When news of the death of Dr. John Stott in the fall of 2011 came our way, I remembered an incident out of the forgotten past. During the mid-1980s David and I had been invited to perform a dramatic Scripture reading for two voices, “And the Word of the Lord Came Unto…” for the Congress on Biblical Exposition (COBE) at a hotel adjacent to Disneyland in Los Angeles.
Dr. Stott and Chuck Colson were both slated to speak on the program that night. In the green room (none of these rooms are green but are the places where participants gather for debriefings and explanations before the actual program begins), Dr. Stott, quiet, punctual and charmingly English, went around greeting everyone kindly and renewing an acquaintance with David and myself. He had been at Circle Church, the plant in the Teamster’s Union Hall in Chicago, where we had experimented with contemporary forms of worship, with social action motivated out of a conservative theology, and with an open-church policy, which we encouraged through a racially integrated staff and congregation. He might even have been in our home since we generally dragged people back from church for a Sunday meal.
At some point as we were waiting to proceed to the platform in the couple-thousand-seat auditorium Dr. Stott eased quietly beside me. He smiled, a man some 20 years older than I, slender and elegant and said with total composure, “I had forgotten how beautiful you are.” My husband, standing beside me, agreed with him.
What a lovely compliment; I received it with pleasure (being a middle-aged mom at the stage of life where major amounts of my time were taken with corralling and herding four children) and promptly forgot it. Perhaps this was because it was very much like something my father frequently did when we were in groups. My father, Wilfred LaRue Burton, also would also ease up to me, place the back of his hand so it hid his mouth and whisper in my ear, “Now, sweet, I’ve looked everyone over in the room and you are the prettiest one here.”
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