Camp Meeting Memories
I was raised on a farm in Montana. Every now and then a couple of our roosters would start fighting. Very often my father would throw a bucket of water on them. They would take off running in different directions.
After I became a Seventh-day Adventist, we went to camp meeting every year. Some years later I was in charge of ushering at the western Washington camp meeting. One day as I was walking by the family tent area I saw two boys fighting. Along the tent area were barrels of water and a bucket by each to be used in case of fire. Without thinking, I quickly filled a bucket with water and threw it on the boys. Immediately the fighting stopped and the boys took off. Later in the day, the mother of one of them came and thanked me for my intervention.
That night at our staff meeting our conference president said with a smile on his face, “Today I heard of a new way to stop boys from fighting!”
—Peter Tadej, Desert Hot Springs, California
Sound Bite
“I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you.”
—King David, from Psalm 32:8
Adventist LifeIn the 1940s when my husband, Alta Burch, was a student at Washington Missionary College in Takoma Park, Maryland (now Washington Adventist University), he drove a Diamond cab to earn his way through college. One day at Union Station in Washington, D. C., he picked up a man who was from Dallas, Texas.
The man asked Burch what a nice young man was doing driving a cab. Burch told him he was working his way through college. “Well, what are you going to be?” the man asked. When Burch said, “a minister,” the man replied, “You’re wasting your time. People don’t appreciate what you do. Be a veterinarian—animals always appreciate what you do.”
Faithful instead to the guidance of the Divine Counselor, Burch spent 20 years pastoring God’s people and 20 more years serving his fellow human beings as chaplain at the Florida Hospital in Orlando, Florida— 40 years in God’s vineyard. But he never forgot the rare “advice” of the man from Dallas.
—Tralece Burch, Apopka, Florida 
