A remarkable life

When I am speaking to church groups, I often ask for a show of hands.

“How many of you,’’ I ask, “have read the Bible from cover to cover?”

A few usually raise their hands. There are times when nobody does.

Unless you are a seminary student, a preacher or a missionary, it’s difficult to count yourself among those who have done a complete read of the King James version from Genesis to Revelation. That’s a total of 807,361 words.

I don’t ask this question to make people feel guilty, although if I wanted to do that, it certainly would work.

It has always been to point out the remarkable feat of Mr. Talmadge Shepard, who was a member of my church – First Baptist of Macon.

When I interviewed him for a column in August 1999 called “The holy word in his hands.’’

This is what I wrote on a Sunday morning:

Talmadge Shepard's fingers have fought the battle of Jericho and met Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane.
He has literally felt every heartfelt word of Psalms. He keeps the verbs of Ecclesiastes and adverbs of Corinthians at his fingertips.
This morning, the churches of Macon will be filled with worshipers who rarely miss a Sunday. They are devout in their faith, frame their lives around the "Good Book" and can quote Scripture from Acts to Zechariah.
I wonder how many of them would admit they never have read the Bible from beginning to end.
Many, like myself, will claim to have pieced together a complete reading over a lifetime. We might have studied enough Scripture in Sunday School and accumulated enough verses from within an earshot of the pulpit to achieve the sum of the parts.
Still, reading the Bible from Genesis 1:1 to Revelations 22:21 remains an unfulfilled challenge.
For that reason, Shepard has taken his rightful place among those on my "most-admired" list. At year's end, he will have completed reading the Bible 21 times.
That, in itself, is amazing.
What makes it even more remarkable is that Talmadge Shepard is blind.

Mr. Shepard died this past Friday. He was 86. He had been in poor health for a number of years. His funeral was Monday at First Baptist.

He was known for more than just his scripture reading. He was a remarkable man.

For 32 years, he ran the concession stand in the lobby of the Bibb County Courthouse. He learned to recognize his customers by the sounds of their voices. He would distinguish their money by its size and shape. He worked five days each week from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., often walking to the courthouse from his family's house on Spring Street.

While living on Spring Street, he and his sister, Jean Davis, grew up in the shadow of the tall steeple at First Baptist Church at the top of Poplar. They joined the church in 1944.

After he retired from the courthouse concession stand in December 1978, he took on a preacher’s challenge to church members to start the New Year with a resolution: To read the Bible in its entirety.

And he did. Again. And again. And again. His 18 Braille volumes stretched across two bookshelves.

I always counted him among my heroes.