Leslie Keyes sits on the edge of a recliner in his living
room, handing photographs of an earlier time to a visitor seated on the nearby
sofa.
Most are black-and-white snapshots, apparently scanned and
reprinted from originals. He offers a sentence or two of explanation with each
one.
Keyes and his guest have been talking for almost an hour. The
photographs are a way of summing up the conversation – offering glimpses
of Keyes life in Louisiana and Honduras.
Editors Note: The following article represents the first
in a periodic series in which the Baptist Message will seek to update stories
that appeared in earlier issues of the state newspaper. In this instance, the
article is based on a story that appeared in the November 12, 1964 issue of
the Baptist Message.
Leslie Keyes sits on the edge of a recliner in his living
room, handing photographs of an earlier time to a visitor seated on the nearby
sofa.
Most are black-and-white snapshots, apparently scanned and
reprinted from originals. He offers a sentence or two of explanation with each
one.
Keyes and his guest have been talking for almost an hour. The
photographs are a way of summing up the conversation – offering glimpses
of Keyes life in Louisiana and Honduras.
Keyes offers the glimpses alone. His wife of more than 57 years
died in early February. But while her presence is absent, her memory is not
as Keyes reflects on their life of missions ministry and service together.
Part of that story was featured in a 1964 article in the Louisiana
Baptist Message. It told how Keyes and his wife, Naomi, were teaching Honduran
women to make quilts from fabric scraps and burlap stuffing. The quilts were
used to help keep the Central American natives warm at night.
But on this day in March 2001, Keyes starts his story earlier,
back to his teenage years in Tensas Parish.
He was 16 when his wifes family moved to his area from
Missouri. They rented a place near Keyes, and the familys 15-year-old
daughter soon caught his attention.
“A girl who was kin to me wanted to visit them one Sunday
afternoon,” Keyes recalls. “And I just kept going.”
Eventually, the couple married and settled into a farming life
there in Tensas Parish. However, that life did not last.
Keyes recalls the week an evangelist came to the church he
and his wife attended. He acknowledges he had been running from God for awhile
in terms of a call to ministry.
“For a couple of years, Id been trying to dodge
bullets from the Lord,” he explains.
That week, the evangelist emphasized a simple truth , Keyes
says. “He said, If youre ever going to do anything for the
Lord, you better get started now.”
One night, lying in bed, the thought troubled Keyes. Restless,
he did not realize his wife was awake – or understood his turmoil –
until she placed her hand on his arm. “If you want to preach, its
all right with me,” she told him.
The next night, the couple announced to their church that God
had called them into missions.
They gathered that years crop, let their farm machinery
go and began the process of getting to the mission field.
The route looked more than uncertain. Age was a definite factor,
At 28, Keyes would have to attend Louisiana College in Pineville and New Orleans
Baptist Theological Seminary. If he took the normal seven years to graduate
from both institutions, he would be too old for missions appointment.
“I thought, Well, thats it, then, ”
Keyes says. “But Naomi said, Well, if we miss it, lets miss
it running.”
Just five years later, Keyes was completing his education,
having attended summers and off sessions as much as possible – in addition
to serving as pastor at a small Baptist church in Cash Bayou. Still, an initial
interview with a Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board representative was disheartening.
“He said we were too old and our oldest daughter was too old,” Keyes
recalls. “So, I gave up.”
His wife did not. She convinced Keyes to talk with another
mission board representative. This time, the word came back for the couple to
report to orientation in July.
“I asked him how they managed to get around my age,”
Keyes notes. “He said they just subtracted my military time.”
In August, word came that the couple was to be appointed. After
a year of language study, they headed to Honduras, where they would spend the
next three decades, finally retiring in 1991.
That first year, all four of their children went with them.
However, it soon became obvious that the oldest daughter would need to attend
school in the states. Eventually, all four children returned to Louisiana for
their high school years.
Meanwhile, in Honduras, Keyes served as pastor of numerous
churches and missions – and his wife engaged in a variety of efforts, including
medical missions.
Naomi Keyes had no medical training, but medical volunteers
would visit and leave medicine and information. In time, Naomi Keyes was able
to help natives deal with various illnesses and ailments. “There were so
many simple things you could do to help folks,” Keyes recalls. “An
aspirin was like a wonder drug, cause theyd never had any.”
The grateful natives tried to call her doctor, but Naomi Keyes
refused the title. Others tried to call her a witch doctor. She refused that
characterization as well, her husband says.
For 30 years, the couple invested their lives across the Honduran
countryside. And when Keyes is asked to compare the sacrifice of those years
versus the service offered, he replies quickly: “Theres no contest.
… Any hardship turned out for our good eventually.”
After retiring, the Keyes returned to Louisiana – but
not to the northern portion of the state. Instead, they settled in LaPlace,
where some of their children were, buying a house directly across the street
from First Baptist Church.
There, Keyes preached occasionally and kept up with Southern
Baptist missions, especially in Honduras. He eventually would return to the
country to take part in the 40th anniversary of the First Baptist Church of
San Pedro Sula, where he served as pastor for a time. “The city had grown,”
he recalls. “It looked like there was 1 million cars in town.”
Naomi Keyes did not make that trip. By that time, she was experiencing
poor health. Then, last fall, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
“The doctors told us it was a bad tumor, …” Keyes
recounts. “Everything about it was bad. They said they could operate, but
it wouldnt do much good.”
Nevertheless, Naomi Keyes opted for the operation in an attempt
to end the seizures she had been suffering as a result of her condition. When
Keyes arrived at the hospital on the morning after the operation, he says it
was obvious that his wife had had some kind of serious experience with God.
“They told me she had been saying some weird things, so
I asked, Like what? And they said one of the things she was saying
was, Assault hells foundations with prayer. ”
A few days later, when Keyes arrived, his wife told him: “I
saw the Lord high and lifted up, and he had his arms outstretched. And he said,
This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in
it.”
That was about the last day Naomi Keyes was lucid, her husband
says, pausing to control the emotion in his voice and to wipe his eyes of tears.
She died in the hospital on Feb. 7.
“She was determined to honor the Lord in her death, just
as she did in life,” he says. “She just set her face on the Lord.”
In doing so, she offered a lesson to Keyes.
In Colossians 1:24, Paul says, “Now, I rejoice in what
was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard
to Christs afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.”
Keyes admits he never understood what could be lacking in Christs
afflictions. But as he struggled to answer his daughters questions about
why God would allow a faithful follower to suffer, understanding came, he says.
“The Lord Jesus died once,” Keyes explains, holding
a Bible with a clipped-out obituary for Naomi Keyes tucked in to mark Colossians
1.
“He couldnt die in every generation. But Paul said,
I can live and die and remind people of him in doing so. I think
thats what it means. And for Naomi, I think her death was a chance for
her to strike a good blow for the Lord.”
That much certainly was on her mind. Keyes recalls the morning
he arrived at the hospital, only to be questioned by his wife if he had done
what she had asked.
“I asked what that was, and she said, I told you
to get everybody you can find and march down the street with them, singing hymns
as loud as you can.”
Keyes smiles at the memory, acknowledging the request was impossible
to fulfill in metropolitan New Orleans.
“But if we had been in Honduras, I could have done that,” he recalls.
“All I would have had to do was go down to the church and tell them what
she wanted. They all loved her so much down there, they would have done it.”