Becoming a Community of Disciples

Introduction

Meet My Mentors—Dad, Basil, and Benedict I was raised by hardworking parents. In fact, my father is one of the hardest working people I know. Now approaching his mid-80s he has certainly slowed down, but during my childhood and teenage years he worked long hours. More or less, my dad only worked a few jobs in his entire life. As I recall he worked a short while for a car dealership, getting recently-arrived new vehicles ready for the sales lot; he spent nearly four years in the United States Navy as a radar man on a destroyer, trying to tell the difference between whales and Russian submarines; and then he mostly worked at the local paper mill, first owned by Mead and then by Rock-Tenn. The paper mill in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he worked making paper from recycled magazines and newspapers, not wood. In its heyday the mill had two paper machines and a large number of finishing machines. The paper machines took the cocktail of water and pulp and efficiently made huge rolls of brown paper. These were big rolls of paper,

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