I was flinging gravel everywhere as I busted down the side road around the construction zone. I had one thought in mind, “I had to get home so I could meet up with my friends for whatever we were going to do that night.” As I reached the straight section of the road there was an old farm truck moving at a snails pace in front of me. I parked my car on their bumper until they got the picture. They pulled over and let me around. I put the pedal down and a couple of hundred yards later missed the 90 degree right and went straight into the driveway across the curve.
As I backed out and let my heart calm the farm truck rolled up behind me and waited for me to get back on my way. I missed the right on Sunday night and on Wednesday the man with white hair stepped up beside me. “Nick, one of the older couples from the church said you were driving a little fast Sunday night and missed the curve. Slow down in the future.” That’s all he said, and that’s all he needed to say. I always wondered why he didn’t say more, he knew that in most things I hung on his every word.
A few years later I went go cart racing and the man with white hair, started giving me pointers on how to hit faster lap times. I reflect back now and understand why he said so little about my speed… He liked to go fast himself. He spent a lifetime building and driving, fast cars. He also spent a lifetime learning how to stay under control.
Like most things in life we don’t understand what their impact is until they are gone. The relationship that ended, but it turns out for the best… The book that changed the way we think, but we haven’t looked at since school… The man with white hair was one of those for me. He meant a lot to me, but I didn’t understand how much until he was gone. My heart hurt more than I expected. I knew I would shed tears, but I didn’t know that I would weep. I expected sadness, but not the depth of my heartache.
The man with white hair, was Ronnie. He had done it all. He built cars from scratch, fabricating the body and various parts he needed in his garage shop. As a young man he was sign-maker to pay the bills. He ran a body shop so he had something to do when there weren’t signs to be made. Moving on the ground wasn’t enough so he started designing, building, flying, crashing, and occasionally landing his own ultra-light aircraft. Why only build things that move? So he built houses as well. With the exception of houses on the coast I had never seen a dwelling built up on pylons until he built a cabin at our denominational camp grounds that way.
Most important to Ronnie, he built relationships with people. He believed in people. Ronnie may have never met you, but, I assure you the man with white hair believed in you. He knew every person had potential.
Ronnie showed up in my life when I was only 15 years old. He was the man with white hair that started attending the church in which I grew up. Until the heart attack, that ultimately defeated his physical body, if you had asked me who would leave this realm first Ronnie or me, I would have said me. As far as I was concerned he was an immortal. From the day I met him to the day I visited him in the hospital he looked the same. Milk white hair crowning his round head that was lit by one of the kindest smiles the world has known. I was sure he was a modern Melchizedek, “Without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, like the Son of God he remains a priest forever (Hebrews 7:3 NIV).” I knew he had family and he had come from someplace, but he couldn’t have an end? He was too strong, too lively to ever die.
It may have been that sense that the man with white hair was everlasting that made his death difficult for me, but I don’t think it was. It was more of what he taught me and the investment that he made in me and knowing that this investor was now gone.
With everything else Ronnie did, he was also a pastor. In all the things that he did, his truest heart was his pastors heart. He was a pastor that believed in young people and believed in us as co-laborers. I was driving home, too fast, on gravel road because I had been ministering at a church where Ronnie was, and he had asked me to come down and speak to the youth of the church. The first Sunday morning sermon I ever preached was at a small country church where Ronnie was filling in. He was hosting a revival and I was one of the “evangelist” for the series. I was sixteen and terrible, but it didn’t matter to the man with white hair, because I loved Jesus and that is all I had to do.
It wasn’t just me either… Our youth group had a praise band and a few of us that were toying with going into ministry. Ronnie had us in Baptist Churches on Sunday mornings, special services at an Assembly of God church, anywhere he could get a foot in the door he brought a couple of us or the whole crew.
A couple of us did end up in ministry and our first ministry lessons came from Ronnie. He demonstrated what it was to build relationships and how to love people well. He showed us what it was to care for people. They were lessons that still lead me today.
When I got the phone call that Ronnie wasn’t doing well and I needed to go see him I was off with 30 teenagers on a trip. Three days after saying Goodbye to my old friend I was in a van driving across the country with a group of young men, half of which didn’t know Jesus. It was maybe the greatest way to memorialize the man with white hair, because the Kingdom was always the priority. Denomination and dogma were nothing, Kingdom mattered. People knowing Jesus mattered.
The man with white hair, Ronnie, meant the world to me. He believed in me, he believed in you, and most of all he believed in Jesus. I guess he will live on for a while more because he was the first to teach me how to build the Kingdom.
Ronnie S. McLain
May 27, 1943 – June 14, 2019