Gary Morgan, the son of Herschel and Shirley Morgan, is a physician in Anniston, Alabama. While he was still in college, he was in Marshall Dickerson’s Sunday School Class. When it came time for Gary to make application for admission to medical school, he asked Marshall to write a letter of recommendation for him. Marshall said that he would be happy to do so.
Several days after Gary had asked Marshall to write the letter, Gary came home and told his mother that he had made a big mistake in asking Marshall to write the letter for him. He was afraid that he would never be admitted to medical school. Then he explained why. Marshall had told him that he had written the letter of recommendation for him and thought that he might like to see the letter that he had sent. When Gary read the letter that Marshall had sent, he said that it was awful. In the letter, Marshall had said that, with proper guidance and some improvement, Gary could probably be a decent worker. Also, the letter was filled with grammatical and spelling errors.
Marshall let Gary brood over that letter several days before he told him the real story. He gave Gary a copy of the actual letter that he had sent to the medical school. This letter had no grammatical or spelling errors and was filled with glowing words about Gary’s hard work. Much to his relief, Gary was admitted to medical school that fall.
Marshall said one thing to Gary, but something very different to the medical school. We are often guilty of doing the same thing. Marshall wrote the two different letters as a way of kidding Gary; we sometimes speak in two different ways for less laudable reasons. We may talk one way around one crowd but in a different way around a different crowd because we don’t have the courage to speak the truth. Compromise is sometimes needed, but at other times it shows a lack of commitment.
A man was called to be pastor of a small country church. He was very flattered that the church had called him as pastor. A few weeks after coming to the church, he was fishing for compliments and asked an old man who had been a long-time member of the church exactly why they had chosen him as their pastor. The old man said, “Well, preacher, we had a division in our church. Half of the people wanted to call a preacher, and half of them didn’t. So, finally, we compromised on you. You’re a preacher, but you’re the nearest thing to nothing that we could get.”
I hope that’s just a preacher story, but the fact of the matter is that we sometimes reach unseemly compromises. We need to let our “yes” be “yes” and our “no” be “no” in every crowd.
Gary Morgan is now a very successful doctor. But, thanks to Marshall, he may have had several years taken off his life by that letter that Gary thought Marshall had sent to the medical school.
