The United Club met June 26 at the Golden Corral with 14 members and guests in attendance. Martha Bostic, founder and hostess for the club, called the meeting to order. She urged the group to remember some of our members in prayer and her son’s recovery from knee surgery.

She urged everyone to put the flag out for the Fourth of July before she led the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. Joe Ben Chase offered the opening prayer.

Bostic used the Scripture John 14:6 for the devotional reading. She said, “You know the world is in a desperate situation right now and in need of the truth ... we’re not letting enough of our light shine, I’m afraid. You know, it’s left up to us when we accept the Lord as our Savior.” She said, that as Christians “it’s up to us to get out and talk to these people and get them to listen to us. “Jesus is no respecter of persons — the Lord looks on the inside.”

Bostic talked about her son, who had a fever and when she prayed for him, the fever came down and she gave thanks to God for answering her prayer. She announced that the next month’s guest speaker for the meeting will be Herman Ard, a local minister.

She ended her talk by wishing happy birthday to those who had a birthday in June, then introduced the guest speaker, Nelson Rayburn, a minister, who’s been involved in music and playing guitars from a young age.

Rayburn said from 1964 to 1969 he served as pastor of a church in Abingdon, Ill., 11 miles south of Galesburg, where Alexander Delk, club member and speaker, was later a school principal. He said, “If I hadn’t left so soon, or (if) he’d got there earlier we would’ve been neighbors.” From Abingdon, he went to South Carolina.

Rayburn said that since he served as pastor in several states, people would ask him where he was from and he would answer, “I’m from the great Northwest — northwest Alabama.” He said he’s from Hamilton, a small town in Marion County.

Rayburn talked about his life’s experiences, saying that he had a stroke about 13 years ago. He said that he retired from serving as pastor after 47 years. He said he is a greeter at the Church of God of Prophecy on Peerless Road and he said when people would ask him, “How are you feeling?” he would say, “I’m fine.”

Rayburn explained, “I’m not feeling fine, but right away that’s what I say.” He added, “What I’m trying to do in my last days of being here is to warn people to make sure that everything is really all right, because my saying, ‘everything’s fine’ when it’s not fine is contradictory, so we need to make sure, really sure that everything is all right,” he said.

Rayburn talked about an event that happened back in the 1950s, “when one of our top pilots, Gary Powers, was assigned by the government the best plane (a U2 spy plane) our country had and he could fly the highest and farthest of any pilot.” The government spent quite a lot of money teaching him all about flying,” he said. Rayburn said as a private pilot he knows that one has to check the oil, the water, and all the moveable parts and everything else, then you fly. He went on to say that when Powers was flying, the Russians shot him down. The incident happened in 1960.

Years later Powers was released in exchange for someone else in custody and later, Powers was back in this country flying for a television company out in California. Powers, a well trained pilot, was flying in a helicopter one day over a forest fire. But he ran out of fuel and crashed. After every piece was inspected for the cause of crash, it was determined he ran out of fuel. Rayburn said, this experienced pilot, (who had) been trained by the government and probably knew more than anyone would ever know about flying, ran out of gas.”

He used this account to illustrate a point in his life and ours as well, when asked how one is doing and responding, “Everything’s OK,” when in fact “everything’s not OK and we need to make sure everything is OK.” He said he read about several men who were crossing a very difficult river. He related how the men were crossing the treacherous river when one of them turned around and went back. The others asked, “What are you going back for?”

The man answered, “I’m going to build a bridge, make it easier for those behind us.” Rayburn said, “I hope all of us are building bridges and make it easier for those, because we’ve been in this battle for so many years and we had a difficult time, but make it easy for those behind.”

Reading from Palms 107:8, 15 and 31, Rayburn said, “When we praise the Lord for his goodness and He’s done so many good things for all of us, He brought us through a lot of bad places.” He said, “And that’s what I want to do, I want to praise the Lord for what he’s done.”

In 1956, he said, he was involved in a plane crash and when rescue had arrived, Nelson was pronounced dead at the scene and pronounced dead at the hospital then after nine days at the hospital he was able to walk out of the building to the car.

Then in 1999, Nelson had a stroke that left one side of his body paralyzed pretty well, he said. “But I still praise the Lord for His goodness and for His wonderful works and for me and for the privilege of meeting you folks, I thank the Lord.”

Rayburn said he is a “deputy sheriff” — a volunteer. He’s not a real patrolman or an officer of any sort — he doesn’t arrest anybody or give out tickets — but he and his wife volunteer to go visit the elderly and physically handicapped — people who are usually home bound.

He passed out copies of Senior Citizen registry forms to those who know someone — a parent or relative or someone physically challenged — who might be interested in filling out the form and mailing it back to the Justice Center. Rayburn said the purpose of the registry forms is to provide the volunteers with the names, addresses and any friends or relatives for emergency contact purposes. Once a month someone will make a phone call to check on that person to make sure everything is all right.

At the conclusion of Rayburn’s talk, Calvin Davis to give the closing prayer to adjourn the meeting.

The first door prize, courtesy of Steve Robinson of Cleveland Plywood, was won by the newest member Kent Gunderson, newest member, the second door prize was won by Joe Ben Chase and Lily Cunningham won the third.

Others attending were club recorder Shawn Markie, Martha Ledford, Juanita Poteet, Peggy Meyer, Sonya Kasper, Calvin Davis, Ruby Ball, Betty Keith and Wade Carmen.

The next meeting will be held at Golden Corral Restaurant 11:30 a.m. on July 31.

For more information on the United Club, contact Bostic, at 479-9207; Charles or Joanie Lupo at 478-5766; or Shawn Markie at 476-5426.