Archive: Ruby’s Listening Post

By Boyce A. Bowdon

What you can learn from a woman who listens to God

Ruby Galloway Farish stepped to the podium at the 1992 General Conference of the United Methodist Church and glanced at the audience assembled there in the auditorium of the Louisville, Kentucky Convention Center.

Eighty bishops were seated on the stage behind her, and 998 delegates from around the world were seated at tables in front of her. In the bleachers around three walls sat hundreds of observers, including her husband—Jay Farish, a retired physician—and her two daughters, Karen and Jessica, both United Methodist ministers. She knew her son, Kent, a physician, was there in spirit, even though he was back home in Tulsa caring for his patients.

Ruby had spoken many times to groups in her church and community, but never had she addressed an audience like this. Microphones and cameras were aimed at her, ready to pick up and pass along to countless thousands every sound and every move she made during the next half hour. And she knew she wasn’t speaking just for herself. From a field of 284 persons who had submitted manuscripts, she had been chosen to deliver the Laity Address to the General Conference. She was speaking in behalf of nearly nine million Methodist laypeople.

Standing there in the spotlight, how did Ruby feel? That night she described the experience in her journal:

“During the half hour worship service before my talk, I had the sensation of flowing and floating in God’s love. I had no fear, no anxiety. I was fully trusting in God’s indwelling. I felt alive, natural, perfect peace. I felt as if I were covered by the warm sunshine of my Listening Post.”

Ruby’s “Listening Post” is at her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is located on a three acre lot with more than 150 trees. A driveway circles in front of her beautiful home. East of the driveway, nestled in a grove of trees near a pond, is her Listening Post. When she goes there, she can hear many sounds: birds singing in the treetops, bullfrogs croaking in the pond, bees buzzing in the honeysuckle, traffic rushing down 41st Street, kids playing at the nearby school. But those are not the sounds that attract her to her Listening Post. She comes to hear God speak to her. And as she sits quietly and reflects, God does speak to her.

In fact, it was here at her Listening Post that Ruby wrote most of her laity speech for General Conference. Sitting under the pine and dogwood, trusting in the initiatives of the Holy Spirit, she asked God to give her a message. “Speak to me that I may speak,” she prayed. And God spoke to her.

During sad times and happy times, she comes to her Listening Post to express gratitude, to ask for forgiveness, to receive guidance and strength. Some of the turning points in her life have occurred here.

For example, one morning a few years ago Ruby came to her Listening Post physically and emotionally exhausted from long weeks of caring for her invalid mother.

“Mother had developed an illness, and had come to live with us,” Ruby explains. “It was very difficult for me. She demanded so much care and attention. She even had to be diapered. Sometimes she was badly depressed. I remember one day, I just couldn’t do it any longer. I went down to my Listening Post, sat down in my old praying chair, and shed some tears. I said to God aloud: ‘I will do it. I will take care of her. I don’t want to do it. I will only do it because I think it is the thing to do.'”

“After I poured it all out, and it was quiet, I began sensing that God was saying to me: ‘Ruby, would you come off it! You are always telling me what you are going to do with clinched teeth and flexed muscles. Now will you just relax? Would you let me bring to you what you need? Would you not talk about serving me and your mother? Would you let me serve you? Just turn this thing around and quit being in charge of everything. Learn that I am the initiator and that you are the responder. You remember about Jesus, tying the towel around his waist, and washing the feet of his disciples. Would you let me serve you? That’s what I taught you through the life of Jesus.'”

Ruby sat there a long time and looked up at that blue sky and listened to those birds. In the silence, she thought about her own childhood. Her father—a Methodist preacher in Arkansas—had died when Ruby was only six-months old. Ruby thought about the load that had been placed on her mother’s shoulders. She remembered that even though her mother had been overloaded physically, emotionally and financially, she sang all day, she saw the beauty and glory of the skies and the sunsets, and she heard the birds. What had given her mother courage and hope? Her awareness of the love of God. She had known that the load was not hers to bear alone.

With God’s help, Ruby’s mother worked hard and managed carefully. The two of them made it through the difficult days of the Depression. Ruby graduated from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. She became a youth director at a large Methodist church in Little Rock. On the steps of that church one Sunday, she met Jay Farish—a young medical student. The two fell in love, married, and moved to Tulsa. Jay became an outstanding physician. They became the parents of three healthy, bright children. God had been with Ruby all the years of her life.

As Ruby reflected there at her Listening Post, she was reminded that she was not alone now. The weight of the world was not on her shoulders. The one in charge was God—the Maker and Sustainer and Redeemer, the One able to meet every need, to turn every disaster into victory. She was merely an instrument through whom God worked.

“When I went back in the house,” Ruby said, “I thought of a way that might help me remember what God had told me. I had an idea. I went to the grocery store and bought some grape juice and a box of crackers. I put them in my refrigerator. Every morning, after I had finished doing the necessary things for my mother, I knelt down on the floor in front of my refrigerator, took out the grape juice and crackers, and had holy communion. God blessed me through that. I experienced his presence, his healing, his renewal. And that’s what I needed to care for my mother and to be faithful to my other responsibilities.”

The discovery Ruby made about herself and about God at her Listening Post—along with some other experiences, including a bout with cancer—turned her life around. “I was moved to consider how I should respond to what God has done. I had been pleading with God to align himself with me. I began asking him to help me align myself with him.”

Not only did Ruby realize God works through her, she realized God would always empower her to do what he called her to do.

Such a challenge came one night in October 1971. Jay, her husband, came home from caring for patients at the hospital and told Ruby about a baby who had been brought to the emergency room with severe head injuries received when her mother battered her head against a wall. The best medical care available could not save the little girl. When Jay told Ruby about the child’s death, her first reaction was the same as his had been—anger. How could a parent be so cruel? But then she and Jay began asking another question, “How can such violence be prevented?” They knew that no agency in Tulsa was addressing the child abuse problem. They asked themselves, “What can we do to help prevent such violence?” The next day Ruby spent some time down at her Listening Post searching for an answer. How could God address the problem of child abuse through her? The answer came. “I invited 22 friends to come to my house. I told them about the little girl’s death. All of us agreed something should be done to prevent such tragedies from happening. For five months on Mondays we studied the problem of child abuse. We invited experts in. We had workshops. Four of us were assigned by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services to work with parents who had abused or neglected their children.”

From that small beginning in Ruby’s den back in 1972, has grown the Parent-Child Center of Tulsa. Today it has a staff of 31 professionals and many volunteers.

Since 1980, Ruby has volunteered as a listener at Resonance, a women’s growth center in Tulsa. During one-to-one listening sessions, she helps women find a starting place that can lead them to hope and healing.

For years, Ruby has been a certified mediator with the Early Settlement Program of Tulsa Municipal Court system. She meets with parties who come together in out-of-court hearings, hoping to reach satisfactory settlements through face-to-face negotiation.

Since 1986, Ruby has been a volunteer chaplain for the Tulsa police department. She carries a police radio, and responds to calls at the scenes of auto crashes, suicides, crisis interventions, and various other disasters. She frequently holds funerals for persons who do not have a church or pastor.

Her work as a volunteer exposes Ruby to many unpleasant realities of life.

“There is so much in this world that is dark and discouraging, so many hurts and so many problems,” she acknowledges. “We laypeople could throw up our hands and say, ‘What’s the use?’ But we have another choice. We can ask God to speak to us and enable us to be priests to one another. This world will brighten up once laypeople are so filled with God’s love that we can’t keep from going out there and spilling over his love to the world.”

Ruby says she goes to church to be healed, to be equipped, and to be deployed into the world to serve.

“God calls laypeople as well as clergy to be his instruments and help meet global and community needs,” Ruby said. “It’s not that the clergy don’t have time to do its job, so we have to do it for them. All of us are called to be Christian disciples. Jesus Christ died that I might have eternal life. In response, I pledge to be his disciple—to hold nothing back, to yield my time, my resources, my strength, and my service, to search out God’s will for me and to do what God wants me to do. Laity can be God’s instruments in the office, the hospital, on the street. Wherever we are, we are the church. We can get into places that the clergy could never get into, and we can accomplish some things it could never accomplish.”

Ruby admits there was a time when she thought of herself as a “warrior” who had to push up her sleeves and get out there and fight the world and all the bad things that are in it. She doesn’t think that way anymore.

“I have learned that the results are not in my hands, they are in God’s hands. But that doesn’t let me off the hook. My hands are for God to use. He can do far more with them than seems possible.”

Near the close of her Laity Address, Ruby summed up her own views about private faith and public action—the theme of her message—with these words:

“We hear the voices of the saints and prophets resounding throughout history and echoing even today in this great auditorium. Those voices urge us, ‘Listen, listen, listen to the crackling of the fire of God within us and without us.’ Those voices of the faith call out to us today to become ignited with the spark of the Holy Spirit as we participate in the ongoing, creative kingdom of God.”

Boyce A. Bowdon is the director of communications for the Oklahoma Conference of the United Methodist Church.

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