February 16, 2000
Bible teacher got early start by swinging to heaven
___By Scott Collins
___Buckner News Service
___BIG SPRING--Sometimes late at night, when all the other children had gone to sleep, Irene Chick would sneak out of her room at Buckner Orphans Home.
___Maybe it was an orphan's way of escaping life on earth. Or maybe there is a deep-seated psychological reason. But as she tells the story 70 years later, a sparkle lights hereyes and a mischievous grin cracks the corners of her mouth.
IRENE CHICK says her childhood at Buckner Children's Home prepared her for her Bible teaching ministry.
___The real reason she did it is because there was "a great big beautiful swing outside," she confessed.
___"This friend of mine and I, we'd sneak out there and swing in those swings, and we'd swing to heaven," she said. "Then we'd run back inside, and the matron would come and say, 'Who's been outside?' and we'd play asleep. She'd go down the row and feel of our feet to see who had cold feet. 'Irene, you've been out in the swing again, haven't you?' she'd say."
___That was probably the last time anything gave Chick cold feet. But it was not the last time she would swing to heaven.
___For the past nine years, Mrs. Chick, as everyone around College Baptist Church calls her, has been teaching the Bible to women in the Big Spring church's fellowship hall. Her weekly studies are a running commentary that would make any seminary-trained theologian proud. She spends hours in preparation, studying biblical commentaries and other sources. A spiral-bound notebook contains page after page of precious nuggets mined from her extensive study.
___Since starting the lessons in August 1990, Chick has taught 33 books of the Bible. Verse by verse and word by word, she brings the Scriptures to life for the women in her class.
___The sessions are laced with 78 years worth of lessons she has learned, many the hard way.
___"Anything that is more important to you than God is a sin," she tells the group. And then someone asks Chick, a diabetic, about her uncontrollable love of Snickers candy bars. "I'm trying my best to be on my best behavior," she replies.
___"There is no fence you can live on," she says, as her Bible students furiously write down her words. "You either serve God or you don't."
___Those kinds of simple truths have sustained Chick throughout her 78 years. Her favorite saying is a lasting legacy passed on by her mother 70 years ago: "She told us never to worry, that the Lord would take care of us. That's been my philosophy in life, and the Lord has taken of me."
___Irene and Clarine Marsh came to Buckner Orphans Home Feb. 14, 1929. The sisters' parents were divorced and their mother contracted tuberculosis. The girls, who lived in the Rio Grande Valley, were put on a train for Dallas and Buckner.
___"It was neat," Chick recalled. "I can remember that even now. It never did bother me, because in the back of my mind I could hear my mother saying: 'It will be all right. The Lord will take care of you.'"
___She lived at Buckner from the time she was 8 until graduating from high school at 16.
___"I was very content," she said. "In those days, there were 850 kids out there. It was a busy place. There were lots of people, and I've never met a stranger yet--didn't at 8, either. I never did resent being there. They taught me invaluable lessons. The most important lesson was that I was responsible for what happened to me. They taught me the value of work."
___From Buckner, Chick went on to Howard Payne College in Brownwood. Then in 1940, she enrolled in the Harris Methodist Hospital School of Nursing.
___After finishing nursing school, she enlisted in the Army in 1943 and served in China and India during World War II. She was married to Lou Allen Chick in 1946, after he was discharged from the Navy. They had four children, two girls and later twin boys.
___After her husband's death, and after living in Wyoming 12 years, Chick moved to Big Spring to be near her daughter, who was soon transferred to Washington, D.C. But she has stayed in Big Spring.
___"This is my family right here," she said, waving her arm to indicate the surroundings of College Baptist Church. And it is here that she shares her life story with her "family."
___The best story is the one about how she accepted Jesus Christ as her Savior.
___"I had the itch," she begins. "You had little blisters all over you, your hands, your legs, your arms, and they itched like mad. You were very contagious, and when you lived in a room with 30 other people, you were subject to get it. When you got the itch, the treatment was to put you in the basement for three days in long-handled underwear and to cover you with sulfur and grease. I smelled to heaven.
___"Well, they were having a revival on the campus, with a guest pastor. They would open up the windows in the chapel, and when there were 850 kids singing, you could hear them clear to the Promised Land. I could hear him preaching too. I was confined to the basement. But I just couldn't stand it, because I knew all about God, I just had never had that salvation experience.
___"So in the middle of a sermon one night, I was just convinced that the Lord was calling me. I went upstairs and put on a dress on top of my sulfur and grease. I went over there (to the chapel) and when they gave the invitation, I was the first smelly thing down that aisle.
___"I really got a good take," Chick said of her salvation. "I have never wavered. I have not been good all the time, don't misunderstand me. But the Lord has never left me."
___Telling the story all these years later, she punctuates it with laughter, especially the part about being smelly. But there is also a deep seriousness about that memory for her.
___"My mother always told me the Lord would take care of me," she said. "That's been a guideline for me all my life."
Send this story to a friend
Contents/ Masthead / Why We're Here / Links / Archive / E-mail us/ SUBSCRIBE!
