy of new learning and ability.

That summer Dallas said goodbye to J. I., who left to go to college in Colorado. Another person he loved deeply exited his world.

In the following spring, 1940, Albert found what he thought would be a permanent solution for the well-being of his children. But it turned out to be another seismic shift for Dallas.

I Didn’t Marry Those Kids; I Married You

How Albert got to know Myrtle Green, the widow of Henry Fair, is not known. Perhaps it was his job as revenue collector that connected them. Perhaps Albert’s compassionate heart was a ray of light in the midst of her dark and embarrassing nightmare. But eleven months after the violent death of her husband, Myrtle had accepted a marriage proposal from Albert. On June 22, 1940, she became the stepmother to his children. Before school started in the fall, Albert, Fran, Duane, and four-year-old Dallas packed up and left the farm on Greasy Creek, this time, never to return.

The newly melded family settled into what Dallas later called “Myrtle’s Farm”—a two-story house Myrtle had shared with Henry Fair on the small farm she brought into the marriage. The house was conveniently located, only a quarter-mile walk to the one-room school in Wood Hill. And the school was a stone’s throw east of the only other building in town, a general store that specialized in farm supplies, nonperishable grocery items, and glass jars of hard rock candy.

Reflecting back on the new location, Dallas said, “I remember . . . running through the corn naked. . . . And I have lots of memories of Myrtle. . . . She cooked and sewed. She was very productive and creative. She taught me, for example, when I took a bath how to wash the ring out of the tub.”

That’s an odd thing to remember: a stepmother whose productivity and creativity was expressed in cleaning up the tub.

Dallas started first grade that fall, a year early. He said, “I went to school before I turned five because I didn’t want to be away from them. My brothers and sister were my world, along with all the cousins, Elsie and Wilma and other young girls. Seeing them together and laughing and playing made me think, It’s a pretty good world.”

As he would later recall, “I look back [and] I think one of the greatest blessings humanly speaking at least in my life was the fact that I started school in a one-room school house with my older sister and brother in that same room. I never worried What’s going to happen if . . . Because I knew if [anything bad happened] my sister Mary Francis was a few seats back of me and my brother Duane was over in the row just over there. I never had [to worry].”4

A classmate of Dallas’s, Patsy Ethridge Condren, remembers him, Fran, and Duane. She was three years older than Dallas, but shared the same one-room school building that hosted about twenty students in first through eighth grade—no small feat for a building only 15' by 20' at best.

Condren recalls, “He was pretty quiet, but as smart as he could be,” and that he wore overalls like most of the other boys. His sister Fran sat behind him, and when he needed to go to the bathroom, he would whisper to her and she would tell the teacher.

“Fran,” Dallas said, “taught me how to spell my first word. She said to me,” he recalled, with a glimmer in his eye, “‘Say it in your mind several times,’ and I realized after a while that I could spell C-A-T.”

It was the start of a lifelong love of learning. “I learned to love words. It was almost magical. I remember having appreciation for my first grade teacher. That first year, I discovered you could learn things and that had been a great mystery. The discovery of learning was really huge. It opened up everything. It said there are all these things and places you don’t know, but you can go into them in your mind.”5 A philosopher might say that even in the first grade Dallas was a budding phenomenologist.

Dallas’s classmate also recalls that Albert Willard was very involved with his children, often dropping them off or picking them up. “And he was always nicely dressed,” Condren recalls. “It was obvious he did not work on a farm or at the local saw mill like most of the other fathers.”

But meanwhile, at home, the story took a dark turn.

Though Albert hoped she would be his children’s substitute mother, Myrtle, sadly, was not able to fulfill such an assignment. A close family relative observed, “Dallas in particular drove her crazy. She thought he was too noisy. He was the first to go.” One by one Myrtle managed to get rid of all the children, exiling them from their only remaining parent.

“Albert had married Myrtle so that she would help take care of his children, but over the next few years she would run them all off,” noted a surviving family member. “She didn’t like kids and she got around it by saying she was sick all the time. And she destroyed a lot of stuff that was Dallas’s mom’s—the poems we found over the years were published in the paper—that is the only reason we have them. A neighbor saw her burning a bunch of things that had belonged to Maymie. She got it out of Fran’s room and burned her mother’s possessions.”

You Just Wiped the Tears Away and Ate

A surviving family member believes that “Dallas’s older brother J. I. chose to move to Rover after returning from college because he refused to live under the same roof with Myrtle.” By the summer of 1941, with much of the world at war, J. I. Willard was making plans to settle more permanently into the farming community of Rover, Missouri. This dot on a map was approximately 140 miles to the southeast of Wood Hill. Albert owned some land there next to his parents, Joe and Rhoda Willard. J. I. had spent the year becoming reacquainted with farm life. And he had also found a wife. On June 10, he married Bertha VonAllmen. It would be the best thing that ever happened for him and would prove to be one of the best things for Dallas Willard as well.

With his oldest son married and living near his parents, Albert saw a way out of the tensions at home. He took the five-year-old Dallas away to live with J. I. and Bertha. Many years later Albert said that it was the hardest thing he ever had to do.

Bertha at age eighteen

We can only imagine what a five-year-old child thought and felt about this new arrangement. Did he feel abandoned by his father, lost and alone in the world? Did he wonder if it was his fault, that he had done something wrong? Or did he think this is simply the kind of shuffling around that happens in extended families? The questions remain. We do know that as an adult Dallas spoke warmly about his father. But how, as a five-year-old child, did he think or feel or respond to this separation from his father? We simply do not know.

Bertha and J. I. had only been married a few weeks when Dallas came to live with them. Bertha, only eighteen, would later say, “I was so young that Dallas and I had to raise each other.” But she readily took him into her heart. Over time she also began to look out for Fran and Duane as well. For the rest of their lives, whenever the Willard children would speak of going “home,” the reference was to J. I. and Bertha’s house.

That fall Dallas began the second grade at Bales Elementary, the same one-room school his father had attended as a boy. He would join a group of children from the neighborhood, carrying a tin pail that held his lunch, for the two-mile walk—often in the harsh weather of the Missouri Ozarks.

Dallas recalls lunchtime at Bales Elementary: “I’ve gone to schools where people brought their lunch. And I can remember quite well the poorest kids were always the ones who would slip off in the corner and eat because they were ashamed to show what was in their lunch bucket. Sometimes it was a biscuit dipped in bacon grease. They didn’t want others to know how ­poverty-stricken they were.”6

Not that Dallas had a luxurious life. Becky Willard Heatley, Dallas’s daughter, remembers a fact from her dad’s childhood: “Onion sandwiches were sometimes all they had in the house for lunch. They would cut a big slice of onion and put it between two slices of bread with mayonnaise. I asked if that made their eyes water. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘But we just wiped the tears away and took another bite.’”

Dallas’s paternal grandparents, Joe and Rhoda, lived on a nearby farm. While he was primarily living with J. I. and Bertha, for the next two years, Dallas was in and out of both houses, and all over the rolling, rocky plains of those two family farms. They featured modest gardens, pens full of pigs, and small numbers of cows, sheep, mules, and horses. “We used old cars for chicken coops,” Dallas recalls.7

As the latter image suggests, this was not life on a country estate. Scarcity was part of his rural reality in the years following the Great Depression. In his own words: “I was raised in real poverty. We didn’t know we were poor because everyone was. You know those postcards you get down in the Ozarks where you see the chickens roosting on the bedstead and the dogs sleeping under the porch and that sort of thing. Well, you know that’s pretty poor.”8

For the rest of his life, Dallas was able to identify with the poor while avoiding any spiritual glorification of that condition—he knew firsthand that being poor limited idolization of money only as a straight-jacket limited movement.9 Being poor made an indelible impression on Dallas. Frugality, one of the disciplines of abstinence he taught, came easily. He would live in houses, buy furniture, cars, clothes, and eat at restaurants that seemed at times oddly inconsistent with his later status and position in life.10

That Little Mind Was Constantly Thinking

One year after Dallas came to live with J. I. and Bertha, Bertha became pregnant with their first child, Joyce. After learning that a new baby was on the way, Dallas said to Bertha, “You won’t want me after your baby comes.”

Bertha held back her tears. She sat down on the sofa with Dallas and gently assured him that she and J. I. loved him and would always want him. She remembered that her mother, Nora, a very godly woman, told her right after they took Dallas, “You be sure to be good to that little boy because he has lost his mother.”

“I always tried to do that,” Bertha said. “Most every night I would lay down on his bed and read to him. And I was a kid, too, so it was easy to spend a lot of time talking to him and playing with him.”

She recalls one time when she was feeling under the weather and lying on the sofa. Dallas came into the room and sat down facing her. With his cheeks resting in his palms and a scowl on his face he said, “Do you know what makes me mad?”

“What, dear?”

“When the one who is supposed to be doing the cooking gets sick!”

Bertha chuckled, got up, and started cooking.

But even as a boy, the philosopher in young Dallas was present. Bertha said, “He was always, always asking why, and every answer brought another why or what if. That little mind was constantly thinking.”

But home was not the only place Dallas feared being left out, unwanted. A few times he related a memory from his early school days. “On the old schoolyard,” Dallas said, becoming a little emotional as the talked,

there used to be a time when during recess or lunch, the teacher went out with all the children, and they said, “Now we’re going to play softball, so we have to choose up sides.” . . . You know, the rule was everybody played. No one was left out. And some of us were not such good players. Perhaps we were still so young that our legs were not very long and we couldn’t run very fast. But everybody had to be chosen.

Normally they’d start with some big strong girl or boy who could do almost anything and then they would choose their side. When they got down to the end, there was some one left over, some little kid, someone too awkward, the teacher would say, “Now who’s going to take this one?”

And finally one of them would say, “Well, all right, you can play backup to Joe out in the outfield.” So you’d wind up sometimes with five or six people out in the outfield. Everyone played. You see that’s the way we possess the kingdom of God. We’re choosing up sides, and Jesus chose me and you.11

Having started school a year early and still in second or third grade here, Dallas was likely picked last in this human pecking order. “Blessed are those picked last in softball,” he would later teach.

Back to Where You Are Not Wanted

In January 1944, those three years of stability, soul healing, and shenanigans came to an end—well, at least the stability. With World War II heating to a boiling point in Europe and Japan, J. I. was drafted into the army. Dallas had to go back to live with Albert and Myrtle, who by this time had moved away from the farm and were living in Buffalo. During the middle of his fifth grade year Dallas was again separated from his siblings. But he was reunited with the curved pews of First Baptist Church on which his mother, Maymie, had held him as a baby.

Dallas was not happy about going back to live with the woman who had sent him away. Perhaps she was not happy to have him back. “Eager to escape the house, it was during these years, Dallas and his playmates indulged in stealing hubcaps and shooting out streetlights with an air rifle, occasionally popping a stray cat.”12