In 1983, Corky, Hope and I moved to Cleveland, Tennessee. Specifically, we moved into Ellis Hall Men's Dormitory on the Lee College campus. Corky had accepted the position of dorm supervisor and was entering into his Bachelor of Arts program full-time. I had studied Fashion Merchandising and received a B.S. from Winthrop College in Rock Hill, SC in 1980 and we were married the next month. Hope was born in April 1982.
After moving to Cleveland in the Spring, we met a student from the Seminary with whom we became friends. Corky's sister, Judy, was visiting with us and this student invited Judy and I to attend class with him one day. That day would change my life. The teacher was Rickie D. Moore, first year professor of Old Testament and Hebrew. The class was "Jeremiah". As a lecturer, Rick is an artist. As a reader of the text, Rick is insightful and sees it in a prophetic way. All of his students can testify to this. That day, Rick lectured on Jeremiah 31, God as mother. In all of my years in the Pentecostal church I had never heard anything like that!
If he had lectured on any other texts, no doubt my intellectual curiosity would have been peaked. But that day, he lectured on what I now know to be a feminist reading of the text (probably influenced by Phyllis Trible's God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality). I could not, in my carefulness, doubt that God was speaking specifically to me.
That next Fall, I enrolled in Greek and Old Testament Intro. And in theological study, I found my calling and place.
Rick is following the leading of the Lord and moving into a new place of ministry in the Bible and Theology Department at Lee University.
I will be forever grateful to Rick for his prophetic voice in my life, and in the lives of hundreds of other women (and men). I will miss him as a colleague at the Seminary. But I will continue to listen when he speaks as it was his voice which helped me find my own.
