Rev. A.J. Ogden

Living with my mother in the back woods of southwest Mississippi, times were hard in the 1930s, to state it mildly. We lived with almost no visible means of support, I guess you could say.

When it came time to start to school in 1932, I was so fearful because I had never been anywhere other than a few trips to Woodville. I was too shy to even look up at my teachers at first. Picture me if you will, with patches in the knees and seat of my pants, no socks on, needing a hair cut, and literally trembling in embarrassment and fear. I was extremely ignorant about how to act and was homesick. How could I cope with being in town and learn all I was supposed to learn. It seemed like a mountain too high for little me to climb. But there was no choice.

The town kids got a kick out of seeing how bashful and ignorant I was. So they began to chant, “Ragged Ogden, just look at him, he does not have any socks.” They had other little songs about the patches on my pants. They called me corn bread and molasses because that is the kind of lunches I brought. The campus bully beat me up the first day and others followed his example right away.

But there was a precious music teacher, Mrs. Meak, who saw my plight and despair, who began to take an interest in little nobody Ogden. She would teach me things at recess periods. She would say, “A. J., you are somebody, you are a good kid and someday God will use you to preach the Gospel, and you are important in his eyes right now. Cheer up my boy!” I will never know how she knew I’d be a preacher someday!

When lunch time rolled around I’d hide behind a bunch of ligustrum bushes beside the school to eat my cornbread and molasses. But the kids would find me so they could make fun of my lunch, “Corn bread and molasses, nobody Ogden fresh from the slums.” But then Mrs. Meak would leave the other teachers, come behind the ligustrum, sit on that little bench with me and encourage me. Many times she gave me a sandwich or an apple or orange. She would say, “Don’t give up A. J., just stay in there and someday you’ll rise up and be gone from here. Her encouragement meant more to me than words could ever express.

I was not a Christian at that time, but somehow I knew God had sent Mrs. Meak to minister to me. The Bible tells us in Romans 5:8, “But God commendeth (proved or demonstrated) his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” In later years I got saved.