HUDDLESTON, Va. — They had breakfast together, prayed together and shared a few laughs. Then they spent the rest of Saturday morning, Sept. 10, pruning shrubbery, as they regularly did at their small Bedford County church, Mentow Baptist, where all 60 members pitch in.
Paul Mitchell, 76, was the longtime Sunday school director. He’d recently retired from running a hardware store and devoted many hours each week to helping at the church.
“He loved to pick and carry on,” said Joyce Hawkins, a church volunteer and friend to both men.
Henry Woodford, 69, is the official church greeter, bulletin passer-outer and collection-taker. Retired recently, he farms dairy cattle and spends a lot time at church, including every Wednesday night when he attends dinner and prayer meetings.
“They liked to sit next to each other for Wednesday suppers,” recalled Woodford's wife, Lucille. “Sometimes they cooked together on Saturday mornings.”
About noon that Saturday, Mitchell, Henry Woodford and two other church men were finishing up the landscaping project. The last step was to haul the brush into the back of Woodford’s GMC truck. Woodford was backing up in the church parking lot when his foot got stuck on the accelerator, causing a freak accident that killed Mitchell, his longtime friend, almost immediately.
Pastor Greg Soult had just finished thanking the men for their service when he left to run errands — and was called back to the church. He’d already prepared a Sunday sermon geared toward the 10th anniversary of 9/11 but knew immediately that the old sermon was out.
He began with Corinthians 1:13, as he had planned all along to do — because he felt that its message of faith, hope and love suited Paul Mitchell’s life as well as those who perished when the World Trade Center’s twin towers fell. He explained that each person grieves in his or her own way. “But in this community, where so many of us are cousins and we're so tight-knit, we don’t have to grieve alone,” Soult said.
Toward the end of the service, he called Woodford forward, along with the other two men who helped Saturday. Soult led the congregation as they encircled the men, putting their hands on them and praying, lifting them up.
Soult, 35, has been pastor of the church for not quite a year and had never dealt with anything like this. He said the idea to fold 9/11 and his community’s tragedy into one sermon came to him late Saturday — and off and on during his fitful night’s sleep.
He acknowledged the handful of comments left on a television station message board, in which some viewers argued that Woodford should face criminal charges. Virginia State Police deemed the episode a clear-cut accident and said no charges would be filed.
Soult told his parishioners they could move forward if they realized that “the things that can break us down and force us apart are actually things that end up, in God’s power, bringing us together. Rather than chaos, these things can produce clarity.”
Reprinted with permission from the Roanoke Times.