Many if not most of the readers of this paper knew Brother Winford Lee, who labored so long among us. When I learned of his passing on the morning of Sunday, March 4th, I thought it fitting that he died on the Lord’s Day. I was struck by the coincidence that Alexander Campbell also died on March 4th (in 1866), also a Sunday.

There will be coverage of Winford’s life and death elsewhere in this issue. We could transcribe whole books of his aphorisms with no repetition. Here are a few things he said to us over the years. His words still instruct, motivate, and inspire us, as they did during his life. He, being dead, yet speaketh:

“Nothing is harder on your laurels than resting on them.”

“A man hasn’t lived until he’s been a blessing to somebody.”

“God does not expect us to do extraordinary things.
He expects us to do ordinary things in an extraordinary way.”

“Every one of us needs a pep talk every once in a while.”

“If you try your best and fail, biblically speaking you really don’t fail.”

“More people leave the Lord from lack of conviction than from lack of knowledge.”

“No problem is ever solved by leaving truth.”

“If every person ever baptized into Jesus Christ had remained faithful, how strong would we be?”

“By the time people show external symptoms of backsliding, they’re 75% gone….
Encourage them before you really realize that they need encouragement. Everybody needs it.”

“Encouragers may be our greatest need. What congregations need is more Barnabases
(or Barnabi, I’m not sure how to pluralize him).”

“The record says Barnabas ‘was a good man’. You know why that sounds sort of flat to us? It’s because we do not know the definition of the word ‘good’ in God’s sight. Today we use it real loosely. If a person can stay out of jail he’s a pretty good fellow. But that’s not good in God’s sight.”

“I think every person in every congregation ought to resolve within himself:
‘I’m never going to cause this congregation a problem, and I’m never going to cause the elders to have to work overtime on my behalf.”

“When you look around you can become weary.
Instead of looking around, let’s look up.”

“It’s not as important to understand the second coming of Christ as the first coming of Christ.”

“Pride not only leads you in the wrong way,
it keeps you from correcting it.”

“Now I want to take you to an easy passage in the book of Revelation.
When that got past my front teeth it sounded strange. But there are some easy passages in the book of Revelation.
Let’s not miss them in favor of the hard ones.”

“There’s nothing so good as letting the Bible explain itself.
That’s the most accurate thing in the world.”

“Truth doesn’t change.”

“Eugene Cernan is the last astronaut to have been on the moon. It was just amazing to meet a fellow like that….
He put on a tie the same as I did. His knot wasn’t quite as good as mine…
He said you just can’t deny there’s a Creator.”

“I can remember going to Bible readings, and I tell you, you worked.
There wasn’t any play. I can remember several of them.”

“I remember when I tried to make my first speech….This was on a Friday night after the classes for the week had closed. We went six weeks….I was just a very immature, green boy from the farm….All we had to do was read a certain portion of a chapter that we were assigned, and just get up and tell about it….I was assigned the Tower of Babel…they say that word means confusion. Well, I was the epitome of that word that night….I got up in front of that group of people that night, and I lasted just exactly one minute. I was supposed to be there five. And I had a total blackout. I took my seat and I was dripping with sweat.”

“I may not be an emotional person exteriorly,
but I think I am on the inside."

“…we studied the book of Genesis…then the test came. I tell you, I crammed for that test. I was just determined I was going to make the grade…. If the class was on a streetcar going to some destination, we’d banter around and everybody was digging for a question trying to stump somebody else. Well, the test day came. We were given twenty questions. I was exuberant. I was confident. I thought I had it….About the twelfth or thirteenth question I hit one that looked a little strange. I jumped over it and went on with the rest. I think I had nineteen questions done probably in fifteen minutes. And then, it sunk in. I tried every way in the world to surface that answer….Do you ever try to dig into your subconscious? I even was probing that, to no avail. I sweated out the last forty-five minutes trying to get the answer to that thing and I couldn’t do it, and I handed it in. I got the paper back. Nineteen correct. One wrong, by default. Grade: 95.
“You know, tonight for the life of me I can’t tell you what the answers were or even the questions on the nineteen I got right. But if you think I’ve forgotten that other one, you’re mistaken….The question was ‘What does the word Noah mean?’ … It means ‘rest’ or ‘comfort’. There wasn’t either one for me that day.”

“In our day I hear this all too often: ‘Well, we’re all human.’, as if God didn’t know it! God knows everybody’s human. And just because we’re human, that doesn’t justify wrongdoing. If being human exonerated somebody from wrongdoing, why did Christ die on the cross? They were human before he came….People aren’t going to ride through the pearly gates on the wings of being human, believe me. Jesus Christ came into this world to make people stronger than their human tendencies…to strengthen the inner man.”

“Sincerity and willingness to correct will overcome weakness….
David was a man after God’s own heart because he would repent….
God’s got a tremendous memory. But he’s also got a good forgetter.”

Thanks for the memories, Winford. We’ll never forget you!