Conference Talk
On Mrs. Jongke's Porch
The Basis of the Fellowship in Real Time by S. M. Hutchens
I am pleased to return after many years to Trinity, from which I took degrees in the early eighties, and served as Harold O. J. Brown's assistant. Assisting Dr. Brown meant doing things like fetching his lecture notes from a dusty pile on his office floor while he waited for them in front of a class. He had assured me they were right on top of his desk. When I finally found them and carried them in to him, he could not believe that this otherwise upright young man would deliberately lie about their whereabouts, since they were, in point of fact, in clear sight right on top of his desk. Well, no part of the teetering piles balanced up there was in clear sight either. I think he must have been teaching me humility, for he did not allow me any measure of triumph in the accomplishment of finding those notes.
The truth of this story is readily believed by anyone who knew Joe, this humble, lovable, absent-minded genius that I had come to Trinity to study with. I was never called upon to put out any of the fires he started in his office with that dangerous German coffee pot of his, but Trinity survived them—unquestionably, in the providence of God, so that it could host this conference.
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