Norm Wretlind and The All Night Prayer Meeting
Whenever Brother Cox sends out an update/caricature/biography of a former spiritual greenhorn, others come out of hiding. This time it was an old friend from the Class of 1964. I am talking about none other than revivalist, missionary, teacher, fellow Reaper of the Harvest, World Book Encyclopedia salesman, and now Christian party person, Norm Wretlind and his lovely wife, nee Becky Horski (also the Class of 1964).
The first time I met Brother Norm was in Ensenada, Mexico, at Christmas time in 1964. Over those mud hills he relentlessly went from door to door selling Bibles to the Spaniards down there. It was that whole experience with him and Bob and Noel Rich, who are now in Peru, and Dan Templeton, who is now in Brazil, that got me to read E.M. Bounds' little book, Power in Prayer. There were stories in there about these fools praying till their breath stained the walls and their knee caps wore dents in the floor. So, inspired, off I would march to the second floor prayer room in Smith Hall and start praying up an electrical storm with Templeton and Rich. I doubt if I was able to even get prayer breath condensation on the walls because these guys would be praying while I was listening to the 1500 other students thundering down the stairs to the dining room for a piece of that green Moody liver. Food always made me want to quit praying.
Because of my associations with Wretlind, Templeton, Rich, and the Reapers of the Harvest, one time I went out to Emmaus Bible School for - now get this - an All NIGHT PRAYER MEETING. I did that one once. And only once. George Verwer was out there womping them up for world evangelization, and when he got through, they broke out the maps on the gym floor and everyone got down and poured spiritual breath over those maps for an hour. Then, they broke up into prayer circles of 50 people, and it was my misfortune to be prayer number 50 in one of those groups. The guy on my right was appointed to open (as they used to say), and I was to "close". I had down pat my favorite prayer phrases that I had learned at Moody and was ready to use them all, like "lead, guide, and direct", which went into every prayer anybody prayed in those days. But this bozo on my right used that phrase about 30 times and all the other ones I had in reserve too. So as he was waxing prayerful, I was rewriting and re-editing my prayer in my mind even as he spoke, using my mental Thesaurus to come up with another version of "lead, guide, and direct" and my other favorite prayer words. When the dude next to him started in, you could tell that he was thinking about his prayer words too because he went with the lead, guide, and direct line one time, but then he changed it an used one of my words that I was holding in reserve. The girl that followed him had had about ten minutes to dream up her prayer vocabulary, and she used another one of my words and then threw in lead, guide, and direct for good measure. To make a long story short, everybody down the line had up to an hour to go through every synonym they could think of for lead, guide, and direct. Some had limited vocabularies and could not come up with any original ones for lead, guide, and direct, and so they just went with it no matter how stupid it sounded after having heard it about five thousand times already. There are only so many words for this, and they used them all by the time they got to me. I have no idea what I said (Notice: said, not prayed), but from that day on I made sure that I stood on the outside of any prayer circle and walked around it like it was musical chairs trying to locate where the beginning was going to be so I could get position one, two or three and could whip out "lead, guide, and direct" without going through the Webster's Dictionary again. The rest of them would now have to dream up new stuff to come up with. If I ever ended up in any position where lead, guide, and direct was beginning to sound too familiar, I just cracked open my eyes a little bit and looked around to see if everybody was supplicating with intensity (or going through the dictionary). Then I just disappeared. Anyway, when they started in on round three of prayer at Emmaus, I couldn't take it anymore and went to bed somewhere up in the bowels of Emmaus. I had said lead, guide, and direct enough for one night. Whenever I pray today, I just can't say that phrase anymore. I'll say something like "steer, channel, and supervise."
Anyway, I graduated from Biola in January of 1969, and somehow I came across Brother Wretlind again who was back from the field in South America some place. Brother Norm, however, was now working in the flesh and selling the World Book Encyclopedia. He had all the Air Force bases in California, Nevada, and Arizona, and was pulling down some pretty good bread. He convinced me that I should do the same. So I became his jedi padawan and rode around Southern California with him in his Mercury Cougar to the various bases. He had this technique where he would post up at the front door of the base exchange with a pencil in his hand and wait for the first victim. When the door would open and the mark looked at Norm, Norm locked on him like a viper with those beady eyes, lifted his pencil, reached it out over the counter and seemed to hook it under the guy's chin, then pulled the end of the pencil toward him. It was like magic. The sucker would just waltz over to the display, and soon Norm, without conscience, led him to the altar of sacrifice where he was relieved of about $400 of military pay before going to Viet Nam. He made a killing doing this and pursued it with the same zeal as he did passing out all those tracts to the Spaniards. I soon went off on my own and have not seen Norm to this day.
I believe Norm went off with Campus Crusade for a while, and now he has this party ministry in Colorado that you can read about by going to www.neighborhope.com. Norm's older brother is Dennis Wretlind (married Elma Long), who was in the Class of 1967. All the Wretlinds live in the Denver area.