How 72-Year-Old Biker Embraced Sabbath in West Virginia
But Richard Smith didn’t readily accept Ruth’s invitation to church.
The invitation startled Richard Smith as he stopped at a senior center to collect meals to deliver on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle to retirees in the U.S. state of West Virginia.
“Would you like to go to the Seventh-day Adventist church with me?” asked Ruth, who also worked at the senior center.
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I don’t know anything about the Adventist Church. I grew up in West Virginian town with a Sunday church on every corner.”
Richard had visited various Sunday churches during two marriages and two jobs. He quizzed pastors on issues that troubled him, but his questions sometimes left them stumped. He wasn’t a quitter. He worked 35 years at a chemical plant, which abruptly closed when he was 58, and then graduated from college at the age of 61 to work as a tour guide. Widowed, he started to deliver meals because he wanted a job that would allow him to ride his motorcycle every day.
But Richard had never been baptized. He didn’t know which church to join, and he often thought, “If God wakes me up one day and says go to a different church, I want to be able to pack up and move.”
So, when Ruth invited him to church, he replied, “Let’s try my churches first.”
He asked Ruth, a divorced nurse six years his junior, for her opinion after visiting the first church on Sunday. Ruth noted that the church had offered a hearty breakfast, including doughnuts and fruit juice.
“If I just wanted breakfast, it was good,” she said. “We don’t need to go out to eat now because I’m full.”
The next Sunday, Ruth pointed out that the pastor had spent a considerable portion of the worship service on announcements and other news about the life of the church.
“The pastor caught us up on what is going on, but when he finished he didn’t have time to read the Bible to us,” Ruth said. “I didn’t go to church for the news.”
New Perspective on Sabbath
Ruth’s observations gave Richard a new perspective, but he remained reluctant to accompany her to the Adventist church. He said Saturday didn’t seem like the right day to worship.
Ruth told him to fetch his Bible, and she gave him a Bible study about the true Sabbath. She explained that they only reason many Christians observe Sunday is because of tradition.
Richard started attending the Point Pleasant Seventh-day Adventist Church with Ruth. Soon he began to ply the pastor, Bill Hunt, with the same questions that had confounded other pastors.
He pointed to Luke 23:43, where Jesus told the thief on the cross, “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise” (NKJV).
“How does that work?” Richard said. “You cannot go to heaven today if Jesus is going to come back and take us to heaven as a group at the Second Coming.”
The pastor explained that the authors of the New Testament did not use commas and periods when they wrote and that translators had added punctuation. So, Jesus wasn’t telling the thief that he would be in heaven today, but that He was telling the thief right now that he would be in heaven one day.
The state of the dead also puzzled Richard. He couldn’t understand how people could go to the funeral of a mother and said, “It’s OK. She is looking down on us from heaven.”
“How could a mother sit on a cloud and look at us and see all the terrible things happening to her loved ones on Earth?” he asked.
The pastor explained that the word translated as “soul” in the Bible is nothing more than breath. “When we die, the breath of life that God gave us leaves the body,” he said.
No More Veil
Richard had many more questions, and the pastor’s Bible-based answers amazed him.
“No preacher had ever told me this,” Richard said. “It was like I had this veil over my head. I could see through it, but everything was kind of hazy. Bill yanked that veil off my head and I said, ‘Wow, things are as clear as a bell!’”
Richard also shared a common interest with the pastor; they both are bikers.
Then the pastor invited Richard to attend an evangelistic series — one of 35 evangelistic series in West Virginia that were funded by a 2015 Thirteenth Sabbath Offering. Richard attended with Ruth, and they didn’t miss a night.
“I was so excited,” Richard said. “I was like a kid in a candy store. I was stuffing my face with candy from every corner. I wanted it all.”
He was baptized after the meetings together with Ruth, who asked to be rebaptized to reaffirm her commitment to Christ. In all, eight people were baptized after the 2016 meetings at the Huntington church.
Today, Richard is 72 years old and sharing his love for Jesus with anyone who will listen. He joined an Adventist bikers group called Three Angels’ Messengers, which shares religious literature on weekdays and preaches in churches on Sabbaths. The club, which has branches in Texas, southern California, and West Virginia, was founded by the pastor.
“I’m at a place in my life that I am so blessed,” Richard said. “The Lord takes such good care of me and I think, ‘Why?’ I know He talks care of everybody, but why? It’s like I am sitting down at the table, looking at my plate, and everything on it I like to eat. What more can I ask for?”