This is a complete and accurate transcript of the tape of the first oral history interview of Deborah J. Seymour (CN 316, T1) in the Archives of the Billy Graham Center. Nothing recorded has been omitted, except for any non-English phrases which could not be understood by the transcribers. If the transcriber was not completely sure of having gotten what the speaker said, "[?]" was inserted after the word or phrase in question. If the speech was inaudible or indistinguishable, "[unclear]" was inserted. Grunts and verbal hesitations, such as "ah" or "um" were usually omitted. Readers should remember that this is a transcription of spoken English, which, of course, follows a different rhythm and rule than written English. Non-English words have been put into italics.
... Three dots indicate what the interruption or break in the train of thought within the sentence on the part of the speaker.
.... Four dots indicate what the transcriber believes to be the end of an incomplete sentence.
() Words in parenthesis are asides made by the speaker.
[] Words in brackets are comments made by the transcriber.
This transcription was made by Robert Shuster and Steven Gertz and was completed July 1994.
Collection 316, Tape T1; Interview of Deborah J. Seymour by Robert Shuster, October 4, 1985.
SHUSTER: Okay, how about now?
SEYMOUR: Let's hope it works this time.
SHUSTER: Yes, this is definitely it. The needle [on the record volume gauge on the tape recorder] is moving.
SEYMOUR: Oh. Okay. [laughs]
SHUSTER: Okay. So rather that turn it off and start again, we'll just keep...continue while the going is good. This is an interview with Miss Deborah J. Seymour for the Archives of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. This interview took place on October the 4th, 1985, at 9:05 a.m. in the offices of the Graham Center Archives. Debbie, why don't we start with when and where you were born?
SEYMOUR: Okay. I was born on the 18th of February 1960 in Guernsey County, Ohio...
SHUSTER: Oh.
SEYMOUR: ...the town of Cambridge and my parents...well, my father was pastoring a very small denominational church. Well, it was really like a two...two church charge, two very small churches. And I was born while he and Mother were in their first years of the pastorate. And when I was about three years old (or maybe two and a half) anyway my...my family then took...moved to another pastorate in what was at that time the largest church in the denomination and had looked for a career there, possibly, for ten, twenty years pastoring this...this wonderful congregation. And at that time the denomination (the Churches of Christ in Christian Union) was beginning a pioneer work in the...in the highland of Papua New Guinea. And my...my mother and father had...had heard one missionary, the one man who had been out there, speak about the needs of the people. And they began to really pray and...and were really burdened for the New Guinea...for the people in the highlands, the southern highlands of Papua. And so Dad began to challenge the congregation to pray and [tape blank or containing only distorted sound for fifteen seconds] "...ye have not chosen me but I have chosen you and ordained you that you may go and bring forth fruit and your fruit shall remain. [John 15:16]" And when they got their heads together and realized the Lord really was calling them, my mother got sick. Because...she...she said, "Oh Lord...." In Bible school she said, "I'm willing to go anywhere and do anything you want me to." And then she realized the Lord was calling her, it just made her ill. And so she was praying. She said "Lord, how can I go to New Guinea? The people live in little grass huts and they hardly wear any clothes and how can I take my two little girls and my baby son over there?" And as she was kneeling by the bed, just...just in...in desperation, she found...her Bible...she opened her Bible. She saw...came across the verse in Isaiah that said, "All thy children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the peace of thy children. [Isaiah 54:13]" And she didn't even know that that verse was in Isaiah. And that was a great confirmation to her and through the years as each of us children left home at an early age to go to boarding school and so on, the Lord reconfirmed that to her each time. So, back to the congregation. When they found out that the Lord was calling Mother and Dad, they said, "Well, Pastor, we wouldn't have prayed so hard if we'd known we were praying our pastor away." [laughs] So that was a really exciting time for my parents. It was in, I believe, October (about this time) 1964, so it would have been twenty-four years ago this month that my parents did move to the Southern Highlands Province of New Guinea. And that's where I spent the next eight years, with the exception of one year on furlough.
SHUSTER: What are your parents' names?
SEYMOUR: Don and Betty Seymour.
SHUSTER: And your brother and sister?
SEYMOUR: Okay. I have an older sister, Martha, and she's a minister's wife in Alabama today and I have two younger brothers that were just both were married in July. Their names are Mark and David.
SHUSTER: Are they twins?
SEYMOUR: No. Mark is twenty-two and David is nineteen.
SHUSTER: And where was the congregation where you father ministered?
SEYMOUR: Yes, pardon me. That was in Lancaster, Ohio.
SHUSTER: Oh.
SEYMOUR: Yes.
SHUSTER: What are your earliest memories of growing up in Papua New Guinea?
SEYMOUR: Well, it's really...I...I suppose one of the earliest memories is a...a rainy day, something like this [it was raining outside the Center building during the interview]. It rains a lot in New Guinea. Wet season and dry season were the only seasons. And it would rain sometimes (it seemed like and I don't think I'm wrong) for two or three weeks in a row, just continuously. Drizzle and then hard downpours. And when we arrived at the government station of Nipa in the Southern Highlands Province, there was a big old house...well, maybe it wasn't old. But it a huge house and it was like living in a barn. And it was on stilts and that is where our family moved in because there was tribal fighting in the valley when we arrived in New Guinea in 1964 and the government patrol officers would not let us move in for the first six months until it calmed down.
SHUSTER: This was the Australian government [which held the territories under a United Nations mandate]
SEYMOUR: At that time it was the territory of Papua New Guinea. It achieved its independence, I believe, in 1975 and now is the country of Papua. So on that rainy day I remember that some of the people were...they...they were always ready to be anywhere near the white people because we were so much a novelty at that time. And they had been...people outside of our own house and when it began raining or whatever, they took shelter underneath the house, because it was up on stilts. And they would build a fire. And I remember my dad running out there just frantically and getting them to put the fire out because, you know, it could have burnt the house down. [Laughs]
SHUSTER: Sure.
SEYMOUR: And things like that. I remember just...all...all the black faces. But the open interest, because white children were uncommon at that time and I remember that people would come up and touch your hair [Shuster chuckles] or feel your skin or just.... Oh, and the mothers especially would make over [?] children.
SHUSTER: Did you pick up the language early?
SHUSTER: Yes. The Melanesian Pidgin English that is the trade language and...well, it actually is the national language of New Guinea today, along with English, which is very prominent in use as well. But it was just like that [snaps fingers]. It's a very...what they call a [brief gap on tap] inner [?] language, perhaps, something on that order. Kind of a...a broken English with some Portuguese and Dutch and German words thrown in and....
SHUSTER: What kind of games did you play as a child? What were your usual activities?
SEYMOUR: Well, that...that was very exciting because there were...there were a lot of things that perhaps if...if I had grown up in the States I would have never been able to do living in a...in a city and....but out in the open country as...as we grew older we got to venture farther afield. But we would often play with the New Guinea children. We played jacks with the girls. They didn't have jacks but they used stones. And different chase games, which were more American in nature. And, oh, our imaginations just went wild. We build little towns and forts and...and later when we did move into the valley, my father engineered the building of our mission airstrip and it was done all by hand, with a crew of about two hundred and fifty men, that built...just carved the side of this one mountain out and... and flattened...made the ground level enough so a plane could land, even though it was a bit uphill.
SHUSTER: Uh-huh.
SEYMOUR: And.... But while they were in the process of shaving that mountain away and storing [?] it on the other side [laughs] we built little...like...tunneled little caves in there [laughs] in the side of the hill. It was really exciting doing things like that. I remember we had a...a secret club with the missionary kids that was so fun and stuff like that and a little village that we made and made up our own language. So it...it was really exciting and we got to go on treks through the mountains and swim in the river, things like that.
SHUSTER: On treks into the mountains, was it just to swim in the river or was it going someplace else?
SEYMOUR: Well, the river actually ran through....
SHUSTER: Which river was that?
SEYMOUR: That was...it's the Nimbe [?] River. It runs through the Nimbe [?] Valley and it was...like, to one side of the valley were nine thousand foot mountains and six thousand foot on this side. So we used to trek up the six thousand foot mountains. We never did actually...well, I think one time we got all the way to the top and went the ridge and came down at the town where we had lived originally, but our home burned there in 1966 and.... So that was the big trek. But we used to go sometimes on treks even with Mother or Dad but us children would go sometimes by ourselves and climb up the mountain and then swim in the river when it was low enough, when it had not been raining too hard.
SHUSTER: What tribes or peoples were your parents working with?
SEYMOUR: Well, they worked with the Kar tribe (which was the town where we lived...
SHUSTER: Is that...
SEYMOUR: ...that was the village of Kar).
SHUSTER: ...K-A?
SEYMOUR: Yeah, it sounds like it. They spell it K-A-R. But.... And then we lived first with the Utipia tribe. And there were just a number of small tribes that had been on very...like their territory, their territory...[indicating the land was divided between many small tribes]
SHUSTER: Uh-huh.
SEYMOUR: ...and anybody that crossed over the line would be killed. Kind of enemy tribes. But with the coming of the gospel, the people made peace. Although in these years the last...well, since 1975, things have...have erupted again.
SHUSTER: Oh.
SEYMOUR: The old disputes over land and over paybacks that were never paid back because people accepted the Lord. And so its kind of sucked the Christians in again, although the Christians have not been...have not been act...actively fighting, to my knowledge. But their...their sentiments are with their line or their tribe. And so its been a difficult thing, especially in the early eighties, I think, is when this...and even to the present.
SHUSTER: What causes this eruption again of feeling?
SEYMOUR: [Seymour coughs] Excuse me. It's been [pauses] the killings that have to be paid back either by death of someone in.... Like, somebody from your tribe kills somebody from my tribe. That has to be repaid either by the death of somebody from that tribe (it doesn't really matter who, I don't think) or else by paying money or at...at that time it was like pigs and pearls, shells were the currency.
SHUSTER: But after all this time, what caused the...what causes the eruption again?
SEYMOUR: Oh, the old...the old feuds that are...the bitterness is still there. Because, why, some of the people have accepted the Lord and there is a growing church in the Southern Highlands of...of New Guinea today, not everyone has become Christians and so maybe a young man whose father has been killed or.... And also the land disputes, of where people, I guess, begin to kind of move in more and more and encroach on...on the other's territory or whatever as time has gone by and things were more peaceful. So those boundary definitions have become an issue as well.
SHUSTER: What exactly was your parents' work?
SEYMOUR: Okay. At the very beginning, they were working...my father was in preaching. He would trek to villages far away from...from our home in Nipa originally and then when we moved to....
SHUSTER: What would far away be for you? Twenty miles? Hundred miles?
SEYMOUR: That's a...that's a good question. Well, I guess it's...you know, when there aren't roads...
SHUSTER: Okay.
SEYMOUR: ...anything seems far away...you know like six, ten hours in the...anywhere and maybe even more. There were times when he would go on extended treks clear across different language groups. And I remember, I think, once or twice, he took a group of the Bible school men over to the Nazarene station at Kujak [?] which was several days walk away...and things like that, but usually they were evangelism tours and preaching, through an interpreter initially and later in...in the tribal language Anganghelin [?], and then after the fire...after we moved to Kar, my father was really involved in a lot of construction, for he was a carpenter by trade and the mission station was nonexistent at that time as far as buildings and so on, and the other pioneer missionaries had left by then and so we were...for a time we were the only ones there along with a single nurse. So Dad was really involved in construction and...and also the beginning of a Bible school. He was doing a bit of agricultural work (he'd grown up on a farm) and was trying to get cattle raising and chicken...(what do you call it, raising chicken?)
SHUSTER: Yeah, sure.
SEYMOUR: Yeah. [Laughs] ...going as well. Right before...this is right before we left for our first furlough, too, and so he also engineered to go in the airstrip by that time and...and other missionaries would come and a workshop was set up [pauses] which had been really just like a pit-saw at first and...and a sawmill which was out in the open. My grandfather had raised the money for the sawmill and brought it over and set it up and helped my father....
SHUSTER: So your grandfather visited you in Papua New Guinea?
SEYMOUR: For three months and he was [laughs]....
SHUSTER: Was he also a carpenter?
SEYMOUR: Yes, he was, and he was a minister too and a farmer, and it was funny because he really got homesick for my grandmother, and especially by the end of the three months, he was just ready to go, and...and he used to tell this story (he died just this past April or this April of '85) and I heard him tell this story of telling how he saw a bird fly one morning as...as he walked outside just before breakfast or something and he thought to himself, "Little bird! You got wings and you can fly away! Now what are you doing here?" [Both Seymour and Shuster laughs] So....
SHUSTER: And what about your mother? What was her work?
SEYMOUR: Mother was...in the beginning was basically taking care of us children, but as the tribe began to settle down, she was able to...to begin Bible classes with the women from the tribe, and even at first when...when (this would have been '66, '67 and maybe in '68) the tribeswomen from the two different tribes - the Kars and the Utipia - would come on two different days, the women, because they would not sit down together because they were from a different group. But there came a time shortly after we left on furlough, and another woman came and took over the women's ministry.... (Incidently, there were about five hundred women meeting total at the...at the time, I think, when my mother was teaching two days a week.) And...but the women began to come on the same day and those barriers were finally taken away. And that was a really...a wonderful time. And I think another thing that really made a big impression on me as a child was seeing how the people, as they began to come to faith in...in Jesus (I believe my parents were there two years before they saw anyone converted, two, two and a half years) and they began to leave the darkness and the spirit worship...ancestor worship and just spirit worship period. Like, they believed that the spirit of their ancestors would come back to haunt them, to inflict sickness on them if they didn't offer a sacrifice of a chicken or a pig or something like that. And just being a part of seeing that...that spiritual darkness lift and how the people would break the stone that they believed...well, they believed that the spirits would inhabit like a weed or a...a tree or a little pond body of water but also stones that they would come across that were odd shaped. And it's very interesting. There seems to be no knowledge of a former civilization that was there, but these stones, many of them, were mortar and pestle, like for grinding...
SHUSTER: Uh-huh.
SEYMOUR: ...corn and corn was...was virtually unknown in the Southern Highlands. Dad brought in some seeds and we planted some. So let's see...yeah. Anyway, they would break these stones with their axes and throw them...throw them away.
SHUSTER: So these were...had some sacred significance for them?
SEYMOUR: Right. Right. They believed the spirits inhabited them and there was a whole...like...like a cult that the men were...were involved in. Women were not. It was...they were just kept in fear. And incidentally, the women were lower than pigs on a hierarchical scale [chuckles].
SHUSTER: How do you mean that?
SEYMOUR: Well, like they practiced polygamy and it was kind of, like, the purpose of life for any of them was to grow up to buy a wife, to have some children: some sons to carry on the name and daughters to sell and get more pigs to buy more wives to have more children to get more pigs to buy more wives [chuckles]. You know, just...and...so the women were...they did all the work as far as care for children (the young children) and the gardening, preparation of food, just the...the care. The men would at times cut
firewood, although usually the women did. The men would sit around and count their pigs. They'd use little pig counters, which were pieces of bamboo, and it was kind of like the Calvin Klein sign or whatever [a status symbol] [chuckles], how many pigs you had and they were also the warriors and that kind of thing. And they would hunt in the bush sometimes and get cassowaries and ostr...a type of ostrich native to New Guinea, and possums and wild pigs and whatever they would find.
SHUSTER: Would you...did you go to the classes your mother taught, the...?
SEYMOUR: Sometimes just out of interest. But usually we...we children...by the time that...that Mama began teaching those classes, Martha and I were in grade school, a correspondence course out of Baltimore, Maryland, the Calvert schooling system.
SHUSTER: Right.
SEYMOUR: And a lot of times we would run out to ask her a question [laughs] and go back in and...and do our lesson.
SHUSTER: What kinds of questions or what kinds of things were the women in the class interested in?
SEYMOUR: Well, coming from a more or less very authoritarian kind of life, they were, I think at the beginning especially, just able to take in anything that was said. And then as...as time went on and they began accepting the Lord, they began to see how faith in Jesus Christ...kind of like what we're learning here at the Billy Graham Center [ where the Wheaton Graduate School was housed] in Ed...Ed[ucational] Ministries program: the theory, the practice, the practical implications of what this faith in Jesus Christ would mean. Did it really mean that they didn't have to be afraid of the evil spirits anymore? The way they should relate to their husbands. Also the way that...that they should relate to their idea of having children, because abortion was practiced. With women having a child a year, there...there was only so much they could take. And I think at times if twins were born, they...they would kill one of them. A lady had triplets while we were there. But she came...she came the hospital and all three were...were retained, obviously through the missionaries' influence. But...so things like that, the practical applications of their faith and how to...even many times the women responded before the men and would somehow keep strong even though they were being beaten by their husbands for this new belief and so on.
SHUSTER: What happened when a wife who was in a polygamous marriage became a Christian? What...?
SEYMOUR: She stayed in...in that relationship and the only stipulation that...that was made when the church began to be formed was that the pastors and the elders be the husbands of only one wife. And so men that had more than one wife were excluded from that, although not from membership and not from active participation and the women as well.
SHUSTER: Uh-huh. And if a man with several wives became a Christian, then they maintained the marriages?
SEYMOUR: Yes, oh yes. I know that...that other missions in other places and I...I...I could not say for sure, perhaps, even missionaries within the highlands of New Guinea themselves were trying to enforce monogamy, perhaps. I don't know that for a fact, but I know that there were some mission groups which were much more in...in probably in that sense conservative, in the...the kind of Western thinking that they brought. But in...in the case of...of the Christian Union Mission, that was not practiced at all. But the polygamy that was already existing was to be carried on. Because if the woman was sent...I mean, it would just disrupt the whole society. And kind of like in Africa, I guess, it was discovered after the missionaries tried to enforce monogamy among Christians that the women that they sent back to...to their fathers or were sent back to their father's house actually became village prostitutes, which was a worse fate than....
SHUSTER: Did you ever go with your father on one of his evangelism treks? What were they like? What happened on those treks?
SEYMOUR: The meetings were usually set up before...before he arrived and he would just [pauses] come in and preach and then, you know....
SHUSTER: How were they set up? Were there already Christians in...?
SEYMOUR: Yes, at that time. Because I went on treks with him during second term, after I had come back from boarding school. There was a time when the Calvert system was discontinued and I went to an Australian boarding school in another...in the Western Highlands Province, but then we got our own teacher, so I came...came back. And by that time, the...the fruit that had been born through the early evangelism treks was sufficient that there were congregations and so the pastors of these congregations were often Bible pupils in training at the main station. They would set up the meetings when they went out for the weekend and when Dad arrived they would just holler and everybody would come to the meeting! And then we would have a meal and a loving meeting, or, you know, depending. And then usually before nightfall my dad would leave or we would find somewhere [?] we would stay over night. I remember one time we went as a whole family and we stayed overnight. And I remember all slept in one [bed]. The pastor was just lovely. He gave us his house so we slept on the one big bed which they had for their whole family. It just boards, probably saplings, little poles with the woven cane over it and we laid down in that[?].
SHUSTER: Were these meetings usually just attended then by the Christians?
SEYMOUR: No. No. No, non-Christians would come because of the real interest that...that was there. Interest in white people, but beyond that, the things they saw happening with...with their fellow village people and the change.
SHUSTER: Such as?
SEYMOUR: The denunciation of the evil spirits...no longer participating in that, and, I...I would guess, say, the life of faith that was begun to be established, the singing, the...the worship of Jesus that was so different than what they had been accustomed to, and...and the good witness and testimony in many cases. You know, there were always people that would come to the Lord and go through the classes, and then finally be baptized after a year (I'm not sure what it was [how long they had to wait before they were baptized]), and then just go back, and.... But for those who...who were strong in their faith and had accepted the Lord Jesus Christ [pauses] sincerely, their witness was a...a definite [pauses] something that brought others.
SHUSTER: Would the preaching usually be in a church building, or...?
SEYMOUR: It depended. If there was a...a congregation had formed or made a building...yes, it was, and...and if not, open air.
SHUSTER: How long would a service be?
SEYMOUR: Oh. [Laughs] It dep...it depended on the kind of meeting it was. There were times like when people would come in to Kar from all over the Nimbe [?] Valley, the...the plateau, and from the end of the valley and upper valley, and thousands of people gathering, maybe one, two, even upwards of that high (I don't really know), and the meetings would go upward two or three hours and maybe...maybe more. The...the meetings in the villages were probably an hour and a half two hours. [unclear]
SHUSTER: And what did they consist of?
SEYMOUR: They would...they would sing, they would testify [laughs]. Anyway it was really funny, they would...if somebody started whispering, they...it had to go, "There were [unclear]." I think this was part of their own culture. Somebody would stand up and tell that person to...to be quiet [Shuster laughs], and somebody else would stand up and tell that person...tell that person to be quiet, and it... [both laugh] and...and that would go on, but not always. That was probably from a business meeting that they had when they had been discussing what was going on with the church (and I have seen that at different times) and then preaching and exhortation and prayer.
SHUSTER: And what about music?
SEYMOUR: They...at that time, all they had was like a Jews's...Jew's harp made of bamboo or the drums that they used in...in the dances and the spirit-worship ceremonies, and they didn't...they didn't use those in the worship services at all. The Jew's harp because they were really quite soft and the drums, I'm not sure why, but they didn't. Perhaps because they were tainted[?].
SHUSTER: [unclear]
SEYMOUR: They would sing [pauses] songs that were...perhaps some in the Pidgin language. There were Pidgin hymnal when they got their own faith, so they would sing Pidgin songs and Dad began translating a couple songs into Ungahw [?] for them. But it was really...it was funny, too, because their music consists of three tones (like the three black keys on the...on the piano...the three that are close to that) and that was about the total...total range of their music. All their songs were just those three tones, so Dad would, you know, would try to teach them the ...the tones and melodies that...like Western, and he would go back a couple of weeks later, and...and they would be singing the same song [Shuster chuckles] with three tones. [laughs] That with some variation, you know.
SHUSTER: When your dad preached, what...what kind of themes from the gospel tend to get the most response?
SEYMOUR: I think, [pauses] first of all, that the evangelistic message of...of Jesus Christ dying for our sins. But so much...in a way, the pre-understanding before someone could accept the Lord at that point had to be done over a period of time. And those...those first couple of years were...and even in the classes, clarifying, because, like, when we came...when we arrived, they were [unclear]. We came in an airplane to the main government station, and people knew we'd come in an airplane and they said, "Well, you came out of the sky." Because, you know, God is in heaven. And they said, "Well, you came from there. Did you see Jesus before you came?" And just misconceptions like...like that, they had to somehow be explained, really. But the salvation message and God's love, and that was one of the probably one that was responded to. It...it took some doing because in their language, there was no word for love. Only life. Even in Pidgin, there was no word for love, and I thought, it kind of came out God's...God's mercy... "Sadi" [?], which is like the word "sorry" in English, and even the song, "Jesus Loves Me," "Jesus i Sadi [?] on me," is "Jesus is sorry but merciful," and so those kinds of...of things, and then not hating your enemies obviously, [unclear].
SHUSTER: Was there anything in their tribal religion that made them more receptive to the gospel or what....?
SEYMOUR: Like redemptive analogies and...no, to my knowledge, no. Their religion was basically.... I remember in 1966. Our family attended the (or we were there) at the last big feast for like the whole lower area of the...of the Nimbe [?] Valley to the long and short spirits, and their...their...their "tankama" [?] which are, like, the little old ladies who are...supposedly eat children and...and are witches, I suppose. But they're always played by a man. They were doing their thing and then the men of the village doing a dance with the...it looked like a spider web, and each man would...would hold one of the...the strings out from the central part, and it was just kind of dancing in a circle, and they would make a really ominous sound. And it's very much a man's [?] religion...just appeasing the evil spirits, the long and short spirits, and then they would have a dance as well, which was also more social and a feast...killing, killing pigs, and they would...they would raise their pigs and save them up for, like, two to three years to have...to have these feasts, and meat was not a regular part of their diet unless it was, like, occasional possum or rat or snake...things like that. So in their religion, not to my knowledge, because it was either appeasing the evil spirits at large or the ancestral spirits, and it was interesting to notice that in their...in their tradition, they did...they did have a story (a number of stories) like a man was in this huge flood and he...he made a...a little boat and was saved, and also the man who was swallowed by a big fish and he somehow escaped...things like that, you know, that were....
SHUSTER: Did you have any contacts with the...the cargo cults?
SEYMOUR: Yes, yes, [pauses for a long time] and there was...there was always the danger of that. And especially at the beginning and even later on through, were people...were there...was there interest in the missionaries because of...of the material things they could gain, or was it because they were truly interested in the gospel of the Lord Jesus? [Pauses] There were people who would kind of hear the gospel and then...then with some of that teaching developed another side to it and then come out as...as some kind of cargo cult leaders. I remember one man. He had obviously heard some kind of gospel teaching, because he said, "I'm half God and half Satan," you know, this half and this half. And he said...but he took an airstrip marker from the corner of an airstrip at the end of the valley and put it up on top of one of the mountains and he said, "On such and such a day, I'm going to lift up this marker, and all of these, you know, bolts and cloth and beads and soap are gonna come flying out of the ground just like a geyser or something, and you people are gonna be rich if you follow me," and things like that. And I guess one of our...I don't know if I remember correctly at least if it was a patrol officer, he stopped through our station at Kar on the way to the main government station at Nipa and he...he...I guess he had the man under arrest and he's like on the back of the motorcycle and he was transporting him to the...to the jail up in the mountains.
SHUSTER: Are cargo cults illegal there?
SEYMOUR: Well, they...they were just trying to...to, I guess, stifle it. I...I'm not real sure. If my memory serves me right, and I think it does. Right. It was...it was not encouraged to say the least and so they were detaining him. Maybe 'cause he took their airstrip marker [laughs]...I don't know.
SHUSTER: How common...how common are these cults?
SEYMOUR: [Long pause] Among our people, it was not real...real common except for that instance and there were another...I suppose other ones too that I didn't hear of. But then, like, on the coast of New Guinea I remember my father one time shared with a Lutheran missionary who was just pouring out his heart to my dad and was just so disillusioned because, I...I guess this missionary's father had initiated the work on the coast, and the [Lutheran] Synod thought that, I guess, between the two of them close to fifty to seventy-five years yet, and then come to find out that somehow the missionaries themselves had been upheld as the...as the cult leaders. And it was, like, did the people want to learn the gospel and religion and go to school and do all these things so that they can find out the white man's secret of power. And...and so it...it was, like, he was realizing that all what he had understood to be belief and acceptance was somehow just false and it...there was an ulterior motive behind it, so in...there it was prevalent and I don't know how many.... I've been gone fourteen years now.
SHUSTER: How...how about yourself? When did you become a Christian?
SEYMOUR: When I was seven, and I remember as...as a little child (three and four years old) knowing that...that Jesus had died for me (and somehow I know all of that), but one day I was inside reading a book of poems about...about the Lord Jesus, and God's Holy Spirit just convicted me through one of those poems, and it somehow dawned on me at that moment that I in part was responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, and that my sins were why He had to die. And my sins at that time, of course, mostly consisted of disobeying my parents [laughs] and well, arguing with my brothers and sisters and things like that, but I knew that those were not things that Jesus would want me to do 'cause in his teachings, those things are not encouraged, Anyway, and so...but it was also a very real sense of...of...of guilt for sin, and did stuff.... I don't know, different people at different ages feel like they have propensities towards doing [pauses] or participating in the cosmic evil or whatever, you know, in the larger sense, just evil in general, and...and I guess even a sense of the dark side, and...and the call of...of darkness and temptation and stuff. So anyway, I just...I just in that moment...I asked Mama to come pray with me, and...and she did, and I confessed my sins and...and was saved that afternoon. And my...my walk with the Lord was my Christian development and...and faith development...you know. He was obviously involved in a lot of learning what it meant to obey my parents all of the time, and...and I wasn't always successful at that. But that was a real problem at that time.
SHUSTER: Why was that?
SEYMOUR: Well, because I just...there were times when I didn't want to. There was just something down inside that would kind of...kind of like the...the, I guess the...what the Bible would call the carnal mind. Even though I knew some that Jesus had...had died for me and I'd accepted Him by faith, there was still something inside that would respond to that, temptation, which is the willfulness. And so my walk with the Lord...was I...I was really reading the Bible from about nine years...nine, ten, eleven (before then I...I would read it too) but with much greater interest at those ages. [pauses] And then that was also during the time when I was in boarding school over at...in the Western Highlands and then...now I came back to the mission station at Kar. And at that time, I began to understand that this struggle was kind of a perpetual thing that...kind of the Roman Senate that I, you know, all my members that I wanted to do right, but for the life of me, you know, if a situation came up where there was an opportunity to do wrong, you know, seven or eight times out of ten that propensity to...to go toward that. And the...the Christian Union...the Churches of Christ in Christian Union is in the western Armenian in tradition, and though they often...also missionaries, different ones, would come and share. I remember, like, the United Methodist people, as they're called now. One was United Church really, kind of a...a.... I suppose they would be more Presbyterian, now that I think of it. The United Church of Australia and New Zealand had a work near...near Nipa and we had become acquainted with missionaries and I remember one time a missionary from there came down and...and was speaking to the body of missionaries at Kar station and us children were present at the...at the meeting and he was preaching along this and he said, And that's why we have to sin every day and so in thought, word or deed, or something, somehow," and I was just, "Oh, that's why this problem's been going on." [Shuster chuckles] And yet I wasn't satisfied because I felt like, if Jesus could save me, do I have to always be up and down and in and out, in the dark, in the light, in the dark, in the light, and I was just really desperate over that and finally...and so I continued seeking because I...I didn't feel like that was real. You know, if I'm committed to Jesus, I'm committed to him or else I'm not, and so when I...finally when I was twelve years old, I had also...there were also some other problems of...of my own human development that were going on at the time, and I had really withdrawn and gone into myself and alienated myself from my parents and...and my dad is like my kindred spirit (we're just really close) and he knew that something was wrong. I mean, he just felt like he couldn't reach me anymore and...and so he and mother just really began to pray for me for about two weeks, and...and the Holy Spirit, just in answer to their prayers, was working in my heart. And at that time, it was...it was often fear that the Lord was coming back and I would be left behind because I knew that in my heart this...this state of...you know, was going on and...and that although I was giving assent to...to Christian faith that there was something inside that was against that. And so I would get up (I couldn't sleep)...and I'd get up in the night and sometimes I would even walk down the hall and just sit down inside their room and watch then as they slept, just creep into their rooms in the comfort of somehow [pauses slightly] I don't know, I thought if the Lord came and took them that somehow I'd hang onto their coattails or what [both laugh], I don't know what I thought but it was just kind of comforting. Well, one morning about four o'clock, Daddy got up and when he came out of the restroom I said, "Daddy, would you come and pray with me?" And I just really...I didn't know...I didn't understand the theology of the whole thing. All I knew was that I was at the end of my rope, and I did not want to go on in that kind of...of spiritual experience of being in and out, up and down. And I just said, "Lord, forgive me for my sin and take my whole life. I'm completely yours," and no doubt you are familiar what...Wesleyan Armenian teaching entails a second definite work of grace which other people call total surrender, consecration and...and so that was very definitely an element. And also at...at that time as...as I surrendered completely to...to the Lord, His Holy Spirit did, in that way, just like, I guess, like Peter said in Acts 15:9, was it? He was talking about the experience at Cornelius's house and when he gave an apology before the Jerusalem Council, and he said, "The Lord...that the Lord purified their hearts by faith even as ours," and it was...it was that...a sense of that: of freedom, the problems that I had been in, and...and just this sense of being so clean inside. I mean, it was just like a high for...for weeks. I just felt...I would get up in the morning and go and sit on this little bench outside our house that Mama had...had made and like a little...among the trees and the flowers and around the house and...and I would read the Bible and I would...I would hear the Nimbe [?] River as it rolled on by and just such a sense of...of being so right with the Lord, and as I...as I've walked in faith now (from that time really) in fellowship with the Lord.... That's not to say that there haven't been times when I've been tempted and that I have...I have failed the Lord and I have...I have sinned. And yet I...I guess the one thing that gives me so much encouragement is...is not that we can't sin, but that if we allow the Holy Spirit to work in our hearts and...and to have control of our lives on a day-to-day basis, reaffirming that...that He is the Lord of our lives, there is power to not sin, and that for me is...is such a blessing. And that's why I'm living to communicate to other people as well because I've so deeply sensed that struggle in myself, and from that time (from age twelve until now), there has never been...just like some.... You know, I know different people would...would say, "Well, that's just faith development or human development or whatever," but as far as that...that sense of...of response to temptation that would...like something inside me against my own will was drawing me, I realized that our...that in our humanness that we can be tempted, but the carnal mind is in enmity against God and is not subject to the law of God and can't be in that sense and that drawing towards enmity and rebellion against God, that element was gone after that time.
SHUSTER: You mentioned that when you...you first converted was while you were reading some poems....
SEYMOUR: Yeah.
SHUSTER: Do you happen to recall which one it was that...?
SEYMOUR: Do you know, I don't. I don't. We left...we left those books in New Guinea. It was like...it was like two lines. Just...I vaguely recall something about...it was about His birth and it was something, something..."And early came to have Christ Jesus for His name." But somehow (I don't know why it was then) but those...those were...did stuck...stick in my mind, and just...it was like the light came on, and...and I knew that Jesus had died for me.
SHUSTER: When did you first feel called to be a missionary?
SEYMOUR: Well, that was a...a very definite experience, too. We came on furlough in 1973, shortly after the crisis experience of...of complete consecration to the Lord and that fall (we came home in the summer of '73)...and that fall, I enrolled in...at a Christian high school and that was in Kentucky, and it was....
SHUSTER: Which one? Do you remember?
SEYMOUR: It was called Mt. Carmel High School, founded by Dr. [unclear] McConnell, a 1924 graduate of Asbury College [chuckles], and it was begun as a ministry to the Appalachian people and to the Brevet County people who were known for their moonshining and feuding and everything. And "Bloody Brevet" is today called "Beautiful Brevet" in a large part due to Miss McConnell's influence. And my parents had gone to that high school back in the fifties (and to Bible school there, to the Kentucky Mountain Bible Institute) and so my sister Martha had come home at age thirteen from New Guinea. She had traveled with some other missionaries that were coming to the States and she had gone to Mt. Carmel. And then when I was thirteen, I went to Mt. Carmel as well. And it was in my freshman year there, a missionary (I think it was Dr. Marshall Cavet [?] of...he was with OMS in Ecuador) came and spoke at one of the missionary services. I think it was the Monday night missionary prayer meeting and...and then that...that evening as I went home (or went back to the dorm) and I just hopped in bed and I was starting to pray and it was only like...I...I was just praying on and then in a very...like a voice inside my heart I could hear, just...not audible but very definitely, "Just be quiet. I'm gonna say something to you." And I mean it was like "Ohhh," and in...in that...in those moments, the Lord just let me know that He wanted me to...to work in...at that time...well, this is what it was. "I want you to go to Ecuador." "To do what, Lord?" I said. "To preach for me." And I thought, "Well, this is strange. I'm gonna wake up here in the morning and I will be here and it will be so hazy." And...and within that time period (I think...I think the next day actually) it was as I was...I was looking in the Scripture. I don't recommend doing this because I know its really subjective but I...there was a passage in Isaiah....
SHUSTER: Isaiah again.
SEYMOUR: Chapter forty-two, this time, verses six and seven. I didn't know that that was there either. [Shuster laughs] I hadn't read through Isaiah obviously, but...but there it was, "I the Lord have called thee in righteousness." I think it's a messianic passage. I will hold your hand and I will keep thee and give thee as a covenant to the people in my time, to open blind eyes and to bring out prisoners to freedom [unclear]." And that was a confirmation...a very...in a very real sense. And as you know, well, I hadn't been a missionary in Ecuador yet [both laugh], but...but the desire to work with Latin American people began at that time, and so I started studying Spanish in preparation for that. I applied the preliminary application at age fifteen to my home mission board, the Church of Christ in Christian Union. I also work with another mission board, which is World Gospel Mission, joint sponsorship there. But that...that had happened, and from that time, the calling...knowing that the Lord had called me to...to the ministry and to missions has been kind of like a rudder on my life through those years in high school when my parents were either in the Caribbean, having transferred fields, and then Bible college for three...three and a half years before they came home.
SHUSTER: Which Bible college?
SEYMOUR: My own denomination's college, Circleville Bible College in Circleville [Ohio] where the national headquarters are.
SHUSTER: When you came back to the United States, what kind of view or understanding did you find that Christians had of the church in New Guinea?
SEYMOUR: Well, I think their understanding was mostly what they had seen through missionaries' slides, through missionaries' speaking and through the missionaries' titles - mission paper. And...and so their understanding, I think, of the church was that those people twelve thousand miles from here are getting converted to the Lord. [Pauses] I...I don't know that there was any definite impression except that there was a...or a sense of real community with those believers out there. We were a part of them and they were a part of us through the missionaries and...and through God's Spirit who is working both in us and in them. Perhaps there were some people who did really feel that way. That's the way I feel that missions is and perhaps I'm just reading into what they feel [laughs] my own feeling. But I know there was a deep desire to...to help and to...to spread the work onward. Missionary giving was probably in those times until...until recent years, the missionary giving was probably highest at that time for...for the denomination as a whole, in the pioneer work days of Papua New Guinea. So a real desire to help even when we didn't, you know...and there were people who even though it was thousands of miles away and took about three thousand dollars just for (Is that right? Yeah.) a round-trip ticket, who went on work teams. You know my grandfather came out there with a sawmill because that was such a...such a big need. Dad would go out into the forest and...and to do the chain saw and fell tree and then would cut it up with a...with a...like a pit saw, but then to get any kind of wood that was usable for his carpenter's aesthetic taste, you know, [Shuster laughs] for making houses for the teachers...school teachers and missionaries and there was a primary Pidgin school that was also formed there on station and national features that taught in schools to...to just, you know, building their homes. So there was a sawmill and then a more refined sawmill later that was...money was raised for, electricity with a diesel (yeah) generator that people raised the money for and had shipped out to New Guinea, so....
SHUSTER: How do you think it affected you to grow up as a missionary kid?
SEYMOUR: I think, number one, it...it made it a lot easier for the Lord to call me in.... Well, I don't know. Maybe not for the Lord. [Shuster chuckles] You know, He can do anything, but I was...I can say I was probably a lot better missionary material for having been a missionary kid.
SHUSTER: In what way?
SEYMOUR: Okay, just having...having grown up among people who didn't do things the way Americans do. I suppose more than anything, to realize that just a million ways of ethnocentricism...the American way is not necessarily the best way. It may be, but it...it may not work in other cultures. And so that and just having, I think, experienced love from those people because, I mean they were really...they were so giving. Now were if you were their enemies from...from a tribe, one of their...another enemy tribe, that was completely different. But among themselves, they were so...the women were so loving. I mean, these old ladies would come up. They'd do this, tickle you under your chin. [Both laugh]. They...they loved to do that and give us sweet potatoes they had just...they had maybe baked that morning in...in the action of their fire, and just anything they could do to...to show their appreciation and their interest and I think just their...a...a sense of love in...in a way for children. That was a really positive...positive, reinforcing experience, and...and then the...the ability to see that other peoples can...can give and receive love and it's not just only in...in one culture and one way and these certain sets of rules and regulations that govern society or what we follow, but being open and flexible with them. And the exposure just to, like, other Europeans, other missionaries from...or Europeans and other missionaries, yeah. In...in those ways. I think as far as people went, it was only the best. It was very [unclear] and also living from day to day, seeing people would come to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. I think that really built in a belief in His power, seeing it, living with people. You know, some of those men who came to the Lord and became pastors were ones that walked around with the battle scars. One pastor, I remember he couldn't walk right because he had an arrowhead still in the back of his knee and he would walk with a very pronounced limp. But the love for the Lord, and...and the hate for the enemy that was gone. It was a powerful testimony, I think. So....
SHUSTER: You mentioned that your first house burned down.
SEYMOUR: Yeah.
SHUSTER: Well, how did that happen?
SEYMOUR: Well, my mother was baking bread and it was during the dry season. At that time we were living in Lasea [?]. It was 1966...and, I think, in May of...of 1966. And we had what was called a sleep house and about...a walkway...it would be a hundred yards between it and the cookhouse and that was just the way these buildings had been purchased from another mission that decided they weren't going to locate there after all, so we lived.... Daddy was up the valley in another village on that morning and the children were outside...outside playing. My mom was breaking...baking bread in the cookhouse and a cinder flew out the chimney, landed in the thatch roof of...of the kitchen, and everything was dry just like tinder. And...but my sister Martha was playing with a little New Guinean girl, and the girl said, "Ohhhh, fire," and...and just...and Martha ran in and told Mama. Here's Mama sick [unclear], comes wandering out. [Shuster laughs] She looks out, it really is a fire, comes running back in, drags out a bucket of water. There was a creek down over like this...this little hill 'cause the...the house was on a little knoll away from the main road, and there was a creek down there. Well, by the time she got back out with a bucket of water, half the roof was...was up in flames and so I...that little girl running toward the people in the village, and they came. They saw...they saw the flames, and so the people just began...I mean, there was a little refrigerator about three feet tall...they just were...turned that end over end, took it out of the kitchen and yanked the sink right out of the wall that Dad had built, you know, had built it in, and then the wind was strong that day and so it carried the flames to the sleep house or to the living room and the bedrooms, and so everything, everything just went up in smoke. My dad's seven year's of...of sermon notes from his pastorate in the States and our...just most of...two-thirds of...of our possessions. People...but they continued running in and out. Somebody would grab the camera off the wall...a nail in the wall and brought it to Mom and so she had to hang it around her neck. She said, "Very well," [both laugh] and she started taking pictures of the house burning down, and...and just different things. The sewing machine came out without a cover because Mother had been sewing. So they grabbed the machine but the cover burned up. Stuff like that. Our clothes, the blankets and everything. We were pretty much almost destitute. And Dad's commentaries [on the Bible] and the encyclopedia and things like that. But the one big thing that really had an impact on me was that people from our church back there in the states, the Lancaster church, had sent us some real nice things for Christmas: toys, Barbie dolls and all these fabulous changes of clothes. And my sister had like this baby doll with a beautiful lavender dress. But Mama said, "You need to keep them in a box under my bed. And you can't play with them. You need to keep them nice and save them for later when you can appreciate them more." So we had one or two grubby little dolls [laughs] and, wouldn't you know, those burnt up and this beautiful little China tea set that one of the missionaries had gotten for Martha and me. I remember feeling just so crushed after as we went through the...the rubble and just finding the little teapot in the ashes and picking it up and it fell apart in my hands from still being so hot. And I just remember feeling so desolate at that time. And I...I think that kind of instilled a desire in me that if I have something that...that, you know, would bring pleasure, that I could enjoy, to enjoy it, not save it for a rainy day or whatever. [laughs]
SHUSTER: A fiery lesson.
SEYMOUR: Yeah. Incidentally, my dad went down the valley and he saw all this smoke billowing up and he said, "Oh man, somebody's house must be burning down there." And the people said, Yeah, white man. It's yours!" [both laugh] Because they had a system that we called "bush telephone." Like where they would stand many times on one mountain and holler something to somebody on the next mountain and that person would pass it on. Of course, your message would get garbled a lot of time. I remember one time Daddy came home from a trek. He had been real sick. And the people were calling ahead saying, "Seymour's coming. Seymour's coming." Then one of the people interpreted it in Kar village, "Oh. Seymour's dying and they're bringing him in on a stretcher." Why, he wasn't neither. Here he comes walking in real slow (because he had dysentery pretty bad) but anyhow, I guess the message wasn't.... Tagan [?] was only about seven miles away, and so people had hollered up there and told those people, so they informed Dad. He jumped on the Honda Ninety and went tearing down the valley with it, but by the time he got there, it was all over. So, we moved back into the big old barn in Nipa for a couple months until Dad could get a house built on the...on the Kar station and then we moved there.
SHUSTER: When you came to the United States to go to school, did you have any adjustment problems?
SEYMOUR: Do you really want to get me started on it? [laughs] Yeah, its kind of a long story. So when we came.... Do you mean the first time on furlough or when we came...?
SHUSTER: Either time.
SEYMOUR: Okay. It was. I went to public school one year, my first grade year and that was [pauses, sighs]...that was hard. But, you know how kids in the socialization process can be very cruel to one another. I kind of experienced some of that. Because I...I was...I was different. You know, my whole frame of reference was different. The things that we played and everything was so...and we didn't know all the stuff that kids in the States were doing and TV shows and everything and what not. And...we didn't have a TV that first time, did we? (We might have.) I remember just this awesome fascination with TV [chuckles]. It was just incredible. And the second time I was just growing into adolescence and that was kind of...kind of difficult. I think it was especially, too, because the boarding high school that I went to in Kentucky (a wonderful school in many, many ways) but after Dr. McConnell's death in 1969, this school became progressively more...more strict in the margins that...that were set and the groups that...that were being...the Wesleyan/Arminian groups that were, I suppose, supporting the school with their sending students had...had a lot of influence and the school today is really very, very, very strict as far as.... I mean, I know this wasn't when my parents were there, even in the fifties, but, like, you couldn't even talk to...to guys and...except at the dinner table where the monitor of the conversation was, one of the faculty or staff. And...but just a...I guess, I came out of my four years of high school with a good education academically in the traditional style of schooling but very little ability to interact on a social level. Not...not...not just...not just with guys, but...but with girls too. Even though I was really close to my roommates and so on. I don't know. I think the problems of your years in Bible college, just learning how to be a social creature in the United States may be...may be[pauses].... I don't know, my relationships with guys and girls kind of underwent a...a...[pauses] a hard time.
SHUSTER: Well what was most different from close relations in the United States and close relationships in...?
SEYMOUR: Well, okay. Maybe that would explain a little bit better. Well, like in New Guinea, it was very separated, too. It really was. I mean....
SHUSTER: Between men and women?
SEYMOUR: Yeah. Oh, like even...even in their homes which...which they built, the community homes, like...from the air, you know, looking at them from a small airplane, they looked like a big earthworm [laughs]. Two hundred, three hundred feet long and they were real low to the ground, about five feet at the pitch of the roof, that's the highest point. And the doors were about this high and you'd get down on your hands and knees and crawl in. But what would happen, the men would have the front section of the longhouse (as they called it) and all the men in the village would live in there together and the boys as they got to be about six and seven, they'd go up and live with the men. And then the women would, [pauses] like...the headmen's wives would come first and they would have one compartment and they and their children and the pigs, they would all stay together and on down and so it was the women of this man and the women of this man and like that. Just their whole way of, I don't know, the culture itself, the way they taught their children, [it] was very separate. And...and so, coming to States, it was, like, everything was so intermingled. And I was...I was just horrified. [laughs] I just thought, "Oh, these girls are so brazen," and this and that. And then, you know, I think it was part of the socialization process and pretty soon I find myself interacting with...with the other teenage...teenagers, guys, you know. Just imitating these girls. And just feeling, "Oh, how awful! Why am I even doing this?" Or maybe realizing by that time, "Well, this is a different world. And you have just got to do what you've got to do to fit in." And yet that was a difficult process. So the interpersonal relationships was one. Another thing was, by this time one of the...I guess one of the negative things that I had picked up almost was just the idea of the imperialist, capitalistic world of the United States, blah, blah, blah and so I...I...well, I felt like I knew my parents were Americans. I didn't know where I belonged as far as my nationality, and I just...my feeling that the American way was not necessarily the best way. I had kind of gone through, well, I guess a rejection. "Well, what's so good about America anyway," you know? How...how ungrateful. [laughs] That's when I was...you know, thirteen, fourteen, and that did persist, you know, for like...I think it was finally resolved my freshman year in college, when [name unclear] came and spoke at the Bible college, and then I heard her that evening as well, and she was talking about the breadth and the freedom and what a great privilege it is to live in free America, and somehow that clicked with me. It was what I needed to hear, and that night I felt like I came home, and I really was an American and I really belonged and it was really okay. And...and I'm so happy that that didn't happen because from there I was able to see that not only am I an American, but a lot of different cultures and different people have helped to mold me and make me who I am, and so...and so while I am American and my roots are here, in a way I belong to the whole world, or I can be an international person. And I think that...kind of going back to what I was saying about how it makes a person better missionary material, that kind of directly ties in there as well.
SHUSTER: Well, after you had felt the call to be a missionary, you said you [unclear] preparing yourself...
SEYMOUR: Yeah.
SHUSTER: ...by studying Spanish.
SEYMOUR: Yeah.
SHUSTER: Were there other ways that....?
SEYMOUR: Well, at that place in time, there really wasn't. When I went...but...but going to Bible college was just the next step. I felt like, well, "Sure, I'm seventeen. I've graduated from high school. After I get out of college, about five years from now, I should be on the field," and incidently it did work out. It was five years exactly. I went to Honduras when I was twenty-two. So, that was...that was neat. So...but going to Bible college (and I was in the missions program) was part of the preparation and I was locally licensed as a minister by my home church in Lancaster, and I am as part of that ongoing preparation now here at the Billy Graham Center in the Master's program [of the WEheaton College Graduate School]. I'm also working toward ordination in...the Church of Christ in Christian Union as well. And I'm looking to go back to Honduras. That preparation is ongoing at this point. But like I said, because it may...the...the socialization had to take place while I was at the Bible college, there were...there were, you know...I probably pursued ordination at that point and continued preparation but...but I didn't, because it's just enough trying to hold even in the studies that I did have as well as just wanting to be at that point in time. But the...the Lord was working through all of it and after I...I worked.... Also that was a part of the preparation and....
SHUSTER: And what was your....?
SEYMOUR: Different...different jobs. I started out at Wendy's and McDonalds [Shuster chuckles] and that didn't last too long because they wouldn't give me enough hours. And so then I got...the second year I was working in the hardware store, sold hardware and the third year I traveled and sang [?] for the College in a small group, and the fourth year (the summer between junior and senior year), I began working for the United Parcel Service. I started out with a truck, and as the second semester opened, I said, "Lord, I can't keep doing this," because, you know, [unclear] it was hard work. Anyway, it was just before school opened, an opportunity to work in...in like, clerk...clerking, and taking care of broken packages and writing up unauthorized shipments and so on. Well, it opened up and so for the next two and a half, two years, I worked at that. So here a year out of Bible college, I was still at UPS. But it's like the Lord just began to....
END OF TAPE