The Conservative Cave
Interests => Religious Discussions => Topic started by: SVPete on April 24, 2016, 01:20:07 PM
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RIP Mary Kay Beard, Notorious Safecracker Turned Angel Tree Founder (http://www.christianpost.com/news/rip-mary-kay-beard-notorious-safecracker-turned-angel-tree-founder-162182/)
BY WALLACE HENLEY, CP EXCLUSIVE
April 20, 2016|9:34 am
Don and Mary Kay Beard walked into my life one Sunday morning in 1984 like a mother and father goose trailed by a brood of scrungy ducklings.
They made their way down to the front pews, and sat under my nose as I stood in the pulpit of the somewhat pretentious sanctuary of the Birmingham church where I was pastor. It was as if Mary Magdalene and Levi the swindling tax collector had married and brought forth children after their kind.
I and the congregation might have been truly aghast if we had known these visitors were a convicted embezzler and notorious bank robber-expert safecracker whose lovely face had once been featured on an FBI Ten Most Wanted poster. Their brood of ducklings consisted of more jailbirds and social misfits and castaways.
Mary Kay Beard passed from us on April 17, and I am having a John Donne moment. It was he who said, in paraphrase, that he was diminished by the passing of every person. My world shrunk when Don died in 2006. Now there's a bigger hole in the world because Mary Kay is gone.
Being honest, I had not heard of Mary Kay Beard or her husband, Don. I've certainly heard of the ministry they started that became part of Prison Fellowship. They were the sort of people who are almost unknown, while improving their community, nation, and even world.
Part of the reason people like the Beards are near-unknowns is that they do not seek fame, not even for the sake of their work. OTOH, and sadly, the MSM folk who could make them known either are so detached from the "world" in which the Beards live that they have almost no way to learn of them, or have a worldview that doesn't know what to do with people like the Beards, and thus such people are consciously ignored.
This article stays clear of such thoughts and focuses on who she was and what she did.
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I've seen "Angel Trees" in stores near Christmas time, but I think it's a generic term a lot of places use now.
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Good short read.... thanks for posting...
It had hit us simultaneously that I, who had served in the scandalous Nixon White House, was giving the church's money for safekeeping to a convicted embezzler. Our laughter turned soon into tears as we were both impacted by the grace of Jesus Christ.
It still to this day amazes me the power of forgiveness of Jesus Christ... I was no saint myself (in my own way) growing up ya know.
Her wiki page....
http://www.bhamwiki.com/w/Mary_Kay_Beard
(http://i68.tinypic.com/scuoon.jpg)