By Don Nevels – BBFI missionary to Argentina
Very soon after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, and during the raging battles of the Second World War, Don (that’s me), Nancy, Carole, and Larry Nevels came into the world. Then during the dreadful battles of the Korean War in the early 1950s, Lee Roy and Craig joined their older brothers and sisters who lived in a duplex house on 168th and Figueroa streets in Gardena, California, a Los Angeles suburb. The house is still there today.
One day, when I was 13 years old, I answered the door and replied to a wheel-chaired lady inviting the family to the Gardena Bible Baptist Church saying, “No thank you, I am going to become a Catholic priest and will never go to a Baptist church.” But Grandmother Rachel and Aunt Joan did go and soon accepted Christ as their Savior under the ministry of the church’s founding pastor, Howard L. Ervin.
It was Christmastime 1952. We six children were sad and quite hungry as Dorothy, our divorced but devoted mother, was not able to provide the traditional turkey dinner nor Christmas presents for her half a dozen kids. On Christmas Eve day we soothed our hunger pangs by going out to play with Emery, Earl, Eugene and Ernie, four Japanese neighbor boys, along with Freddy and Ronnie Padilla, two Mexican brothers, and Patrick, Randy, Steve, and Frankie — all kids our age. The only girls on the block were my two sisters, Nancy and Carole Nevels, who managed to mix among the boys, that is, until we ran them off because “girls were not allowed in our tree house.”
Quite early on Christmas morning, I was awakened by a knock at the front door but upon opening the door no one was in sight. I then observed on the porch floor there was a grocery bag filled with food items including a Tom turkey, cranberry sauce, vegetables, some yams, and some stuffing for Tom turkey. Also there were Christmas gifts of tennis shoes for each of the four older children and other gifts for Lee Roy and Craig.
The hungry half dozen kids could hardly wait for Grandma Rachel to finish cooking old Tom turkey with all the trimmings. Hungry little Larry loved to lick the yam pan. Inside the grocery bag was a note dated Christmas, 1952, which read, “Merry Christmas from someone at Gardena Bible Baptist Church who loves you children.”
The next summer, at daily Vacation Bible School, on Tuesday, June 9, 1953, the Nevels children received Christ as Savior and were later baptized, and so was Dorothy, their mother.
Though more than half a century has rolled on, I recall Brother Ervin preached some powerful sermons, but perhaps his most far-reaching message was preached from a grocery bag on December 25, 1952. God used the gesture of that grocery bag to eventually speak to me, the eldest of the Nevels children, who later on became a missionary to Argentina, and who time and again duplicated Brother Ervin’s grocery bag gesture — which simply means that many people from the Land of the Gaucho will be in Heaven all because of Tom turkey.
“…for I was hungered and ye gave me meat…” and that is what it is all about.
Don and Lucy Nevels have been BBFI missionaries to Argentina since 1967. Look for Don’s account of his amazing bus adventure from Argentina to Kansas in a future issue of the Tribune.