Cold in Alaska
- Updated Jun 29, 2008
I began this way:
"The year was 1943 and the whole world was at war. A young man from Mississippi who was studying to be a doctor was sent by the Army to the frozen tundra of northern Alaska, to a little town called Nome, not far from the Bering Strait. It was bitterly cold when the young man arrived there, and I don’t think he ever really got used to it. Eventually he met a beautiful Army nurse from Iowa. It was so cold in Alaska that people found many ways to keep warm. And so that young man and that young woman found each other. I know they never forgot how cold it was because later they talked to their sons about it"
"After the war, they married and eventually moved to Memphis, Tennessee. Later they moved to a small town in northwest Alabama where they raised their four sons. I was the second of the four boys—Andy, Ray, Alan and Ronnie. Because Dad was Baptist and Mom was Catholic, they never really settled on a church home, but they both made sure that their four boys were in church every Sunday. I have some old pictures of the Pritchard boys on Easter Sunday, dressed in suits and ties, lined up by age and height, ready to go to church."
I have written the rest of my testimony in a sermon called Has God Lost the Battle? Scroll down to the section titled “Raised in the Church."
I must have mentioned it being cold in Alaska several times (I do remember Mom and Dad talking about that) because when Ian Leitch gave the message following my testimony, he worked the phrase “it’s cold in Alaska” into his sermon four or five times, each time drawing a chuckle from the crowd.
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