05 The First Year in Kentucky

Chapter 5 THE FIRST YEAR IN KENTUCKY The well diggings business of W. A. Anderson & Son was carried on while John was in college by a man from Pennsylvania who was engaged to run the machine. The actual management of the business was done by John Anderson through correspondence with this man from Wake Forest. The man had to be "jacked up" every now and then as he did not feel his responsibility as keenly as he might have done. Contracts had to be straightened out and collections made. Many a day John’s typewriter clicked as he cared for these affairs. This work was done in addition to the activities cataloged in the last chapter. The summer after graduating from Wake Forest with a B. S. degree John spent in Georgia again, drilling wells. A medical education is expensive and money had to be secured to further prosecute those studies. Writing to a college mate about the middle of the summer, he says: This has been a busy summer with me and I have had very little time to myself. I had a good time yesterday in this little place by myself and with Him. It was the best Sunday I have spent in some time. What have you been doing for yourself? What have you been doing for others? Did you know that there were only two fellows at the summer conference from Wake Forest? I am sorry that it was this way. You have decided to go back to Wake Forest next fall, have you not? Well, you all must do things there in a spiritual way. I have often thought of what you all will do next year and have built air castles for you. Do not let them fail, but build to them. I would be glad to hear from you as to your plans and what you have done. My work this summer has not been what I would like it to have been as I have been occupied more with material than with spiritual matters. But I have made a number of talks and led Sunday School classes. I have not fully decided where I will go next year as I want to get to a place where the spiritual atmosphere is as good as it can be in a medical school — even at that it will be low.

"What have you been doing for others?" is his question to his friend. It was always on his heart. The thought of a poem that he enclosed in one of his letters from Georgia, he came as near embodying in his life as any man that many of us have ever known.

"Lord, help me to live from day to day In such a self-forgetful way That even when I kneel to pray. My prayer shall be for — Others.

Help me in all the work I do To ever be sincere and true. And know that all I’d do for you, Must needs be done for — Others.

Let ’self be crucified and slain, And buried deep; and all in vain May efforts be to rise again.

Unless to live for — Others. And when my work on earth is done, And my new work in Heaven’s begun, May I forget the crown I’ve won, While thinking still of — Others.

Others, Lord, yes, others;

Let this my motto be:

Help me to live for others. That I may live like Thee." For the reasons mentioned above, John decided before the summer was over to go to the University of Louisville for his last two years of medicine, as it would be possible to have association with the students of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where several of his friends were studying. For a time, when he first came to Louisville, he lived in the Seminary dormitory, a procedure quite out of the ordinary for a medical student. He attended the chapel services and special lectures as often as possible, though he did not have much time with a schedule that kept him at the Medical School from 8 A. M. to 6 P. M. every day, with an hour off for lunch and Saturday afternoon free.

It was not long before he was doing those kindly services for men in the Seminary which were typical of his life everywhere; waiting on table to substitute for one who was absent, nursing students who were ill, setting a shoulder dislocated in the gymnasium, and so on. One of his friends was taken sick with a bad case of tonsillitis and he came over from the medical school between classes — it was four or five blocks away — to give him medicine and nourishment. He once told one of the Seminary men that he had counted his steps from the Medical School to the Seminary so that he would know the shortest route to come when he wanted to save seconds. He wrote in a letter:

One night I was called three times and one time I had to go to a drug store four blocks away at 3 A. M. for some medicine. There is nothing like getting used to being awakened any time in the night. This service was all, of course, gratuitous, and this was only his third year in medicine. His letters home at this time are full of advice for sick friends and neighbors in Woodruff. He was interested in all his home community ills. On Sunday afternoons John went with two or three of the Seminary students for a twenty-minute street car ride and a two-mile walk from the end of the car line, to teach in a Sunday School which was held in a public school house in a religiously neglected community. Most of the attendants were young people and only a few of them were Christians. They had a missionary rally in the spring of that year with one hundred and one present and a collection for missions of $5275.

John Anderson could not be satisfied to nourish himself on the spiritual food the Seminary provided and disregard the needs of the Medical School he was attending. The moral conditions there distressed his soul. There was no religious organization in the school and beyond the seven or eight men who attended a Bible class in the city Y. M. C. A. there were none who seemed concerned about Christian living. There was drinking and gambling and immorality unabashed. The year before, the State Student Secretary had conferred with the most interested students about the organization of a Student Y. M. C. A. but they had declared it to be impossible. One would hardly call it a promising situation. But John was "just fool enough to think that he could do the impossible," and he did it. He began by finding out the few men who attended church services, cultivating them, talking to them about their obligation to do something to better the moral tone of the school, drawing them together into an inner circle, that they might stand by him in the attempted transformation. It was not until May that he had worked up enough interest to feel justified in calling a meeting for the organization of the Association. It was organized with twenty-seven members and the number had doubled in two weeks. They were strong enough by the end of the session to send five delegates to the Student Christian Conference at Blue Ridge, North Carolina. Before the organization meeting, however, some religious meetings had been held in the school. A letter dated March 22, 1913, reads: The first meeting of any religious nature for a number of years was held at the Medical School after the seven to eight class on Wednesday night. We did not do much advertising, but gave much time to prayer and personal work and instead of twenty or thirty being there as we expected, we had sixty odd. These fellows gave attention to the speaker better than they have to any surgeon or" practitioner that we have had this year. I believe that God will use some of us to bring about a change in that place. We have before us some plans and are also doing some definite praying. Mark 11:32 — Jesus said: "Have faith in God," and it does seem that we should have faith when He has done so much for us and we have been able to see what He has done for so many people. In this same letter he copies from his note book some sentences that he had put down while attending the Kentucky State Y. M. C. A. training conference at Lexington.

_Are our lives surrounded by so many things that we cannot see God?

_Every Christian student should set standards, set an example of practical faith, set his college atmosphere right, set great ideals for life service.

_To conquer the world for Christ, we must first conquer self.

_Inactive lives are like a pool with no outlet which becomes stagnant.

_Pray without ceasing.

_Two necessities for the successful missionary. (Why not any Christian?— John adds.) Simple Obedience and Faithful Tenacity. An associate of those days has written of him:

John was not unusual as a personal worker in winning definite decisions, but he was constantly seeking contacts with men who were morally weak, and his life with his radiantly clean mind and unselfish spirit exercised a profound influence. During the time that I knew him I never heard him utter a word that would indicate the harboring of any unclean thing in his mind. He gave me the impression of being transparently pure. His face was as open and frank as a child’s and there was a kind of radiance in his smile that was a revelation of the Christ spirit within. I have seen him often when it could be truly said — "His face shone."

There was a single Chinese student in the Medical School. He was a retiring kind of a chap and for the most part was ignored by his fellow students. Thousands of miles away from his ancestral home, no one knew how lonely he was, for a true Chinese never lets his feelings be known. He seemed to have plenty of money, but he was without friends. Should a man who was proposing to be a missionary in China neglect an opportunity to serve a Chinese who was at his door?

Early in the year John wrote:

We have a Chinese here in the Sophomore Class who is an extra smart fellow. He is not a Christian, but we are trying to bring him across. He is a nobleman’s son and it will mean much to his people for him to go back as a Christian. He has only been in this country a little over two years. He has no Christian home to be in and has to live in a boarding house. At the Medical School the atmosphere is not what it should be anyway. He knows some of the missionaries in China. If I could win him to Christ, he would be worth two or more of my lives in Christianizing China.

John simply set himself to be a friend to this young Chinese, whose name was Kuei Chow. He invited him to dinner, visited him in his room, took him out to lectures and to church and Sunday School. Chow, though nominally a Confucianist, was practically without religion of any kind when John began associating with him. But he could not resist the genial warmth of the friendship which was offered to him. John had him out to his country Sunday School to give a talk on China. In the course of that talk Chow said:

*’I am not a Christian, but I believe that Christianity is the true religion, and I want to know more about it."

John used to get his Seminary friends together, going from room to room, to pray for Chow’s conversion.

If Kuei Chow could be persuaded to go to Blue Ridge, North Carolina, and have touch with the fine type of Christian living found there, and be thrown with several hundred aggressive Christian students in Bible study and recreation for the ten days of the Student Y. M. C. A. conference, surely he would give his heart to Christ. So thought John and so he planned. Before the year was up he had Chow’s promise to attend, and in order to make sure that he would not change his mind between the close of school and the time of the conference, he invited him to go home with him to South Carolina for a two weeks’ visit. There Chow had the new experience of being in a true Christian home. John and Chow talked often of the meaning of the Christian life, but there was no attempt to force any decision. Then together they went up into the mountains for the student conference. John saw to it that Chow was enrolled in a class in Christian fundamentals. But in the midst of the week Chow said that he had to leave for New York to meet some Chinese friends with whom he had an engagement. John felt that it would be fatal to all that he had planned if Chow were not to stay through the whole time. He brought him to one of the Student Secretaries and together they talked it over. Chow finally agreed to send a telegram canceling the engagement, and two days later this young Chinese student voluntarily came to John to declare his purpose to become a Christian and ask to be baptized.

Kuei Chow wanted to confess Christ then and there before the conference and so it was arranged to hold the baptismal service late Saturday afternoon. There was no baptistery, but John put on some old clothes and secured a wheelbarrow and with two or three others worked several hours that afternoon damming up the stream which runs by R. E. Lee Hall. It was one of the happiest services he ever rendered and he wrought with a heart on fire. What an impressive scene that baptism was! In the cool of the afternoon the crowd gathered on the slopes about the pool. Dr. A. T. Robertson, the great Greek scholar, read the Scripture. Mr. W. B. Pettus of China asked the candidate in Chinese whether he would hold true to his confession if on returning to China he were to be subjected to persecution. And Dr. E. M. Poteat, then President of Furman University, led Kuei Chow into the pool to bury him solemnly in the watery grave from whence he rose dedicated to the new life in Christ. On the train going down from that conference, John Anderson turned to a friend and said:

I went to that conference with a three-fold purpose: to see Kuei Chow become a Christian; to get a delegation from the Medical School there and get them lined up with plans for the next year; and to gain power and inspiration for my own life and tasks. All three things have been accomplished.

Turn back a few years in this story and Kuei Chow, a grandson of one of the great Viceroys of the Chinese Empire, is a boy in China. His family is one of the wealthiest in the city of Yang Chow. The doctors in the mission hospital have served them in times of sickness and are on very friendly terms with them, though no one in the family is interested in the Christian religion. Kuei Chow conceives the idea of going to America to study medicine, perhaps because of what he has seen those Christian physicians do. When finally he sails for the West, the prayers of Dr. R. V. Taylor go with him, asking the Father God to bring him into such relationships in that new atmosphere in America as will help him to understand the meaning of the Gospel and bring him into discipleship to Christ. In the providence of God, unknown to Dr. Taylor, Kuei Chow and John Anderson came to the same medical school and John Anderson, the friend of Dr. Taylor and later his associate, was the answer to his prayers for this Chinese boy. The year after John Anderson graduated at Louisville, Dr. R. V. Taylor’s older brother, traveling while on furlough for the Student Volunteer Movement, visited the University of Louisville and saw Kuei Chow. He asked him why he had become a Christian. Chow’s reply was:

"I saw that it worked in the life of John Anderson."