RURAL BRYANT, SD, PRESENTS:
AT TACOMA SEAFARERS' CENTER,
PORT OF TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Another long association has been the Seafarer's Center in Tacoma's port. Mondays and Fridays Darrell volunteers for work at the center, and has been doing this for many years.
He has provided his help faithfully by going out to the ships with the director to greet the captains and the sailors. Many times he has shared the Gospel, giving his testimony, and passed out Gospel tracts.
With only a slender income of his own to live on, he seeks ways to gain finances for the center. He collects cans in the can storage unit to sell in order to finance the Gospel correspondence and Bible courses the center offers to the sailors.
He goes with the Center's van to drop off and collect sailors when they go into town for various items and services. At Christmas he helps carry on board ships the Christmas boxes to the sailors who cannot be home for Christmas with their families. Over 1200 boxes are distributed this way from the center.
Each box contains combs, stationery, candy, homemade cookies, a woolen cap, or scarf, or mittens. Gospel tracts and greetings from the center in various languages are also enclosed. Each box is wrapped, and many churches take part in providing these gift boxes for the sailors. They are much valued by the seafarers, as you can imagine. Darrell also works getting out the center's monthly newsletter, called THE MOORING LINES.
Nevertheless, there is no sympathy or pity asked here for him, as he passed to Glory "with his boots on." He was a witness for Jesus to the last in a public ministry involving tracts, singing of Gospel songs, and words of cheerful nature. He made a final trip to California a month or so after his mother passed, a ministry trip he had postponed, and then completed despite the loss of her. He died quietly in his sleep, and suffered some falls, but no great disability or pain in his last days on earth.
The Lord was merciful to him to the very last, to an individual who lost his father when he was only just about to reach his teen years, in a sudden and violent death of his childhood hero, producing a traumatic experience that together with his other problems suffered from a fall his mother took, while carrying him in her womb, pushed him over the edge for many years.
That he recovered enough to do the mighty exploits he did, with the slender means he had in life, is a phenomenal story. His own book, DELIVERED FROM THE POWERS OF DARKNESS, will give many details and ample indication how much Jesus, his wonderful Savior, Provider, Deliverer, Friend, Guide, Comforter, Healer, and Protector, meant to him life-long in all his difficulties, challenges, and also his triumphs. Truly, no one in the entire Stadem Relationship can be explained less if you delete GOD'S AMAZING GRACE from his "equation."