On a Thursday in July, 2002 I received a message from my hometown. It was a message I’d been expecting for over 30 years. It told me that my Dad, Sammy Don Minefee, was dead, a death caused by an overdose of alcohol and drugs. From the time I was about 10 I came to realize that any day could be the day my Dad died, or committed suicide or simply wasn’t coming back home. Once when I was 11, he locked himself in a bathroom and told me to get a knife so he could kill himself. One night when I was in High School I had to pick him up off the floor where he had collapsed from drugs or the lack of them. I held him while he wept and had seizures in my arms. Other times I watched him drive in anger out of our yard so fast that I knew he would kill himself or someone else. So I had prepared myself for that day when I’d get a message from home that Dad was dead and that it wouldn’t be from old age.
Now, please understand my Dad believed in God and had accepted Jesus as his Savior. There were times I can remember my Dad in church, walking the aisle and rededicating his life. They were not many but I believed then and now they were genuine. In fact, he was there when I was saved. I looked up at him just before I walked the aisle and he nodded his head toward the altar. It wasn’t much but it was enough for a seven-year-old boy to know his Dad was saying, “Go on son, God’s waiting for you.”
About a year before he died I talked to him on the phone. He told me he was so sorry for everything he had done and everything he hadn’t done. He told me he knew he had left God out of his life for too long. I told him I loved him and forgave him. He wasn’t drunk and he was sincere. I believed him. Sammy had not lost God, and God had not lost Sammy.
All his life my Dad fought. As a kid he was a Golden Gloves champ and he fought anyone who he thought didn’t give him respect. He fought against the bottle, drugs and temptation, battles he thought he could win, but he was wrong. On his final day he fought a battle with alcohol and drugs and he lost his life. Sammy lost that battle because like many other times he thought he was strong when really he was weak. He thought he was tough but he was really brittle. He thought he was a man but he was really only a lost child who had wandered away from His Heavenly Father, alone and in danger.
Sammy, though, did win the most important battle of his life, even of eternity. A battle fought between heaven and hell for his soul and Sammy won that battle. Why when he had lost so many others? Because in this battle he called upon the name of the Lord and Jesus Christ fought the battle for him. Like Samson, the fatally flawed, Old Testament hero he was named after, he stood on the battlefield of eternity and God gave him the strength and grace of Jesus Christ and Sammy won the most important battle of all.
He failed at much and finally settled for mere existence and then even failed at that. But his life should count. I want his life to count. I have promised myself that I will tell the story of Sammy Minefee so that others can hear and the battle that will be won through his death will be more than what he won in his life. If one person hears and one person turns to God, then the life of Sammy Minefee will not be in vain.
I told you that when I accepted the Lord as my Savior, Dad was the last person I looked at before waling the aisle. His look gave me his approval, his support to walk that aisle. That nod of his head that said, “Go on son, God is waiting.” If he did nothing else in all his life, that nod helped a young boy to come to God. So today as I once again say goodbye to my Dad, Sammy Minefee and just like that day so many years ago I still can see his nod and know that he is telling all his kids, family and friends, “Go on in your life, because at the end, God is waiting.”
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