Faith Story - Tex Evans

Tex Evans was a wonderful story teller. He said that when he was a young preacher he had an opportunity to visit the mission field in India. He preached in one of the mission churches for a week. He was the guest with one the Indian families. Like most of the members of the church they were poor. Surviving was a full time job. There were several children in the family. He had a great time, getting to know them. One of them was a young teenage daughter, who was eager for him to tell Bible stories and stories about farming in America.

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One of the stories he told was about how his mother put her family in the chicken business. His mother cooked on a kichen wood stove. Above the stove was an enclosed place, called a warmer. The warmer had several purposes. After you cooked the meal, you could put some of the food in the warmer so that it would be ready when a member of the family came home after everyone else had already finished supper. One of her favorite ways of using the warmer was to put in an old cigar box a few chicken eggs. The heat from the stove kept the eggs just warm even to make them hatch. When the baby chicks starting hatching, there would be a new one or two every day until about a dozen hatched. As they hatched she would take them out of the box and place them in a larger box with chicken feed and water. When they got big enough she would put them out with the rest of the grown chicken in their chicken house. Soon they would be laying eggs too.

When the week was over and it was time to move on, Tex Evans took from his pocket a silver half dollar. He handed it to the young girl and said, "I want you to go to the store and buy a dozen eggs. Then come back and put them in a small box over your mother's stove. Do what my mother used to do after they hatch. This half dollar can turn into many dollars if you will follow my mother's example.

Tex shared with us at Trinity Church what he found when he visited the same community in India again, twenty years later. The young girl now was a grown woman with a family of her own. She no longer lived in poverty. She was the owner of a chicken processing plant. By faith, she had learned the lesson of Jesus' story of the mustard seed (Matthew 17:20). Not only was her family prosperious, but so was her church and her community. Her favorite charitable service was to share Jesus' stories with children and to give away silver half dollars.