Written by Trey Reely
My senior year at Harding I took part in a mixer at Camp Tahkodah where each person had to say two things about themselves—one statement that was true and one that was not. The other members of the group then tried to guess which statement was true. After contemplating the matter for a few seconds I decided to use a deep, dark secret as my true statement: “I have only missed chapel one time in four years.”
When it was my turn, every person in the group chose the other option. No one believed that I could have possibly missed chapel only one time. In fact, they were so incredulous I think they would have been more likely to believe me if I had said I had been abducted and operated on by aliens.
Additionally, the only reason I missed chapel even once was because I was frantically trying to finish a term paper on the symphonies of Mozart that had ballooned uncontrollably in length and was due in my music history class immediately after chapel. I’m lucky Mozart died young or I may have missed three straight days.
A few weeks ago when I mentioned to my daughter, a Harding student, that I had only missed one chapel during my first four years at Harding, she said I must have been a real nerd. (Actually, I think she used the present tense.) It’s ironic that she called me a nerd because that’s kind of how it appears looking back on it. I’m not exactly sure why I only missed once. I was certainly not legalistic—I don’t remember looking Pharisaically down my nose at anyone else for missing. I certainly wasn’t expecting any recognition, like maybe a chapel attendance scholarship or a special seal on my diploma. I didn’t always find chapel stimulating. In fact, like probably most anyone else, I found that chapel ran the gamut from downright boring to immensely inspiring. I even vowed I would not say that chapel was the one thing I missed most about Harding if I ever got to speak in chapel after I graduated. When I was at Harding every other speaker seemed to say that—do they still? I guess my conscientiousness was due to some subconscious need to fulfill one of the Church of Christ mantras often spoken of the faithful at their funerals: “Our dear Flossie Mae was there every time the doors were open.”
That being said, there were two chapel programs that changed my life, and I can’t imagine what would have happened if I had skipped either one of them. The first, during my freshman year, featured a guest speaker named Bill Waugh, founder and owner of Casa Bonita, a Mexican Restaurant with good food and great atmosphere. The restaurant featured cliff divers in Speedos, mariachi singers, escaping gorillas, cowboy shootouts, lost caves and caverns, and an amusement arcade. During his speech, he talked about all the effort he expended to meet his future wife. My memories of the story are a little foggy by now but as I recall it, he saw this beautiful girl and just had to meet her. However, she was attending college and he was working, so their paths did not cross during the course of the day. So what did he do? First, he procured her schedule from the school. (That’s kind of creepy—I wouldn’t try it at home.) Then he left work at lunch each day, stood outside one of her classes, and said hello when she walked by. After several days of this, he struck up a conversation with her, they began dating, and eventually married.
It just so happened that I wanted to ask out a very attractive girl named Ronda Huddleston from Hearne, Texas. I was not a Casanova by any means.
In my limited experience, I liked to test the waters some before I asked a girl out—if the flirting thing went smoothly, then I would ask her out. If there seemed to be no initial chemistry then I would save us both the trouble. But I didn’t see Ronda enough to get any vibes as to whether she would go out with me or not. I wasn’t even sure if she would remember me from the time we met during pledge week a few months before. As I sat in chapel listening to Bill Waugh speak, I summoned up the courage to call her. If he could go to all that trouble, the least I could do was make a phone call. And what’s more, it wasn’t the least bit creepy. I called, she said yes, we had our first date on Valentine’s Day, and the rest is history.
The second chapel program to impact my life was a presentation on the Harding University in Florence program. Dullard that I was, I had never even thought about going to HUF, and since I was a senior music major I was not sure if there would be any classes I could take for graduate credit the next year. I asked the chapel speaker, Don Shackelford, about it and he said “Dr. Davis is going, why don’t you ask him?” Dr. Kenneth Davis (Uncle Bud) was the chairman of the music department, so as it turned out, he could guide me in a couple of independent studies in music. A few months later, Ronda and I were in Florence having the time of our lives.
Am I saying you should never skip chapel? No. In fact, if I had it to do over again I would probably live it up and miss another time or two. But beware—you never know what you may be missing.
