Bob Mills worked as a barber, earning his keep with the usual clippers, scissors and combs. Having grown up among some of Appalachia’s best storytellers, he had a secret weapon that guaranteed his success.
It was his incredible ability to spin a yarn the way the old-timers did down around Stinking Creek.
With a somber look on his face, Mills once told about the hard times he and his wife, Wanda, had survived some years back.
“We’d never had it so bad,” he said. “We were flat broke. We were down to half a sack of potatoes and a few jars of green beans that Wanda had canned during the summer. We had a few scraggly, half-starved chickens in the backyard.”
I knew Bob well enough to know a punch line was coming.
“We didn’t have any corn for the chickens, so to keep them from starving to death I started feeding them sawdust,” he continued.
OK, I thought, here comes the punchline.
“Right in the middle of those hard times,” Bob said, “one of my hens started sitting on eight eggs,” Bob said. “Would you know, she hatched all eight of those eggs? Five of those chicks had wooden legs and three were woodpeckers.”
Oh, how Bob laughed after stringing me on as that tale unwound. I laughed, too.
I got word in December that Bob, a Christian gentleman who grew up not far from where I was raised, had died at age 93. My first thought was of the celebration in heaven when Bob arrived.
Knowing Bob, I’m sure the first thing he did was to bow at the throne and thank the Lord for so great a salvation.
I can’t help but think it wasn’t long before Bob was out and about on the streets of glory entertaining the saints with his wit and humor.
In heaven, the Bible tells us, there will be no tears, no mourning and no crying, Revelation 21:4. That has led a good number of people to surmise that there will be lots of happiness, smiles and laughter up there.
That’s Bob’s kind of place.
In heaven, there’ll be no more sickness, no more death and most assuredly, no more lean years of having to feed sawdust to the chickens.