Not many people enter the world of broadcast television after reaching 90, but James "Jim" Russell has done just that. He co-hosts Scriptural Pursuit, a 30-minute weekly television and radio program that reviews the Sabbath school lesson themes published by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. A “retired” minister, Jim has enjoyed a lifetime of study and rich experiences that he has brought to the program which he has co-hosted with his son, Glenn Russell, assistant professor of religion at Andrews University since '98.
Scriptural Pursuit began in the mid '80s on WAUS-FM as a one-hour radio program hosted by Allen Steele. Several hosts continued the program, including Robert McIver, a former Andrews University graduate student; Pat Morrison, a former campus chaplain; and George Akers, a professor in the School of Education. Today communication students, in cooperation with International Learning Systems and WYGN-LP Channel 12 in Berrien Springs, Michigan, produce the show as a 30-minute television program shared around the world through the Hope Channel and beginning this month, on LifeTalk Radio Network.
Jim is loved by the members of the crew. They appreciate his thoughtful, friendly demeanor and his great sense of humor. But working in the studio, with all the setup involved, demands a lot of patience. And patience is a virtue that has come to Jim through a variety of learning experiences on his journey with God.
Born in 1913, in Toronto, Ontario, Jim celebrated his first birthday in a log cabin in the northern wilderness of forests and lakes. With one older sister and three older brothers free to play outside, Jim spent much of his crawling and toddling time in the little cabin with his mother. One day, while his father worked at a lumber camp some distance away, a forest fire broke out and threatened their little cabin. Isolated in the woods, a mile from their nearest neighbor, his mother gathered up the children and they sat on the floor with buckets of water while they fervently prayed for the Lord to turn the fire away. As the fire approached the cabin, the wind blew it the other way.
With the outbreak of World War I, Jim's father enlisted in the army and the family moved back to Toronto. Near the end of the war, his mother took the children night by night to some evangelistic meetings held in the city. At the end of the meetings, his mother and older sister were baptized.
When Jim’s father came home from the war, they moved to a small farm. Although they had limited income and were not near an Adventist church or school, each of the five children were given the opportunity to receive an advanced education at an Adventist school. Jim attended South Lancaster Academy, where his sister and her husband taught. Without the aid of student loans or grants, he was able to continue his education at Atlantic Union College by working in the bindery and serving part time as dean of boys in the dorm above the bindery. He graduated completely free of debt.
It was during college that he met Carolyn Hall and developed a meaningful relationship with shared dreams. “At that time they had what they called a foreign mission band," recalls Jim. “We both got the inspiration to be missionaries—to go to the mission field. Well, we graduated and went out to teach at Union Springs Academy. We still had that desire and conviction, and it wasn’t long before the General Conference asked us to go overseas. We took that as a sign that the Lord was opening up the way for us to serve Him elsewhere.”
After a number of delays and changes in plans, Jim and Carolyn, along with baby Janet, boarded a ship in New York headed for Brazil and across the South Atlantic to Africa. While en route, their ship was attacked by a German Raider and sunk.
“The other day,” recalls Jim, “I was looking back over the years a bit, and I got out a piece of paper and jotted down seven different occasions when I thought I was going to either die or get killed—when my life seemed threatened and I survived. The Lord brought me through them. On occasions like that I wondered, 'Why, Lord? Why? Why did You spare my life?' Obviously, He does it so that we might serve Him. Some good can come out of every experience in life.
“Life is full of unexpected experiences that can test your faith—test your patience. And it surely did that to us. We’d been married three years and we had a little baby girl, and she was the youngest passenger on the ship when this happened. Sometimes we think, ‘Well, we must have made a mistake. We should have gone to Asia instead of Africa. Why did we decide to go this way?’
“You know, our planning is oft times not God’s planning for us. And so we had many questions, 'Lord, we were going to the mission field. How come this happened?'”
Following their rescue, Carolyn and Janet were allowed to return to America, but Jim ended up spending four years as a prisoner of war in Stalag 10b. At the end of that horrible experience Jim says, “It seemed like the Lord was saying, ‘Alright, have you learned your lesson? Are you ready to go out again?’
“We sometimes wonder if we ever did learn all the lessons the Lord had in mind for us, but He taught us a lot of patience, and leaning on Him for guidance to understand that man proposes, but God disposes.
“It’s not always exactly the way we had planned, or even sometimes how the brethren planned for us, but God has His own plans, and evidently He saw that we needed four more years of experience of one kind or another and then He sent us out. Instead of going to East Africa, we ended up in Egypt and Lebanon.”
Jim served the people of the Middle East for 23 years before returning to the U.S. as a pastor. “It’s always amazing to me,” remarks Jim, “and it’s more amazing as time goes on, how the events of life were not as I planned, but they were in God’s plan. Commit your life to God in the morning—every morning—and ask Him to lead you through the day and that’s what He’ll do.
“It’s perplexing for young people because they look ahead; they want to plan their life, their future. Pressures come to them from all sides to do things the way the world is doing it. There’s always a tendency to go the way the world goes when really what young people need to do is get down on their knees and commit their lives to the Lord, and say, ‘Lord, I don’t know what the future holds, but I know Who holds the future and You can direct me.’ It’s a matter of surrender, isn’t it? Surrender—committing our lives to the Lord, so that He will guide us.
“I remember our college motto used to be, ‘Service—Not Fame.’ It’s so easy in this life to become self-centered, because of all the pressures in life—especially economic pressures. The devil tries to keep people busy thinking about themselves instead of others. But if you spend time with the Word, the things of this world become less attractive and your mind is set on Heaven. You long more and more for heavenly things and not for earthly things. But God’s plan for each one of us is to be a blessing to someone else.”
Much of Jim’s faith and confidence can be attributed to the many portions of the Bible that he has committed to memory. As they were abandoning ship, he helped Carolyn, baby Janet, and the other women down the rope ladders into the lifeboats. He quickly returned to their cabin to grab a few supplies for the baby and slipped his precious Bible into the baby's blanket.
“When you go down thirty feet on a rope ladder swinging back and forth, you tend to lose some things,” notes Jim. “Wouldn’t you know, my Bible slipped out of the little bundle I was carrying, down into the water, and after I got down into the lifeboat and our boat pushed away from the ship, I looked over the side and there was something black floating on the water. And when it came closer, it was this Bible floating on the water just like that. I was able to grab it up.” The Word of God remains Jim’s most precious possession.
“There is nothing that can take the place of personal devotions. When my wife’s health was failing, we sat at the breakfast table; when we were finished, I was reading something for our devotions. In the middle of our devotions, my wife bowed her head. She suffered a severe stroke.
“My wife was in the hospital for that 48 hours before she passed away. During that time I was by her side there and trying to see—she was totally unconscious, but she must have been somewhat conscious, and I remember saying to her, to see if she would respond to me, I said, ‘Do you remember Isaiah 26:3?’ And right off she said, ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed upon thee.’ Even though she was unconscious, that message of the Lord was there in her mind.
“When we get to Heaven, there’s going to be, we think now, there’s going to be questions that we’ll want to ask and get the answers to. But you know, I think Heaven will be such a wonderful blessing to us that what happened to us on Earth will be of little importance. We’ll forget it all and enjoy the blessings of Heaven."
Gary Burns is the Lake Union Conference communication director.
