S.F. Carlisle Jr. and his wife, Hazel, were married 63 happy years. In the evenings, they would sit outside their Oak Grove home with a Bible.
“We sat out there about 18 years,” the 87-year-old Carlisle said earlier this week. “I’d read, we’d talk and I’d pray. She didn’t want to read or pray; she wanted me to do that.”
Four years ago, Hazel died from a brain tumor. Carlisle went to a dark place.
“The thing I could not get over was that time,” he said. “I told my friends – my Christian buddies – ‘I’m having me a hard way.’ When I say I prayed, I’m telling you, I prayed, ‘God, you’ve got help me. You’ve got to get me past this.’”
Carlisle remembered the times he and Hazel listened to the Bible and talked about it. As a former newspaperman, he decided he would keep a journal about the scriptures he read and what they meant to him. That journal turned into a 730-page book called, “Bites of Bread: Journey Through the Bible.”
Carlisle is the father of Phillip Carlisle, the Lamar County District 4 supervisor.
“We lost Mama in May 2014,” Phillip said. “The main thing (writing the book) did is it filled the gap. They used to sit out on the porch.”
After losing his wife and best friend, Carlisle wrote her a love letter from something they shared for 18 years. For Carlisle, the attraction to Hazel was sudden.
“When I met that girl, I fell in love with her immediately,” he said. “I came home from the service and met her on a blind date in Mount Olive. She and I were married 63 happy, happy years.”
Carlisle said he really enjoyed
talking about the Bible with Hazel.
“I said, ‘You know, one of the
things I think I’ll do is read through the Bible.’ I started journaling,” he said. “That’s something I have never done. I told people all my life that I would do a journal, but I never did. I started journaling and I started reading. I call it ‘meditation’ because I would just sit there and let the Holy Spirit tell me ‘What did these three chapters of Exodus tell me? What did it say?’ I would journal it. When I got through that, I said, ‘What does that mean to me? How does that apply to me, an 80-year-old guy?’ So, I would write down what I thought the scripture said. That was my summary.”
Carlisle said he grew up as the son of a preacher, but his mother influenced his Bible studies.
“When we went to Sunday school every week, you had an offering envelope,” he said. “On the front of the envelope, you had to mark ‘I’m present,’ ‘I’m on time,’ ‘I studied my lesson’ and ‘I studied my Bible.’ My mama always asked me, ‘Did you read your Bible? Did you read your Bible?’ She motivated me. My daddy, before he was a preacher, was the town drunk. But she always motivated me.”
Carlisle has since asked other people whether they read the Bible.
“I have talked to so many people about this,” he said. “I asked them, ‘Did you read the Bible through?’ They would say, ‘I started.’
“‘Why’d you quit?’
“‘Well, I got behind and didn’t catch back up.’”
So, “Bites of Bread” was written to help those Bible readers who didn’t want to feel the pressure of finishing.
“I soon determined that they did the same thing that I had done over the years,” he said. “I read the Bible as a project to be through in 365 days. So, I decided I would put something together where there wasn’t a time limit on it.”
Carlisle aspired to be the editor of his hometown newspaper in Collins. He studied journalism in Dallas, Texas, and came home to work at the paper.
When his plans fell through, he met an insurance salesman who said his boss wanted to talk with him.
“My daddy had a terrible image of insurance,” he said. “The agent’s boss and I got together on the insurance job, and 40 years later I retired. I was sales manager and agent for 17 years and field manager for the rest of the 40 years. I came to Hattiesburg in 1958 and almost starved to death getting started with three children. But I finally made and had a very successful career.”
The book is self-published through Xulon Press in Florida (xulonpress.com) and is available through Amazon and from Carlisle directly. The softbound version is $40 and shipping is added. All of the profits from sales of the book are set aside to be presented to his church, Willow Pointe Baptist Church in Bellevue.
“I was part of a church startup 15 years ago,” he said. “I told God, ‘I’d like to do something for you.’ So, I paid all the startup costs for the book and let the church get the rest.”
For Carlisle, the book is special to him because of his faith and his love for his wife.
“In a crisis, it was an answer to a prayer,” he said.
