By Phil Harris
Born into Adventism
Both my paternal and maternal great-grandparents were Adventist. Dad’s parents, Chan and Myrtle Harris, met while taking nurse’s training at the St. Helena Sanitarium in California and were married there in 1911 whereupon they were commissioned to be medical missionaries in China where dad and his older brother were born. As the years passed on, Granddad was both a logger and a nurse, but I found that he also loved being a gardener and was a great story-teller. Grandmother, on the other hand, was the spiritual leader and power in our family. When she spoke, we either did as she said, or we were in trouble.
I was born shortly before our country entered into World War Two. During the war my brother Shermy and then a sister were born. After the war another sister was born while dad was logging in Oregon. Upon our eventual return to California, however, it was discovered that Shermy was very sick with what turned out to be leukemia.
Grandmother led both both Shermy and me to the Lord shortly before Shermy died. Although she was an Adventist, Grandmother shared Jesus as our Redeemer. Even though Shermy was only 4 and I was 6, we both understood we were sinners and knew without question that we needed Jesus in our lives. Not knowing anything about Adventism’s doctrines, we simply accepted Jesus in faith as our Savior. I will never forget seeing Shermy’s peace and joy as he approached his end here on earth.
All in our family were Adventists but were were mostly ignorant about what our religion taught. Because I didn’t know Adventist doctrine, I trustingly believed that Shermy was safe with Jesus. It was only later, when I began to be taught “Adventism”, that my religion became a problem for me.
Cultic teaching lacking godly love
In my life, the display of God’s love demonstrated in my brother’s faith was “the witness of two brothers”. In other words, Shermy’s peaceful faith was a witness to me of God’s love towards him, and His love also witnessed to me that faith like Shermy’s is the only way we can come to the Savior. In fact, all of us must come to the Savior with the same faith that Shermy had if we are to experience the love he he knew before he died.
Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people, but Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:13-14).
Prior to my brother’s departure into his Savior’s arms I had begun schooling at the Howell Mountain Elementary public school and attended church in the old Erwin Hall of the Pacific Union College campus. By the time of Shermy’s death, however, we had moved to St. Helena, and it was there I first attended Sabbath School concurrently with being enrolled in the Adventist elementary school to finish the first grade. Thus my Adventist indoctrination began.
Little did I realize it at the time, but the path that finally led me out of Adventism began when grandmother, who was a longtime friend of Elder E. F. Peterson (a pioneer Adventist evangelist and church planter of that era) requested that he preach the sermon at my brother’s funeral. What he said coupled with the distressing reaction of those who heard his sermon shocked me. Why were they so hopelessly in agony and without hope of the promised return of Jesus? Why did they not understand Shermy was now free of pain resting safely in the arms of his loving Savior? Yes, I also was sad, but not in the way they were. Thus my trauma had begun.
For reasons not explained to me at the time, both my parents were suddenly hospitalized for a period of some months. My two sisters went to stay with our grandparents at Angwin, but I was placed in a strict Adventist home so that I could remain in the local Adventist school. Beatings soon followed because of my absolute refusal to follow their authoritarian rules of conduct. Those beatings became invisible scars that have remained with me to this day.
Soon after dad returned into our lives, he opened a lath mill north of the city of St. Helena. Shortly afterward the mill was relocated to the slopes of Mt. St. Helena overlooking the upper Napa Valley, and dad put up a war-surplus army tent that served as our “house”. The mill quickly went bankrupt, so dad went searching for work to the north in Lake County. My sisters and I were left stranded and alone.
Grandmother and dad’s sister came to our rescue with food and took me on my seventh birthday to visit dad’s older brother who, it turned out, was confined at the Napa State Hospital. Visiting my uncle there, I realized not all was well in my family, but being young and uninformed, I didn’t understand why. Things remained as they were until I was about eight when “the sins of others” began to affect me, developing in me a false guilt that has impacted me to this very day.
By the time I was twelve, my feelings of guilt made me doubt that I could be ready for Jesus to come. I decided that my solution for facing the End Times was to be baptized and thus join the Adventist church, but even membership proved disillusioning. I finally gave up the pretense of “overcoming sin”, and when I was sixteen, I simply walked away from religion, openly living a worldly life. It wasn’t until another ten-plus years had passed by that I learned that the “Adventist Jesus” wasn’t the same Jesus to whom my brother and I had given our lives all those years before.
Love of God
The Holy Spirit never ceased working in my life. After graduation from high school and doing a tour in the Marine Corps, I met through the shipyard where I then worked a Christ-centered couple to whom I became irresistibly attracted because of the godly love they showered upon me. No one had ever cared for me as they did. They even taught me how to romance the lady who would soon become my wife.
After two years of their prayers and of my repeating over and over the nearly incomprehensible words from Romans 8:38–39 that nothing could ever separate me from the love of God, I finally surrendered to their invitation to go with them to church—on SUNDAY. Initially all I had to hang onto was the promise that going to church on a Sunday would not separate me from God’s love, so my new bride and I joined them. We were engulfed with both godly love and a living, dynamic search of Scripture.
Initially I assumed my new-found love of God meant a return to the local Adventist church of which I was still a member. In fact, one Sabbath we did just that. We walked expectantly into the local Adventist church but found that, unlike the church we had been attending with our friends, it was a place that shocked and depressed us because it was like being with those who already had one foot in the grave. The irony of this situation was that the loving, vibrant, godly group with whom we had been worshiping were meeting weekly in a mortuary in the middle of a cemetery!
The contrast was overwhelming. It wasn’t long after that shocking Sabbath that the Holy Spirit led me in a personal search of Scripture that proved Ellen G. White to be a fraud.
As I saw the contrast between a group of true Christians worshiping their Lord compared to an Adventist congregation, the witness of the love of God ran full circle back to the testimony of my brother Shermy. When he gave his life to Jesus, even as a very young boy, the love of God had shone from his very being. Shermy knew he would soon die, but with Jesus in his life, it didn’t matter. He displayed a love that was totally absent from those who attended his funeral, and it was a love I had not seen again until worshiping with spiritually alive Christians in a mortuary—on Sunday! Because of their love—which included an obvious love of searching the word of God—Jan and I soon became members. Jesus said:
By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
Living God’s love
Now, years later, the end times no longer scare me, and death is not a bottomless pit of non-existent soul sleep. For those whose sins are covered by Jesus’ shed blood, death is not something to fear. Because I know the terror of relentless guilt and the certainty that I cannot become good enough to pass the judgment, I would like to share how Christians face death while still loving others by recounting the passing of several close friends of ours.
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better (Phil. 1:21-23).
The first story concerns the couple who led Jan and me to the real gospel: Dave and Dee. They helped pioneer an outreach to the troubled youths of the city near where we lived. Their outreach resulted in the changed lives of many beyond counting. In 1980, as I was transferring employment to Washington State, Dave contracted cancer and died. Well over a thousand came to his funeral where his daughter sang a song she wrote, a song of her love for her dad whose own great love was for lost sinners who needed Jesus. We all came away from there crying, yet filled with joy.
Today, whenever I are able to attend worship services, I am blessed by the teaching of our pastor—who just happens to be one of those whom Dave and Dee reached for the Lord in the course of their ministry.
In about 2003, Bob, another of our close friends, was diagnosed with cancer. In 2005, when he learned that I was about to have knee replacement surgery, he insisted that he and his wife be the ones to take me to the hospital in spite of his own health and pain. When I came out of recovery they were there smiling, even after waiting most of the day—with Bob in pain—to make sure I was OK. Not many would suffer like that, yet out of God’s love, they did it for me. Not long afterwards, Bob also went to be with the Lord.
More recently, the couple from whom we purchased our property have been close Christian friends of ours for over thirty-five years. The wife died of cancer about three years ago but was able to pass into the Lord’s arms from her own home next door to us with the same peace of God the others— including my brother—had.
Recently, as I came out of the local supermarket, I spotted a huge cardboard box in the back of my pickup truck. It turned out that our friend, who is now the widower, had heard Jan and I were looking for a used chest freezer. As a surprise to us, he went out and bought a new one. On his way home with his gift, he spotted my pickup in the local supermarket parking lot and transferred the box into my truck bed.
From my perspective, finding that freezer in the back of my truck had all the earmarks of an angel dropping it there from out of heaven while I was inside shopping. It truly expressed our friend’s love for us in both the gift and in the way it was delivered.
Now I see clearly that Shermy’s childhood faith was a witness to God’s transforming love. In his four-year-old suffering, he recognized that he needed a Savior, and his childlike trust in Jesus changed him. He radiated His love, and he died peacefully without fear.
Shermy’s death occurred decades ago, but today, I testify with my little brother: God’s love is our only hope. His love gave us Jesus, and Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection give us life. He forgives our sin, and He rescues us from the fear of death.
This love of God gives us a reason to live, and it makes our departure from this life a graduation into the arms of Jesus where we are never separated from His love.
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Thank you for sharing this, Phil. It is very touching!
Thank you Ddfloyd1,
It has been over seventy years since Shermy departed to be with the Lord but I think of him pretty much everyday.
God bless you, Phil! Thank you for your writing. Look forward to seeing more from you. Jim
Thank you for commenting. I am far from that false Adventist concept of becoming a perfect person. My only righteousness is that of our Savior. All the glory goes to him.