Elmer Albright was a fellow-carpenter, born in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, whose father was a coal miner. He and his wife, Evie, had come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour at the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Shamokin about five years earlier under the ministry of a Scotsman named George Atcheson.
As he worked with Ernie, Elmer began to speak to him of the Lord Jesus Christ, someone he invariably referred to as his Saviour. He told Ernie of God the Creator who made and sustained the universe, whose Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, had been sent into the world to deal with our greatest need, the guilt of our wayward living: ‘We deserve eternal death, because we are sinners, but the Lord Jesus, because he loved us, died for us.’ While Elmer explained the good news to him and urged him to read the Bible, he invited Ernie to come to the Sunday School which the government allowed a small group of Christians to hold in a recreational building on the base.
Don’t get too close
Elmer Albright and Reisinger had many conversations in the course of a year, but the other workmen had little time for Elmer. He was a good carpenter and a considerate follow-worker, but he had this ‘bug’ on religion. ‘Don’t get too close to him’, they warned Ernie. ‘If you do, all he will talk about is religion.’ But the men were wrong. Elmer never talked about religion. He talked about the Lord Jesus Christ in such an intimate way that Ernie began to think: ‘He really knows this Person’.
