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Writer's pictureStephen Woodfin

On Learning of an Old Friend’s Passing

I learned yesterday of the passing of my old friend Sam Underwood. I don’t know what made me think of Sam, but I caught myself putting his name in Google.


The first thing that popped up was his obituary.


He’s been gone since April 24, 2020, almost seven months now.


Sam spent many years as a pastor, his final twenty-nine-year stint at the First Baptist Church in Farmers Branch, Texas.


But I knew Sam first when we were both in our twenties, those years when we had no clue of what hand life would deal us. In the summer of 1973, I was serving as the summer youth director at First Baptist Church Port Arthur, Texas, living in an efficiency apartment next to the Inter Coastal Waterway, where the mosquitoes were as big as your hand.


That summer Sam and a couple of other young people were working as a team who visited local churches around the state and managed programs like Vacation Bible schools a week at a time. They were itinerant evangelists of a sort, brimming with the energy of youth and hardly older than the young people to whom they ministered.


He and I became quick friends, enjoying the moments together and building a relationship that lasted for many years. Once in the early 1980s, Sam came to live with me in a Baylor University student apartment, long since demolished by the gods of progress.


In 1986, Sam performed the wedding ceremony for Paige and me.


We saw each other only a few times in the last thirty-ish years.


I knew some years ago he had fought a battle with cancer, but I had convinced myself he had beaten the disease.


He hadn’t beaten the disease.


Thinking of Sam reminds me of the words of Jesus when he saw the disciple Nathaniel approaching, “Behold an Israelite in whom there is no guile.”


Sam was a man in whom there was no guile. He was a pure soul, loving, compassionate, eaten up with the desire to follow God’s lead.


My condolences go out to his wife Ellen and his children and other family members.


The world has lost a good man and I a good friend.

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