Home Sweet Home

Howard & Thelma Summers

Home Sweet Home

We moved to Picayune from New Orleans 35 years ago when we were expecting our sixth child and had outgrown our suburban home. After looking exhaustively for a country home near New Orleans, Slidell, and finally, Picayune, the realtor took us to see “just one more” down a country road, over a “cattle gap,” and up a long driveway. A picturesque panorama unfolded before us with two giant magnolias flanking the drive framing a sprawling, white, older home surrounded by birds and flowers. It would be our home for the next 20 years.

We raised our six children there, until our son who was born there went away to college. We gave them roots grown deep in the wonderful community of Picayune, watched them graduate high school, spread their wings and go on to successful lives of their own lived for God and reflecting their upbringing, reinforced by spiritual development in church attendance and participation. Our oldest became a minister, our second-oldest, a minister’s wife, four are involved in music ministry in their churches, with one a youth pastor and band director at an outreach church for Chinese in Houston, Texas. Besides ministry, they work in education, nursing, industry and finance. My husband, Howard, became a minister himself when God stopped him in his tracks in the middle of a business career. The then-pastor at Solid Rock Church, Rev. Joseph Kiley, guided him in getting ministerial credentials and placed him on staff as Administrator/Associate Pastor. We left Picayune when Howard was called to the staff of a large church in Wichita, Kansas. We later returned to south Mississippi where he was pastor of a church on the Gulf Coast, leaving after Hurricane Katrina.

Is Jesus Lord over Picayune? That was our experience. I know the demographics of the town have changed, but God hasn’t changed. As II Chronicles 7:14 says, “If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” If that is the case, then we can say, “Jesus is Lord over Picayune.”

(Check out www.thelmasummers.blogspot.com/ for more wonderful articles by this author.)