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David Worley as Husband and Father
Melinda Worley
My family and I would like to thank Tom Olbricht, Stan Reid, and the other friends and colleagues who have written in this book; it will be a treasure to our family. David, however, would not have agreed to this book since it is about him, his commitments, and his way of life; he would not have enjoyed the attention on himself. I believe, though, that he would have appreciated the opportunity readers of this book might have to see the grace of God at work in one personās life and to praise the name of our Father above for it.
Iāve been asked to tell something of the man David Worley as I have known him for fifty-two of his sixty-seven years. He would have wanted me to say that what follows here is not what David accomplished but what God, by his grace, accomplished through David.
In that regard, I hope you will see here the beginnings of a life of faith, amidst false steps and imperfections. I believe I can look back at Davidās life and see how God prepared him, nurtured him, and equipped him to take advantage of the opportunities he was to be given to participate in the coming of the Kingdom. Indeed, I believe I could see some of it happening as it was lived.
As I tell this story, I will include some statements from family members and friends that help to illustrate Davidās character. I will focus on aspects that seem to have had the greatest impact on the people around him.
If I were to write a lionized version of Davidās life, he would have rolled his eyes at me and moved on to something else he found more interesting. So, I will say on his behalf that he was not perfect. For one thing, his communication style was based on the assumption that less is more, as anyone who has received one of his terse emails will testify. He often recited his grandmotherās old adage from his childhood, āIf you donāt have anything important to say, then say nothing.ā Those of us who lived and worked with him would have preferred sheād kept that little gem of wisdom to herself.
David had strong, well-conceived convictions about most things he thought to be important and could articulate these convictions with enormous skill, particularly in written form and classroom lecture. In our family when our girls were young, these convictions largely went unchallenged. As the girls grew up, married, and had families of their own, they and their husbands each had to balance their own perspectives with Davidās, tempered by their love and respect for him. It was not easy to do with a father who is beloved, articulate, and has such a commanding presence, but each managed it successfully in his or her own way.
Also, David was fearless. When he began traveling to Russia in 1990, in that era of bread lines and unrest among her people, I was terrified. He called me from the hinterlands of one of Russiaās eleven time zones; the phone connection was often very poor and characterized by odd clicking noises that, in my imagination, sounded surely like KGB wire taps, gathering information for his arrest and imprisonment in Siberia. But he couldnāt understand that kind of fear. Our middle daughter, Christiana Peterson, remembers that her dad sometimes made light of such fears.
Not only was I unnerved by Davidās travels to a place I once regarded as dangerous, I also worried about Davidās frequent absences and how that would affect our daughters and their relationship with him, and frankly I was mad at him about it for the first few years of his travels. After all, every parenting seminar I attended or book I read emphasized how important a daily relationship is between a father and his daughter. And I think each of our three girls struggled in her own way with this. But this brings me to another aspect of Davidās character. He almost never did anything, including parenting, the way other people thought it should be done. And, by Godās grace, his unorthodox choices could sometimes be redemptive. Christiana wrote the following about traveling in this supposedly dangerous place with David and her older sister, Heatherly. Being in St. Petersburg and meeting the people her dad left home to see helped to shape her view of the world and the relationships people have with each other.
Though I had reservations at first about Davidās absences in faraway places, his sharing these experiences on occasion with his family and bringing people from those places into our home gave us all opportunity to see the world in exceptional ways. Davidās approach to life was unique, and his careful and creative use of words was no exception. He believed that words shaped character and clarified thinking. Christiana writes that her fatherās approach to words was life changing for her.
In Christ Twenty-Four Hours a Day
I met David Worley on his first day of high school choir at Eastern Hills High School in Fort Worth, Texas. It was our junior year, 1965. He was fifteen. We did not begin dating until the end of that year, but I remember vividly on the day I met him that he wore a plaid button-down shirt, a dark cardigan, and khaki-colored corduroy jeans that were a trifle too short. He had dark curly hair, beautiful green eyes, and tan skin. He was quiet in a crowd and smart, but had a ready laugh. I especially remember his low, resonant radio voice that I would later come to understand he had inherited from his father.
Davidās father had died unexpectedly a year earlier. That loss and the McKay melancholy inherited from his motherās side of the family would help to form his character, and give him both direction and challenges as he matured.
His family had assumed he would go to Texas Tech University as both his parents had. Then, they assumed, he would earn a degree in business and join his mother, Iva Lea, overseeing their radio stations in Austin, Lubbock, and Lovington, New Mexico. But David, newly baptized, was beginning to take a new direction. He often said in those high school years, āI just want to know what Godās will is.ā He carried his black Bible with him when we went to church, and I could tell by looking at it and hearing him speak about what he read that he was reading it often. So, as a freshman at Abilene Christian College in 1967, he took one business course but began his work toward a BA in biblical Greek. He labored to understand what Scripture in its original language really said and what it meant in his life. We...