I can take you to the exact place and reenact the exact scene where the lights came back on in my life.
Twenty of us, from all over the nation, arrived that Sunday afternoon at the huge stone mansion called Wainwright House above New York City on Long Island Sound. We were guests of Guideposts magazine and had come to attend a weeklong writer’s workshop.
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Normal Vincent Peale, the publisher, and Catherine Marshall, wife of Guideposts editor Leonard LeSourd, planned the workshop. They had asked writers—and writers-to-be—to submit a manuscript. It would be judged, and 20 writers would be selected to attend an all-expense paid week studying under the magazine’s editors.
When I spotted the notice in the magazine, it was like Moses seeing the burning bush. Two years earlier I would have passed the opportunity by. But during the past 24 months I had been fired from two churches as pastor. The first time was in South Carolina. I had escaped, just one step in front of the T&F Committee (tar and feathers gang), to start over in Florida in another church. There I lasted 15 months before I was fired again.
I did the only thing I could do: I walked through whatever door opened. In this case I submitted a manuscript to Guideposts. If people wouldn’t listen to my sermons, maybe they would read my stories.
In late September 1967, I received a telegram from LeSourd. (I still have it, framed, on the wall of my writing studio.) Out of many entrants, I, along with 19 others, had been chosen. That night after dinner we gathered in the huge walnut-paneled great room of the old stone mansion. A fire crackled in the fireplace. Outside the autumn leaves brushed against the leaded glass windows. We sat in easy chairs around the room. All 20 of us. All strangers.
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