Preface
Chapter 1 - Early Childhood
Chapter 2 - My Teenage Years
Chapter 3 - A Wife And Family
Chapter 4 - Entering The Ministry
Chapter 5 - First Baptist Church Of Evadale, Texas
Chapter 6 - Deer Creek Baptist Church
Chapter 7 - Evangelism
Chapter 8 - Grace Baptist Church
Chapter 9 - New Hope Baptist Church
Chapter 10 - Solid Rock Baptist Church
Chapter 11 - World-Wide Evangelism
Chapter 12 - Student Testimonies
Chapter 13 - Photo Section

Below is chapter one of my book, "Reaching The Perishing."

Early Childhood

I was the youngest of seven boys and was born on December 24, 1946, in a small community located on the Sabine River between Orange and Deweyville, Texas. The oldest to the youngest brothers names were J.E., R.L., Huebert Avis, Roy Lee, Darrell Wayne and myself, Johnny Ray Woodard. The two oldest brothers were named after my parents by giving them their initials. J.E. stands for James Edwin and R. L. stands for Ruby Lovis. The first-born brother was not named, as he died during childbirth. The little community had only a very small number of families living there, but there were quite a few people from different towns in Southeast Texas that had camp houses. I was not aware that the first born in my family had died at childbirth until my early elementary school years and it really broke my heart. I cried and cried because I truly believed that I would never see my brother, because I had no Bible teaching concerning the afterlife. It was only until I was saved a few years later that great joy filled my heart when I understood that he was already waiting for me in Heaven.

The house we lived in had three rooms. There was a kitchen and living room with a big double bed in it where mama and daddy slept. All six boys slept in a room across the back. It had about a four-inch step down to it. I remember during the big flood in 1953 that water got high enough to get into the bedroom, but not quite in the living room. There was no such thing as evacuation, we lived in the house and waded water to bed. The old house had no insulation and you could literally see daylight through the cracks in the wall. We had a wood heater in the middle of the living room. You could stand by it and toast on the front side and freeze on the backside. Many times, one of us would grab one’s pant’s leg and pull it against the calf of their leg and nearly blister them. We had no inside bathroom. When it was warm enough, we would all take a bath in the river. During cold weather we would all have to take a sponge bath.

My next to the oldest brother enlisted in the army about the time I started school and was sent to Germany. He sent a portion of his monthly check home and we were able to build a house with four bedrooms and an inside bathroom. We were able to get a butane heater for the living room. The eight-grate butane heater kept the living room and kitchen warm, but the bedrooms were another story. We did not have electric blankets back then. We slept under a blanket and quilts. I remember crawling into those beds and it was like climbing between two slabs of ice. There were times when it was so cold that the only thing I would take off was my shoes. I’d jump in bed, coat and all and put my head under the cover and shiver and shake until I finally warmed up. One night, one of my brothers went to sleep with the window at the head of his bed raised about four inches. A blue norther blew in that night and when he woke up the next morning, part of his pillow was coated with ice.

The earliest memories I have of my childhood are when I was about three years old. I remember one of my brothers rolling an old tire down a hill near our old home place. We were poor in those days and having store bought toys was out of the question. I remember spending many days rolling an old lawn mower wheel down the road with a flattened out Prince Albert tobacco can that was nailed on the end of a stick. We would spend hours and hours rolling an old tire back and forth to each other in the old dusty road that ran in front of the house. I remember one incident when one of my brothers curled himself up inside a big grader tire and another one of my brothers rolled him down the road. Needless to say, when he got out of the tire his head was spinning.

We lived so close to the Sabine River that you could literally throw a rock across the road into it. We spent a lot of time either in the river, on the river or by the river. I remember a huge cypress tree on the opposite side of the river, which was the Louisiana side. We would cut a limb about the diameter of one’s finger and about four feet long and use it to sling wads of mud across the river. We would get a chunk of the clay that lined the riverbank and crimp it on the end of the limb. We literally spent hours and hours slinging that mud across the river. Of course, we kept tabs on who could throw the most pieces of mud over the top of that big tree on the other side.

Another “sport” of ours during the summer was to walk a mile or so up the river and find a dead tree log that we could roll off into the river and ride it downstream to the house place. Naturally we would play “King Of The Log”, instead of “King Of The Hill.” We got quite a few scrapes while being ejected from the soon to be crowned, “King Of The Log,” but no serious injuries ever occurred. Sometimes we would also go quite a bit farther up the river and bring our “inner tubes” to ride down the river in the sometimes fast, sometimes slow current. Many happy hours were spent in the river. Today people pay a lot of money to ride inner tubes, canoes or rafts down a river or creek. To us it was an almost everyday affair in the summer months.

Of course, there being six boys living within a few yards of the river, there was a lot of swimming going on. I remember when I was two or three years old, someone gave me a little plastic inner tube that I would put around my waist and go everywhere the big boys went. On many occasions my brothers or parents would try their best to get me to try to swim without it. It was nothing unusual for me to swim everywhere they went, as long as I had my safety factor with me. I do remember one day they finally convinced me to take it off. I could swim like the rest of them. Our parents were always referred to as “Ma” and “Daddy.” I do remember telling “Ma” that she could give that ole inner tube to someone else because I didn’t need it anymore. By the time I was four years old I was a very good swimmer.

Fishing and hunting was also a major part of our lives and livelihood. My father, James E. Woodard, was a commercial fisherman, hunter and trapper. I can always remember several old wooden boats that could be rented for $1.00 a day. We also sold bait shrimp. Many people don’t know it, but there are huge amounts of freshwater shrimp in the river. They can reach up to about three inches in length. They make great fish bait, especially for hand fishing. We would catch them using what we called a “shrimp box.” It was a wooden box about three feet long, eight inches high and eighteen inches wide and made of thin boards about one quarter inch thick and about three or four inches wide, usually from an apple or orange crate. We would make a throat in one end out of heavy-duty screen wire for the shrimp to swim into. We made a lid for the top of it. Once inside, the shrimp couldn’t find their way out. We sold thousands and thousands of these bait shrimp to fisherman, who either owned their own camps or came from town to spend a day on the river. One of my dreaded chores was to have to get up early in the morning and run the “shrimp boxes.” It consisted of driving a big wooden boat, usually fourteen feet or longer and seldom ever with an outboard motor bigger than a five horsepower up and down the river. The boxes were first sunk to the bottom by putting an old piece of scrap metal in it. After the wood became “waterlogged”, they would sink on their own. They were usually attached to a limb or tree in the river with a piece of old electrical cable that would not rot in the water. The boxes were baited with a slab of Cottonseed Cake, which was a type of animal feed that came in long slabs about three feet long, one inch thick and eighteen inches wide.

Of course, there are many fish tales to tell, along with hunting, trapping, and boat racing. During Spring and Summer we would sell catfish, shrimp and also rent boats. The catfish were sold live for $.50 a pound and were cleaned free. There was an old fish cleaning board mounted next to the riverbank. A big hook was used to hang the fish on and they were skinned, not filleted. Daddy and “Ma” skinned and cleaned many a pound of catfish in their days! They were masters at it. I remember getting up before school and running a few “trotlines” to catch some blue or channel catfish to sell and make spending money. On one occasion Daddy had a line stretched across the river and told me that if I would bait it, I could have all the fish I caught on it. The line was tied to a small willow limb on the Texas side that was very flexible. When I eased the boat up to the line one morning, the limb was as still as a mouse. I figured nothing was on it. As I got a few yards toward the middle of river, the line suddenly took off so hard and fast that it was all I could do to keep the hooks from hooking me, as I fed the line through my hands. The fish went all the way to the bottom. I began to work my way to the fish again. A few feet from the boat, the catfish came to the surface and he looked huge to me. I had a big dip net in the boat and tried to dip him up tail first. Bad idea! I found out that the catfish didn’t take too well to a dip net being slid over his tail. Every time I would try to dip him up, he would take off again and run until he hit the bottom of the river. After about the third or fourth time of him nearly jerking the line out of my hands, I put the dip net in front of him and he literally swam into it. If there were any more fish on that trotline, I have no idea. I took the hook out of that catfish’s mouth and away I went to the boat dock.

When I got home, we had an old pair of scales and we weighed him (or her) and the fish weighed a whopping twenty pounds! That was a big fish for a kid in elementary school for sure. A barber that owned a camp house a little way up the road from me gave me $.50 a pound for my fish and I didn’t even have to clean him. I was given a $10.00 bill. I was rich!!! I baited the hooks with P&G soap. That’s right, soap is one of the best catfish baits ever, even to this day. What happened is the twenty pounder swallowed a small catfish. I remember seeing a picture in the Orange Leader Newspaper around that time of a sixty-pound plus catfish that had been swallowed up to the two big fins behind his gills. The way to know if a catfish had been swallowed on by a bigger fish is that the fish would have white skin and a few scratch marks where the big fish tried to swallow him.

There were some huge catfish in the river. One morning Daddy came and got me up and told me to come outside, he had something to show me. There was a flathead catfish, like the one I caught, hanging on the side of the house that was bigger than me. The fish weighed over ninety pounds! My oldest brother has caught a lot of big catfish himself, the biggest being over seventy pounds. The big catfish were usually caught on live bait. The best big catfish baits back then was a yellow cat (pollywog), a carp, bream or small channel cat.

I remember going with daddy to seine some bait out of a drain ditch that crossed a road. There was a culvert running under the road and nearly all of the fish were in that small concrete culvert pipe. Daddy had me to take a garden hoe and crawl through the culvert. It was literally working alive with small fish, perch, carp, etc. I pushed the hoe ahead of me, along with the fish (and a water moccasin or two) out the other end into a waiting net, where Daddy scooped them up and put them in a 5-gallon bucket of water to keep them alive. We seined a lot of baitfish to keep all the many trotlines baited. We seined perch, little grinnell (cypress bass), pollywogs and crawfish for live bait, when not fishing with soap.

My daddy was probably the greatest hunter around in his day and time. It was not unusual to kill between 50 and 100 cat squirrels in a single day. We ate our share of them, but most were sold to “City Folks” who didn’t hunt. I remember going squirrel hunting with daddy once. While we were walking through the woods, me behind him, he whispered, “Stop, there’s a squirrel.” I looked and looked and finally said “where?” “In that big tree just ahead”, he said. I looked and looked and he was finally able to get me focused on a tree ahead that looked about ¼ mile off. I finally saw a cat squirrel on a limb. The squirrel was so far away that he looked about 2 or 3 inches long. It would have taken an elephant gun to reach the poor critter from that far. We were able to get close enough for him to get a shot at him with his old 12-gauge pump shotgun. The gun was a true antique; it had a hammer on it. It was quite an impressive gun and is worth a lot of money today.

I remember Daddy getting a 10-gauge double barrel shotgun with hammers on it. It had quite a kick to it, to say the least. One of my brothers, Roy, took a liking to the gun and would take it squirrel hunting with him. He said no matter how hard he tried, he could not keep the gun from rising up and his thumb hitting him in the nose every time he shot it. It was quite an impressive weapon for sure. I am not sure what ever happened to it. I do remember that Daddy had it in a gun rack in his bedroom. One day while working on the bathroom, which was adjacent to his bedroom, he was doing some hammering. We heard a terrible noise. It sounded like either a stick of dynamite, a sonic boom or an atomic bomb had went off in his bedroom. Upon going into his room, we saw that the 10 gauge had fallen out of the gun rack and hit the floor. Naturally, it hit on both hammers and both barrels went off at the same time. It blew a hole through the dividing wall into the next bedroom and right through the next bedroom wall and exited outside. I am not sure, but those hammers might have had a part in its departure.

Daddy was also an excellent trapper. He trapped during the winter months. Back then mink were very valuable. He could get up to $30.00 for a big mink hide. I have helped him skin many a coon, mink, otter, and possum for the pelts. There is a special technique to skinning an animal in order to preserve its hide. After skinning a mink, otter or possum, the skin was stretched over a board, with the fur on the inside. The skin was then left out in the sun to dry. Coons, as we called them, were skinned so their pelts would be in a square configuration. They were then stretched out and nailed to a piece of plywood, with the fur inside. When they dried, they could be kept until the fur buyer came. I have watched Daddy set his steel traps and cover them with wet leaves where different animals were sure to travel. I felt sorry for the trapped animals. I never really got into hunting. When I did hunt, it was not for sport, it was for food. I have always liked most any kind of wild game. We had a diet of squirrels, rabbits, hogs and fish. We even made our own cracklings and hog lard from fat hogs that ran wild in the woods. I wonder how much cholesterol was in that homemade hog lard?

My mother was a very talented woman. She was one of the best seamstresses around. She could look at a picture of the most fancy dress, or most any piece of clothing, make her own patterns and sew it together like a regular store bought garment. She had a great talent for making all kinds of cloth dolls. She would sew them together, stuff them with cotton, and use yarn for their hair. She would stitch their eyes, nose and mouth with different colored embroidery thread. She sold many dolls to people who were friends or work acquaintances. In all the days I remember of my Daddy being self employed and mama selling dolls, dresses, shirts, caps, etc., there was never an ad put anywhere, nor was there a poster put up. Everything was advertised by word of mouth.

Mama was a hard working lady who did everything she could to make the best of what we had to do with. She would make shirts out of 25 pound flour sacks. She would patch our clothes, as long as it was needed, in order to get all the use out of them we could. She washed many a load of clothes on a rub board before she got her first ringer type-washing machine. Of course, the clothes were hung up on a clothesline to dry in the sunshine. I remember well her using an old iron to iron clothes with. It was placed on the old wood heater to get it hot enough to get the wrinkles out of the clothes. She would take an old glass coke bottle, fill it with water, and then put a bunch of straws in the mouth to sprinkle water on the clothes she was ironing. For a long time, we had an old hand water pump that we had to pump water from for house use. Sometimes we would have to “prime the pump” before we could get water from it. She pumped many a gallon of water for sure.

“Maw” was also a great cook. I never remember her having a recipe. She would bake big cathead biscuits three times a day. During hard times, we could not afford to keep the fish or game. We had many a meal of biscuits, fried potatoes and gravy. Now Sunday was different, we would have a big pot of navy beans, cornbread and a homemade cake. Times were not always that bad. I do remember some great meals of fresh pork ribs, wood ducks, squirrels, rabbits, deer, fish or an occasional coon. I can remember trying armadillo once, but I can’t recall what it taste like. In some of my mission travels, I have eaten a lot worse than that for sure.

I can remember at times that big blue crabs would come up the river from Sabine Lake and we would catch them and “Ma” would make a big pot of crab gumbo. She made her own roux and I cannot ever remember eating any better. Back then no one had heard of BBQ Crabs, which is a sensation here now. Sometimes we would boil the crabs and eat them and the big pinchers. They were delicious for sure. My mother could not eat shrimp. She ate them one time and almost died from an allergic reaction. A lot of people don’t know it, but one of the best ways to eat crabs is to clean them and fry the body in cornmeal, like fish. Me being the youngest of seven children, I did not see as many hard times as my older brothers did. My parents moved to Orange from Sabine County near San Augustine, Texas before I was born. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only one of seven children that was delivered by a real doctor. Midwives delivered my other brothers and no doubt, it was a very painful experience for her. I seldom went to a doctor for anything as a child. I fell off a fence gate one time and snapped my right arm between the wrist and elbow. My hand was about eight inches from where it should have been. My arm was laid on a table and “set” and a splint put on it. No pain medication, no shots, no doctor visits, no X-Rays. I was almost twenty years old before I took any store-bought pain medication.

“Maw” knew the old home remedies. I well remember taking a big tablespoon of sugar with kerosene on it for the “croup.” She knew how to make a poultice that could draw the infection out of a wound. The only times I remember going to the doctor as a child is on two occasions. The first time, one of my feet got badly infected from scratching it because of “athlete’s foot.” That is one time that the poultice didn’t work. I had several red streaks going up my foot and already starting up my leg. A trip to the doctor and some antibiotics did the job. The other occasion like to have done me in. The Barber neighbor had a big cornfield and it sure had some nice roasting ears in it. I snuck into it and plucked me thirteen ears of corn. I carried them down to the riverbank so no one could see me and ate all thirteen ears, RAW!! Later that day, Maw couldn’t understand why my stomach was cramping and I was dry heaving until I couldn’t dry heave anymore. A trip to the doctor took care of it. Believe it or not, it has been only a few short years ago, (I am sixty two now) that I could even stand the smell of corn on the cob, let alone eat it!

My mama and daddy had a hard life. They were not active in church when I was at home. My mother said she attended church faithfully when she was first married, but quit going. I have the assurance in my heart that I will see them in Heaven again someday. In their older years they both assured me that they had asked Jesus to come into their heart and they both had the assurance of salvation. Both of them had the opportunity to hear me preach and my family sing. What a comfort it is to know that salvation is not based on feelings, church membership, baptism or good works. Salvation takes place in the heart, when one puts their trust in the finished work of Jesus at Calvary’s cross.

I don’t see how I could leave out a vital part of my early childhood days on the Sabine River without writing about boat racing. As I stated before, I learned to swim at four years of age. I was also an accomplished boat racer at not much older than that. My oldest brother had a homemade wooden boat about twelve or thirteen feet long. He brought a brand new twelve-horse Sea King outboard motor and put on it. It would scat across the water pretty good. I remember being far too little to crank the motor and my brother cranking it for me. He would then take the boat paddle out of the boat and push the boat away from the dock and say, “take off.” Take off I would. I would give the gas to that motor, it would jump up on top of the water and away we would go. I would run that boat wide open up and down the river in front of the house, while my family, people from the camps and anyone else who happened to drive up would be lined up and down the bank watching me rip and tear up and down the river until they would flag me in. A boat racing accident would play a major role in me rededicating my life to Jesus when I was twenty-nine years old and thrown from a fast boat. By God’s grace, I was spared from harm or death. I will give the details in a later chapter. There will be some more of our fast boat stories in a later chapter.

There are many people who do not believe that a young child can be saved. I would refer them to the Bible, when Jesus rebuked His disciples and outright commanded them to bring little children to Him, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. I was saved during early elementary school at Little Cypress Baptist Church, just outside Orange, Texas. I would put my age at about ten years old, between the third and fourth grade. I will never forget that morning as long as I live, unless I lose my senses. There was a very special lady that God put in our family’s lives. A couple named Sam and Aileen Trussel lived about three quarters of a mile up the road from us. She was a faithful member of Little Cypress Baptist Church. I remember her coming and picking me up and bringing me to Sunday School faithfully. Another special person that God put into my life was Bro. Wilburn Ansley, pastor of the church. I cannot remember the messages he preached. I do remember that in one message he mentioned people buying electric clothes dryers. He said he wanted God’s sunshine to dry his clothes. He was a dynamic preacher of God’s word and has been used of God for many years. I do remember the Sunday morning coming down the aisle during the invitation time. I was under great conviction with tears streaming down my face. I will never forget the question he asked me when he met me at the front. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to join the church, he didn’t ask me if I wanted to get baptized, he didn’t even ask me if I wanted to get saved. His simple words were “Son, what do you need.” My reply was “I need to be saved.” His reply was simple, “Do you believe Jesus died for you?” There were no laying on of hands or praying at the altar, I simply put my trust in Jesus that morning and I have never been the same since.