Jerry and Joan’s Story
Andrea Rock, contributing editor
Jerry and Joan Livingston are a team professionally as well as in their marriage. He is an ordained pastor, she a gifted musician who is music director at every church they serve. Early in their married lives, they faced a challenge that they met with more than their professional training. They clearly possessed wisdom beyond their years in their personal understanding of the human condition. Theirs is quite a beautiful story.
Both only twenty-five, their marriage vows were recent enough that they wanted some time as a couple before starting a family. They lived in a tiny trailer in Missouri, where they were leaders of a new church “plant.” In the midst of their working to establish a sense of community among their tiny congregation, they were challenged with the death of one of their members — a woman who left behind five children. Four of them were on their own; one was still living at home. Fourteen-year-old Doug’s life was doubly challenged by the fact that his father had long ago abandoned the family — he was a criminal and a fugitive from the law.
The older children of the family — now young adults, tried their best to keep the family together, but they had not had great role models of family values, and were not, themselves, a particularly good influence on Doug. To use the term “dysfunctional” would be to understate the case. A consortium of nearly twenty people from the church joined the effort to help the family and keep them together, but eventually dissolved when it failed to do so. The young pastor and his wife decided to do what they could to help Doug until a family could take him in.
They started picking him up on Saturday nights, taking him to church on Sunday, and returning him home on Sunday nights. Gradually, Jerry and Joanie found ways to involve him in more activities, so that he would be able to stay with them for longer periods of time. They urged him to be part of the team at Vacation Bible School leaders, so that he would not only be a part of community, but also have a sense of being a valued contributor to the younger members of the congregation. And it also gave them an excuse to keep him in their home for a still longer period of time!
Meanwhile, the family decided that Doug should live with one of his brothers, but Jerry and Joan sensed pending disaster, as that particular brother was very much like their fugitive father. They realized that the only alternative was to offer him a permanent home with them. Offering to become surrogate parents to a young man only twelve years their junior was no small step for them to take. And accepting the offer, over his own family’s strong objections, was a large step for Doug to take!
When he moved into the trailer, Doug had turned fifteen. He had been judged by his teachers to be incapable of college work, and had been placed in a vo-tech school, where he was learning to be a cook. With all that he had survived in his short life, he was understandably quiet and withdrawn. Like the proverbial salesman whose selling starts when the client says “no,” Jerry took on the challenge of winning over his young “son.” Jerry would go into the kitchen area of the trailer, and ask Doug legitimate questions about cooking. He would ask him to demonstrate every technique he has learned in school, and, when necessary, play “dumb,” by asking any and every kind of question that would draw Doug out from his understandably guarded world. Jerry and Joan both could see that Doug was an extremely bright young man who had never learned how to study, so while Jerry employed his tactics to win his trust and friendship, Joanie taught him how to study. Within a year of living with them, Doug announced that he did want to go to college, so he was moved into the college “track” and graduated from high school with honors. He went on to earn a masters in Christian education.
During the early years that Doug was with them, the Livingstons had two sons of their own. Although there is a fifteen-year age difference between their adopted and natural sons, the three are very close. Not surprisingly, given the role model Jerry and Joan provided, all three men are happily married. And all three men have followed in Jerry’s footsteps and become pastors. I’ve had the privilege of seeing this family in action, and it is quite something to behold. The love of and respect for their parents is evident in every way, on the part of all three men. Jerry and Joan’s hard work has been richly rewarded.
