Oliver Deen
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Oliver Deen died last week. His obituary plunged to new depths of crappiness...
https://www.hixsonbrothers.com/obituaries/Reverend-Oliver-Franklin-Deen?obId=27658595#/obituaryInfo
It gives you no sense of who Oliver Deen was. Brother Oliver was a tall, lanky force of nature. There are some people who have hit a different plane, no matter the normal problems and laments of this old world. Oliver Deen absolutely exuded positivity. He was always ready with a supportive word, a kind deed or a funny story. I don't know if Oliver Deen knew how to frown.
He was more of an evangelist than a pastor, although he pastored quite a few churches. But he never stayed too many years...He thought he had done what he could do, there were other people who needed to hear the Good News and his old congregation was probably tired of listening to him, anyway.
Lots of times between churches, he'd head out West and do some serious hiking out in the Rockies. Sometimes with family or friends, sometimes alone. Well, alone except for a traveler's guitar. He loved to play and sing, even if he was just singing to the sky.
As he got older, he worked for the Louisiana Southern Baptists. The obit says doing chaplain work for disaster relief, which he was well suited for, but Brother Oliver temporarily filled in for many a rural church that might have an empty pulpit for whatever reason. No telling how many people Oliver Deen knew.
That's how I first met him...He was filling in for my FIL, after my wife's dad was recovering from a colon resection. Ran into him again, many years down the line, after dropping by Cowboy Church one night. Brother Deen was there, playing an upright bass and singing harmony on those old Heavenly Highway (blue book) hymns. Cowboy Church meets on Monday nights, so that gave him another opportunity to go to church, besides Sundays and Wednesdays. Brother Deen sure liked to be in church, enjoying the Word and singing away.
His funeral was attended by a gaggle of pastors and folks from the Louisiana Baptist HQ. Probably twenty preachers or more. The man who gave the obit was Oliver's dad's pastor and he was almost 100 years old. The reverend who preached the funeral sermon - and I do mean 40 minute sermon, full blast with Bible readings, multiple points and an altar call - was a young man in his 30's. And with all those preachers, at least a dozen had a short, funny story about Rev. Oliver Deen. The funeral ate up almost two hours.
And Brother Oliver got some laughs most people didn't even know about. The family had asked my wife to play everything except the congregational songs, but after hearing her do the prelude, the pianist who was supposed to do the congregational songs told my wife she played much better than her, so please take care of that. So, in the middle of the funeral, the wife is scrambling to get music together and lined up in front of her soloist's arrangement and her post-lude stuff. She'd never worked with the gentleman leading the congregational stuff and after she played the intro in the correct time, this guy took off like a galloping horse with a tempo probably twice as fast as written. As the funeral director is snickering into his sleeve, the wife has to correct and match tempo with the guy leading. Being a pretty good musician, Brother Deen would have grinned at the speed of the hymn.
Having said all of this, Oliver Deen's life could be pretty much be summed up in one sentence, a phrase I've heard him tell many people over the years...
Brother (or Sister), I love you and there ain't nuthin' you can do about it.
That was Reverend Oliver Franklin Deen.
