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How I Appreciate “the Kindly Quality of God”!

As told by Myrtle Quackenbush

It saved members of my family, and it continues to save countless others

I AM now 91 years old, but I was only a small girl of five when Kingdom truth entered my family, in 1895. It was then that a colporteur​—a full-time house-to-house minister of the Watch Tower Society—​called at our home in Indiana. My mother took the first two bound volumes of a set of Bible helps called “Millennial Dawn” (later known as “Studies in the Scriptures”) for my father. His chief interest was religion, but it had not always been so. The shift of emphasis in his life came soon after I was born, in Riceville, Indiana, in 1890.

Soon thereafter we moved to Jasper, Indiana, where we ran a hotel and were mildly prosperous. My father was in politics, screamed himself hoarse campaigning for Grover Cleveland, and when he was elected a severe depression set in. We lost our hotel, and my father went to work wiping oil off railroad engines in the roundhouse, for $1.25 a day​—to support a family of eight. One day I sat on the porch crying. A passing neighbor asked: “Myrtle, why are you crying?” I wailed: “I’m starving!” She brought me a piece of watermelon. The depression disillusioned my father with Cleveland and politics. He then turned to religion.

Bible Helps Arrive

He became what was known as a “Shouting Methodist.” The “shouting” was especially prominent at the revivalist meetings. He would return home after such meetings bubbling over, to a family more inclined to make fun than to take him seriously. My mother discerned hypocrisy in the preachers, yet believed the Bible. So when the Watch Tower representative came to the door, she obtained the books for my father. He reveled in them and would come in from work and ask, “Where are my little Dawns?” as he called the books. However, the issue was not as sharply drawn then as it is now, and he remained a Methodist. His stand for true religion was still years away.

In 1898 we moved to Arkansas, to a farm in an area known as “The Promised Land.” It was far from that​—some swampy sections literally crawled with snakes. The post office was Egypt. I hated it, and longed to make an exodus from Egypt. It was here that my father became aware that Pastor C. T. Russell’s sermons were being published in a weekly paper, the Kansas City Star, and he subscribed in order to get them. We all went to church​—there was nowhere else to go—​but my father was the only one really involved with religion.

Some of it must have rubbed off on me. I had pet chickens, and whenever one of them died I would hold a funeral for it. One funeral was especially tearful. After a Sunday chicken dinner, I discovered the head of my favorite pet rooster by the chopping block​—he had been the dinner entrée. I was both horrified and grief-stricken. That funeral with the head only was a doleful lament, and I remember the song I sang at that ‘service’ was the old spiritual “Tomorrow’s Sun May Never Rise.” I was religious enough to conduct funerals, if only for chickens. As for my father, he still studied his ‘little Dawns,’ and he still went to the Methodist church.

To Indian Territory by Covered Wagon

When I was 10 years old, in 1900, in two covered wagons, with a team of horses and a team of mules, a cow, a dog, six hens and a rooster, we set out for the Indian Territory​—later to become Oklahoma. White settlers had previously raced to establish claims on Indian land, and now more was being opened up for settlement, this time assigned by lottery.

After a month of jolting travel with our menagerie, crossing streams so swollen that the horses and mules had to swim, and cooking over campfires, we arrived in the Indian Territory. My father and older brother signed up for the lottery, but did not get any land. We stayed camped near Fort Sill for a year. My father and two brothers worked laying the roadbed for railroad tracks heading west. Indians were everywhere​—Comanches and Kiowas and others who had been put on reservations. The Apaches under Geronimo, however, refused to sign a treaty, and at regular intervals Geronimo had to come in to Fort Sill to report. He died there in 1909.

But in 1901 we had returned to Arkansas, back to the “Promised Land”​—back to the preachers and to the circuit riders that traveled on horseback from town to town to hold revival meetings, and back to the Methodist church. Yet my father still read his Studies in the Scriptures. We later moved into Jonesboro, and there my father met the Andrews, a couple who were actively engaged in telling others about Bible truths and distributing Watch Tower literature. At this time my mother died, my father was attending home meetings with the Bible Students, and I met Ralph Quackenbush.

Getting Out of Babylon

Finally, in 1908, 13 years after first studying the Watch Tower publications, my father stood up one Sunday morning in the Methodist church and, before the entire congregation, requested that his name be taken off the church roll. By this time he was the Sunday school superintendent. Yet he announced that he was now a Bible Student, associated with the Watch Tower Society. It took him a long time to break away, but finding someone active in the witness work apparently gave the needed impetus. It shows the value, the need, for right association. From this time on he was actively telling others about God’s kingdom, until his death in 1914.

He was at a meeting, the showing of the Photo-Drama of Creation​—a combination of slides and motion pictures synchronized with sound recordings. Near the end of the meeting, a woman next to him asked him to visit a friend of hers to tell her about the truth, and gave him a slip of paper with her friend’s name and address on it. When they all stood up for the final prayer, he didn’t stand. When the prayer was over, the woman looked at my father. He was sitting there, the slip of paper crumpled up in his clenched fist. He had died of apoplexy during the prayer.

I became active that same year, 1914. By then I was living in Paragould, Arkansas, married to Ralph Quackenbush. I’d had my third son in June of that year, and two months later World War I started. Was this the start of what my father had talked about for so long, saying the Kingdom was to come in 1914? It started me studying seriously, as it also did my three sisters and one of my brothers. Still, I waited four years to be baptized, in 1918. My husband was baptized shortly afterward. We requested that the Watch Tower Society put us on the list of persons who would like to have the Society’s traveling representatives​—called “Pilgrim brothers” at that time—​visit our home and speak in our town. For several years thereafter we were spiritually benefited by having these visitors in our home.

In 1922 my three boys and I distributed the first of the series of seven special judgment messages against Christendom. By this time we were living in Glendale, California. We attended the meetings there until we moved to Chatsworth, out in the far end of the San Fernando Valley. We were rather isolated out there, and our activity waned. We were drifting spiritually.

An Argument Leads to Our Revival

Then my youngest son started attending U.C.L.A. Two other students rode with him. One of them was a strong Methodist, and one day he commented on some criminals who had escaped punishment and said that they would get their just deserts in hellfire. My son told him there was no such place. He came home to me to get scriptures to prove his point. The family got involved looking up Scriptural arguments, such as the following, quoted from a modern version of the Scriptures, The New English Bible:

Psalm 146:4: “He breathes his last breath, he returns to the dust; and in that same hour all his thinking ends.”

Ecclesiastes 3:19-21: “They all draw the same breath. Men have no advantage over beasts; for everything is emptiness. All go to the same place: all came from the dust, and to the dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit [breath] of man goes upward or whether the spirit of the beast goes downward to the earth?”

Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10: “The living know that they will die; but the dead know nothing. . . . Whatever task lies to your hand, do it with all your might; because in Sheol [the common grave of mankind], for which you are bound, there is neither doing nor thinking, neither understanding nor wisdom.”

Ezekiel 18:4: “The soul that sins shall die.”

Romans 6:23: “Sin pays a wage, and the wage is death.”

The young Methodist, however, was never convinced by these and many other scriptures that there was no eternal torment for the wicked in a fiery hell. But our family became so stimulated spiritually by this Bible searching that we became active again and never thereafter stopped.

We moved to Burbank, closer to Los Angeles, where the regular weekly meetings were held. We started attending regularly and going out in the witnessing work. I worked with a sound car, going all over San Fernando Valley, which was mostly orange groves, wheat and bean fields.

The sound car played Bible lectures, then our car group followed up by calling on all the homes within hearing distance. At that time we used testimony cards, asked the householders to read them, then offered Bible literature on a contribution. Later on we carried portable phonographs, playing brief Bible lectures for the people. Eventually, we concentrated on giving brief sermons at the doors, and presenting literature. We followed up by making return visits where there was interest and started free Bible studies in the homes of those desiring them.

In 1935 my two younger sons were baptized, and the following year they went to Bethel, the headquarters of the Watchtower Society in Brooklyn, New York, contributing all their time to serve in the printing plant there. In 1947 my husband died of cancer​—he was a servant in the Burbank Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. All this time my eldest son did nothing about the truth. But, eventually, in 1954, he was baptized and remained active until his death in 1979, during which year he was the presiding overseer of the Sherman Oaks Congregation. Three months ago another one of my sons, Myron, died while serving at the Society’s “Watchtower Farm.” My third son is still serving in New York, at the Society’s printing plant in Brooklyn.

I am still living in California, still hoping to see God’s kingdom under Christ come to cleanse the earth of wickedness. If I do not live to see that time, then I have the hope that God will remember me, my husband and my two deceased sons when the resurrection will awaken millions and perhaps billions of those now sleeping in death​—awaken them to opportunities for everlasting life in a paradise earth.​—John 5:28, 29.

“The Kindly Quality of God” for All

At 91, I have much to look back on. My family and I took a long time to see the importance of dedicating ourselves to Jehovah God, getting baptized and witnessing about his kingdom. That makes me appreciate so much Jehovah’s ‘kindness and forbearance and long-suffering, that kindly quality of God that tries to lead us to repentance.’ (Rom. 2:4) And now if I become impatient and think of the many long years I’ve waited and yearned for his kingdom to come to cleanse the earth of wickedness and bring in an earthly paradise, I recall the scripture at 2 Peter 3:9: “Jehovah is not slow respecting his promise, as some people consider slowness, but he is patient with you because he does not desire any to be destroyed [not tormented in hellfire] but desires all to attain to repentance.”

The kindly quality of God’s forbearance and long-suffering that was so vital for me and my family is still allowing time for countless others to repent and gain everlasting life. Now world conditions are rapidly worsening, the evidences that we are nearing the end of this old world under Satan are mushrooming, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are working efficiently worldwide to get the preaching work done. (Matt. 24:14) Many people see the urgency of taking a stand for God’s kingdom and are doing so quickly. And this delights me very much.

I can no longer read and my legs are unreliable, but my mind and heart are still filled with God’s Word and my faith burns as strong as ever. I would like to live to see the Kingdom come and terminate this wicked system under Satan. But I do not want it to come before it is God’s due time, before the witness work is completed to his satisfaction, or before the remaining people of honest heart toward God avail themselves of this same “kindly quality of God.” May it lead many of them to repentance and salvation​—just as it was extended to me and my family, and which we needed so much.