CHAPTER NINE
Reaching Our Unsaved Parents
It is often very difficult for sons and daughters to lead their non-believing parents to Jesus Christ. There are many reasons for it, including a reluctance to embarrass or irritate older members of the family. They often assume that spiritual commitments were made at an earlier time, and they ignore the matter. Talking about spiritual concerns is simply too awkward. Our parents brought us into the world and then raised us for eighteen or twenty years. They represented authority, which we either accepted or resisted. Either way, that makes us uneasy when talking about certain issues. Religion can be one of them, unless the generations have similar views. Therefore, convincing Mom or Dad, or brothers and sisters, or uncles and aunts, that they need to repent and accept the claims of Christ is challenging. Typically, the issue is ignored and the years roll by in silence. That isn’t always true, but it often is.
First, Shirley prayed that the Heavenly Father would send her a godly husband when it came time to marry. Though I didn’t meet her until we were in college, she was actually praying for me. Second, she asked that the Lord would bring another father to love and care for them. One year later the Lord sent an angel named Joe Kubishta to be Shirley’s stepdad. He was thirty-seven years old and had never been married. He was a wonderfully kind and loving man. Given his background, there is no way to account for the “goodness” that lay within him.
Joe was born on a dirt-poor farm near Dickinson, North Dakota, on March 12, 1912. His mother died tragically of tuberculosis when he was nine. She left twelve children, including a baby and a toddler, to fend for themselves. Joe’s father was abusive at times and often disappeared for days on drinking binges. The children were forced to drop out of school when Joe was in the eighth grade to work in a coal mine. That was the end of his formal education. He and his siblings were deprived of everything, from parental love to the necessities of life.
Joe left the farm at eighteen years of age when the nation was caught in the grip of the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce, and a young man such as Joe with no money and no influential friends was fortunate to even earn enough to eat. He said, “I never missed a meal during that time but I postponed a few of them.” Joe migrated to California, riding the rails, as did many other refugees from Midwestern farms. They were each chasing the promise of work. For the next few years, Joe set pins in a bowling alley, worked on a potato farm, and did whatever was necessary to survive.
How could a man with so many disadvantages and liabilities turn out to be one of the most optimistic, loving, happy, and productive people on earth? I don’t know, but I never heard him say a mean thing about another human being. He was known everywhere by his broad grin and by the warmth of his winsome personality. Those who knew Joe Kubishta instantly liked him. I met him many years later when I started dating Shirley, and I came to love him like the father I had lost. We all miss him dearly today.
In 1942, Joe joined the United States Navy and served aboard the battleship South Dakota. He fought at Guadalcanal, the Marianas, and Okinawa, among other horrific campaigns in the Pacific. His combat assignment toward the end of the war was to fire a machine gun at deadly Japanese kamikaze planes diving toward the ship. During one terrible battle, a shell exploded on deck, killing 160 men and wounding many others. Thankfully, Joe was not injured. He received numerous medals, including the Navy Unit Commendation for Outstanding Heroism for bravery in the Battle of Guadalcanal. He was honorably discharged on November 3, 1945. Joe was a member of what former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw termed “The Greatest Generation.”1 They were forged in the fire of privation and discipline, and were intensely patriotic, courageous, and self-sacrificial.
Shortly after the war, Joe met and fell in love with a beautiful woman named Alma Wisham Deere, who had two children, John and Shirley. The Kubishtas were married December 16, 1950, and celebrated their fifty-second anniversary on December 16, 2002. The love and commitment of Joe and Alma to one another are legendary. Joe also loved John and Shirley as though they were his biological children, and he provided stability for them throughout their adolescent years. He became a highly skilled ceramic tile setter and provided admirably for his family until his retirement in 1978, having helped the kids through college. In his years setting tile, he never once had anyone call him back to repair something he had done wrong.
In 1960, I married Shirley Deere and became part of the Kubishta family. Knowing Joe was a highlight of my life. In fact, I referred to my in-laws in my book, Bringing Up Boys. This is what I wrote:
I find that children and young people are starved today for family life as it used to be—but almost never is. My in-laws, Joe and Alma Kubishta, are 89 and 90 years of age, and yet my daughter and her friends love to visit their home. Why? Because everything there is so much fun. They have time to play table games, laugh, eat and talk about whatever interests young people. Nobody is in a hurry. If their friends ever called on the phone, they are always available to talk. One of their frequent visitors was an unmarried man named Charlie who just loved the Kubishtas. When he made a return visit to California after moving away, he drove 60 miles to their house with a rosebush that he planted in their backyard. He just wanted to make sure Joe and Alma didn’t forget him. [His gift is called “The Charlie Bush” today.] This elderly man and woman provided something to those who are younger that is simply not available elsewhere. How sad.2
Here’s another quote from my book, written before Joe or Alma died:
This competitive impulse is evident in “boys” of all ages. My father-in-law is getting old, but still loves the thrill of victory. Joe plays golf four to five times per week and keeps track of his wins and losses against his younger buddies. He speaks in a North Dakota accent much like Lawrence Welk, and he loves to tell me this story:
“Hey Jimmy, dos guys I play with, der years younger dan me, and they have coaches to teach them to play golf. But I beat em all. HaHaHaHa.”
One of his buddies was named Wally, and Joe would say, “Dat Wally, he practices all week long and he coms out der all set to tak me down, and I beat de socks off him.” HaHaHa. Then he always added, “And Wally is ten years younger dan me.”
Joesy told me that story until he was ninety years old. He was also very good at a card game called Hearts, which he played during off hours in the Navy. He introduced me to the game when Shirley and I were first married, and Joe played it every time we were together. I had a Ph.D. and Joe never went to high school, but he beat “de socks off me,” too. It took me three years to figure out how Joe was whipping me. He offered no hints. He just laughed and said, “Let’s play again.” I finally cracked the code. When Joe had a good hand and was quietly trying to “run it,” his blood pressure went up and his neck turned red. I used to watch that region below his ears and I could tell what he was thinking. You see, Joe wasn’t the only one who “loved to win.” But he still usually beat me.
Joe was incredibly healthy until the very end of his life. He had had one small dental cavity in ninety years, and was in the hospital only once for something relatively minor. He continued playing golf regularly until six months before his death. Believe it or not, Joe shot an eighty-seven on his ninetieth birthday, and made a “hole in one” when he was eighty-five. A photo taken as Joe retrieved his ball after that miraculous drive appears in the photo section of this book.
Now I must tell you about Joe’s spiritual life. I don’t think he was a Christian when he married Alma. At least if he was, he never talked about it. He came out of an era when people didn’t like to discuss their faith, and he considered his convictions to be a very personal matter. As the years passed, our family talked often about Jesus Christ, and even then he was reluctant to let us in on this private world. Nevertheless, when Alma was sick for any reason, Joe would get dressed on Sunday morning and go to a nearby Baptist church. We prayed before every meal, and Joe would sometimes lead, but still, he never said the words we wanted to hear.
Finally, I took him to lunch one day, just the two of us, and I said, “Joe, I really need to talk to you about something important. You know that we can’t be together in heaven unless you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I think I know the answer, but you have never told me how you became a Christian. Share that story with me.”
Joe said, “Oh, Jimmy, you don hav to worry bout dat. When I was nine years old (which meant when his mother died) a priest took me into a little room and he talk to me.”
Frankly, I didn’t know what that meant and it stymied me. I couldn’t say, “Oh, no, Joe, that didn’t count. You haven’t been a Christian all these years.” He acted like he knew the Lord personally, but he never came out and said it. I just wasn’t sure if he fully understood what a relationship with Christ meant. I did the best I could to explain it, but he just smiled.
When we were told a year later by a hematologist that Joe was dying of leukemia, Shirley and I felt a great urgency to assure that he was ready to meet his Maker. The stakes were too high to leave anything to speculation. I came to his bedside in the hospital and said, “Joe, do you know for certain that you will be with us in heaven when you die?” He promptly changed the subject. Then I said rather sternly, “Joe, look at me. I asked you a question and I want you to answer it.” There was no time to waste. With that, he turned his face to the wall and wept. None of us had ever seen Joe cry before. He was, for the first time, very tender to the gentle touch of the Spirit.
The next day, Shirley called Joe’s minister at his Baptist church and asked him to come and talk to him. Rev. Lyle Williams sat at his bedside and said, “You know, I have been preaching a series of sermons on hope, especially our hope of eternal life.” They talked a while and then the minister skillfully led Joe in the sinner’s prayer. Then, a marvelous thing happened. Joe asked Jesus to come into his heart. No doubt about it. The next day when Shirley and I visited, he was beaming. He held his hands in the air and said with tears streaming down his face, “JIMMY, I’M SAVED. I’M SAVED!” This came from a man who had never been willing to talk about his faith. I knelt beside him and said, “Joe, every sin that you have committed in your entire life has been forgiven, and they will never be remembered against you again. We’re going to be together in heaven forever and ever.” Shirley and I were both crying.
The next day when we arrived at the hospital, Joe began crying again. “I’m clean,” he said. “I feel so clean.” It was a wonderful experience to see this precious soul, who may or may not have been justified earlier in the eyes of God, make a public confession of his dedication to his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He experienced what we in our faith community call “a conversion.”
Though Joe was indeed dying that November, we asked God for one more Thanksgiving and one more Christmas together, and unbelievably, he was able to come home from the hospital on both days. He sat at a window looking out at the Pacific Ocean for a long time without talking. I think he was saying “good-bye.” Then he said, “Okay, Jimmy, I want to go back to de hospital.” We were given ten more weeks with the man Shirley lovingly called “Pops,” and our kids called him “Grandpa Joe,” and I called him “Joesy.”
Even as he approached the end, everyone at the medical facility had fallen in love with Joe. One of his nurses said to Shirley, “I just love that man. All he talks about is how much he loves his wife. I wish I could put him in my pocket and take him home.”
His doctor, a crusty older Jewish physician, said to me in the hall one afternoon, “Everyone loves that man in there,” pointing to Joe’s room. “You wanna know why? ’Cause he’s a good man. He’s never had much money, but he worked hard all his life. He’s the kind of man who built this country.”
Toward the end, I asked Joe if he was comfortable and if the hospital staff was treating him well. He said, “Oh, Jimmy, der good to me here. Dis is a great place. Da food is good. I couldn’t ask for anything better.” As he spoke, I thought about this emaciated human being, lying on his bed all day with nothing to do but stare at the walls. Yet there was not a hint of self-pity in his demeanor. A Scripture verse came to my mind as he lay on his deathbed. The Apostle Paul had written it when he was in a Philippian prison and would soon be executed. Who knows what miserable circumstances he was encountering, and yet this is what he wrote:
I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength. (Phil. 4:12–13)
Joe Kubishta exemplified this peace and contentment as well as anyone I’ve ever known.
On February 14, Valentine’s Day, Joe was voted “King of Hearts” by the medical staff and the patients at the convalescent hospital. He had trouble stringing words together coherently by that point, but it didn’t matter. His winning personality was still evident. We played one last game of Hearts, and he couldn’t remember the rules. How sad that was. Four days later, on February 18, he told Shirley that the angels were coming to get him. And on February 19, my beloved father-in-law slipped quietly out of this life and into eternity. He was nearly ninety-one years old. Now he awaits the rest of our family on the other side. I promise you, Joe will be smiling!
I’ll share one last story that was related during the memorial service. Our son Ryan, who has become a very effective speaker, gave one of the emotional eulogies. During his remarks he talked about the meaning of success. Ryan described a day several months earlier when he dropped by unexpectedly at his grandparents’ house. He found them sitting at the kitchen table—not on opposite sides, but side by side. They were holding hands.
“What are you doing?” Ryan asked.
“We’ve just been sitting here this morning looking at one another,” Alma replied.
After fifty-two years of marriage, they were content just to be in each other’s company. “THAT,” said Ryan, “is my definition of marital success.” Joe Kubishta was survived by his wife, Alma, who died six years later, and by his stepson John and John’s wife, Marlene Deere; their grown sons, Steve and Brad Deere; by his stepdaughter, Shirley, and me, his son-in-law; and by our grown children, Danae and Ryan Dobson. As soon as I have been in heaven for a while and have knelt at the feet of Jesus, I want to play a game of Hearts with Joe. I know he will win.
Good-bye, our beloved husband, father, grandfather, and friend. You brought such incredible joy into our lives. Your smile and laughter will linger in our memories forever. We can hardly imagine life without you, but our separation will be brief. We will see you on the other side, in the presence of our wonderful Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Because He lives, we can face tomorrow.
Neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:39)
I have one more story to tell you about the salvation of a loved one. I believe it will resonate with you as you think about your own kin. This one is about my father’s father, my grandfather, Robert Lee Dobson. He is legendary in the Dobson family.
My grandfather never professed to be a Christian. It’s the old story about seeing hypocrites in the church and wanting nothing to do with them. He never opposed Little Mother’s spiritual training of their six children, including riding a streetcar across Shreveport to get them in church. She was a member of the board there. Grandfather Dobson had no objection to his wife doing that. He even let her support the church with contributions. However, he steadfastly refused any involvement of his own.
“Keep me out of it,” he said. “I want nothing to do with Christianity or any church.”
My grandmother was deeply troubled by her husband’s rejection of spiritual matters. He was a “moral” man but that is as far as it went. Little Mother didn’t press him about his faith, but she made it a lifelong project to pray for her husband. For forty years she continued this quiet prayer vigil without any movement on his part.
When Robert was sixty-eight, he suffered a massive stroke and was bedridden thereafter. The following year, his youngest child, a teenager named Elizabeth, was in his room taking care of him and giving him his medications. She then looked toward his bed and saw that he was crying. That was most unusual for this stoic man.
Elizabeth said, “Daddy, what’s wrong?”
He replied barely above a whisper, “Honey, go get your mother.”
My grandmother ran up the stairs in the Big House and knelt at her husband’s bedside. She said, “Are you okay?”
Robert said to her, “I know now that I am going to die and I am not afraid of death. But it is so dark. Will you pray for me?”
“Will I pray?” she asked through her tears.
Little Mother had been praying for this moment for four decades. She began to pray for the man she loved, and he surrendered his heart to the Lord. I wish I could have been there on that occasion. R. L. Dobson died two weeks later with a testimony on his lips.
At Christmastime thirty-five years later, four surviving siblings came to my parents’ home in California for their first family reunion since the death of their father. For five days they sat in the living room and shared treasured memories from their childhood. Almost all of their conversations centered on their dad, although Little Mother and their twin brothers were gone by that time, too. I was enthralled by what I heard. One of my cousins recorded their recollections on a small cassette tape machine and they still exist today. What a rich heritage these recordings provide, granting insight into my grandparents’ home and the early experiences of my dad and his siblings.
While all the conversations were of interest to me, there was a common thread that was especially significant throughout the week. It focused on the respect with which these four siblings addressed the memory of their father (my grandfather). He died in 1935, a year before my birth, yet they spoke of him with an unmistakable awe more than thirty-four years later. He still lived in their minds as a man of enormous character and strength.
I asked them to explain the qualities that they admired so greatly, but received little more than vague generalities.
“He was a tower of strength,” said one.
“He had a certain dignity about him,” said another, with appropriate gestures.
“We held him in awe,” replied the third.
It is difficult to summarize the subtleties and complexities of the human personality, and they were unable to find the right words. Only when they began talking about specific memories did the personality of this patriarch become apparent. My dad provided the best evidence by writing his recollection of Grandfather Dobson’s death, which I’ve reproduced below. Flowing throughout this narrative is the impact of a great man on his family, even three decades after his demise. This is my dad’s written account.
The Last Days of R. L. Dobson
The attack that took his life occurred when he was sixty-nine years of age, and resulted ultimately in the breakup of the family circle. For many years after his death, I could not pass Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport without noting one particular window. It stood out from the rest, hallowed because it represented the room where he had suffered so much. The details of those tragic days and nights remain in my memory, unchanged by the passage of time.
We had been three days and three nights practically without sleep, listening to him struggle for breath, hearing the sounds of approaching death, smelling the smells of death. Dad lay in a deep coma. His heavy breathing could be heard up and down the corridor. We walked the halls of that old hospital for hours listening to the ceaseless struggle which now was becoming fainter and fainter. Several times the nurse had called us in and we had said the last “goodbye”—had gone through the agony of giving him up, only to have his heart rally, and then the endless vigil would begin all over again. Finally, we had gone into an adjoining room not prepared for sleep, but some in the chairs and some across the beds, we had fallen into the sleep of utter exhaustion.
At five minutes to four o’clock the nurse came in and awakened one of my twin brothers. Robert roused with a start. “Is he gone?” he asked.
“No, but if you boys want to see your dad one more time while he is alive, you’d better come, now.”
The word quickly passed around and we filed into the room to stand around his bed for the last time. I remember that I stood at his left side: I smoothed back the hair from his forehead, and laid my hand on his big old red hand, so very much like my own. I felt the fever that precedes death: 105. While I was standing there a change came over me. Instead of being a grown man (I was twenty-four at the time) I became a little boy again. They say this often happens to adults who witness the death of a parent. I thought I was in the Union Train Station in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the late afternoon, and I was watching for his return. The old Kansas City Southern passenger train was backing into the station and I saw it come ’round the curve. My heart swelled with pride. I turned to the little boy standing next to me and said, “You see that big man standing on the back of the train, one hand on the air brake and the other on the little whistle with which he signals the engineer? That big man is my dad!” He set the air brakes and I heard the wheels grind to a stop. I saw him step off that last coach. I ran and jumped into his arms. I gave him a tight hug and I smelled the train smoke on his clothes. “Daddy, I love you,” I said.
It all comes back. I patted that big hand and said “Goodbye, Dad,” as he was sinking fast, now. “We haven’t forgotten how hard you worked to send five boys and one girl through college: how you wore those old conductor uniforms until they were slick—doing without—that we might have things that we didn’t really need…”
At three minutes to four o’clock, like a stately ship moving slowly out of time’s harbor into eternity’s sea, he breathed his last. The nurse motioned for us to leave, and pulled the sheet over his head, a gesture that struck terror to my heart. We turned with silent weeping to leave the room. Then an incident occurred that I will never forget. Just as we got to the door, I put my arm around my little mother and said, “Mama, this is awful.”
Dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief, she said, “Yes, Jimmy, but there is one thing Mother wants you to remember, now. We have said ‘good night’ down here, but one of these days we are going to say ‘good morning’ up there.” I believe she did say “good morning” too, eleven years later, and I know he met her “just inside the Eastern gate.”
His death was marked by quietness and dignity, just like the life he had lived. Thus came to an end the affairs of R. L. Dobson, and it ended, too, the solidarity of the family. The old home place was never the same again. The old spirit that we had known as children was gone forever!
Though this illustration reveals few of the specific characteristics that made R. L. Dobson such a powerful influence in his family, it does tell us how his son felt about him. I happen to know some of the other details. He was a man of absolute integrity and honesty. Though not a Christian until shortly before his death, he lived by an internal standard that was singularly uncompromising. As a young man, for example, he invested heavily in a business venture with a partner whom he later discovered to be dishonest. When he learned of the chicanery, he virtually gave the company to the other man. That former partner built the corporation into one of the most successful operations in the South, and he became a multimillionaire. But my grandfather never regretted his decision. He took a clean conscience with him to his grave.
How about your family? Are there members who are not safely within the fold of the faith? If so, may I urge you to intensify your prayers on their behalf, and watch patiently for an opportunity to tell them again about finding a relationship with Jesus? It might be, as in the case of Joe Kubishta and Robert Lee Dobson, that time and circumstances will open a door that has previously been closed. We can’t make a person willing to repent of sins and accept divine forgiveness, but if that occurs even to the point of death, the angels in heaven will rejoice. And you and your other believing family members will live out your years knowing that a joyous reunion is in store on what Little Mother anticipated as a “good morning, just inside the Eastern Gate.”