Confederate Sharpshooter

I only met 'Brother Sheldon' three times in my entire life, each time at the church down the road on US-52 with a sign out front that proclaimed "Truckers Welcome." But I feel like I knew him very well. He was, and continues to be, a part of my morning ritual on our local radio station, one of the few that still includes morning preaching on a daily basis. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of staying with my mother's grandmother, a widow, while mom and dad went to work. Grandma Jessup would invariably turn on the AM radio in the living room at 9 am each morning to listen to morning devotions, often done by Preacher Burrows, a kindly old man who always stopped by to pray for grandma when she was in poor health. After morning devotions, the high pitched, energetic voice of Brother Sheldon would jump from the speaker, announcing "The temperance and evangelistic crusade bringing you Triumphant Truth..." I was too young to understand it all then, but grandma would listen with rapt attention, despite a bunch of kids fighting, jumping, and generally being a nuisance.

As the years went by, sometimes I'd listen, sometimes I couldn't. As a long haul truck driver in the late 70's and early 80's I came to realize how important good Southern Style preaching could be to a boy far from home, when I tried to find some good preaching on the radio while waiting for a load on Long Island, near NYC. I did finally find a good preacher, but somehow hearing the King James 1611 being quoted by a guy with a heavy Bronx accent just seemed wrong. Not long after that I started running local, or at least regional, truck routes. With a little planning and some luck, I could pick up my 10,000 watt home town station up to 100 miles away, even with the cheap radio in the cab. I'd try to catch Triumphant Truth for a morning break, it was only a 15 minute long program and I could usually stop for that long.

What made Triumphant Truth so different was the often used subject matter of temperance. It was hard even back then to find a preacher who often spoke about prohibition and the evils of alcohol. As I have mentioned recently, I am not a believer in government prohibition of much of anything, all it does it raise the price and generally causes more problems than it solves. That does not make the prohibited items any less wrong, however. A lot of people raise eyebrows and look at me with a bit of disbelief when they find out I don't drink alcohol. A lot of them probably don't believe I'm telling the truth, but I am. I do not see much, if any, benefit to using an over the counter drug that makes me even more stupid than I already am. As you might imagine, that way of thinking wasn't popular with a lot of the people I associated with, so it was really wonderful to have a daily pep talk from someone as passionate about the subject as was Brother Sheldon Jones. That wasn't his only passion, of course. He preached about the love of Jesus, the forgiveness of sins, the need of salvation, and could preach Hell hot enough that you could feel the heat and the flames.

Sadly, we lost the voice of Triumphant Truth in late 1999. I remember hearing the sad tone of the radio announcer as he intoned he had a special announcement- and I knew it was bad news. Reverend Sheldon Jones had died at the ripe old age of 81, the end of a well lived and full life. His funeral was at his beloved home church in Moncks Corner, SC, and he was buried nearby. The Voice of Triumph and Truth continues, at least for now, on some of those same radio stations, but I wonder for how long- my local station announced recently that the program might be discontinued soon due to a decline in listener support. That would be a sad day indeed. If you happen to live in an area where you can pick up a broadcast like Triumph and Truth, I would encourage you to support it with your prayers and with your gifts. In these days of uncertainty and despair, we need God fearing men like Reverend Sheldon Jones to remind us that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and God does still work in the affairs of men.