Here goes my first post:
A sculptor does not use a 'manicure set' to reduce the crude, unshapely marble to a thing of beauty. The saw, the hammer and the chisel are cruel tools, but without them the rough stone must remain forever formless and unbeautiful.
To do His supreme work of grace within you, God will take from your heart everything you love most. Everything you trust in will go from you. Piles of ashes will lie where your most precious treasures used to be!
I thought I knew what to expect when I sat down to watch the documentary The Heart of Texas (Media Tech). But this story goes beyond what I imagined. It' s not just a story about someone who chose to forgive. It is a story of forgiveness, love and compassion demonstrated tangibly.
Grove "Grover" Norwood is a kind, hardworking, giving, loving man. He is a family man who loves his wife, Jill, and their children, Graham and Joy. Grover is highly respected and deeply loved.
This larger-than-life guy is always looking for ways to help others, even strangers. One day on his way home from church, he passes a church and sees a group of men standing outside. He senses that they have a problem, so he stops to see what he can do. Someone has stolen the church' s air conditioner, ripping a hole in the wall. Grover pays for the repairs.
Grover' s stop at the church leads to his meeting a member of the church, Ulice Parker. Ulice is also a well-respected, loving and kind man. He and Grover develop a friendship, and their families become family to each other. Grover always makes sure the Parkers have what they need, helping them however he can. He is especially concerned about the condition of their home, and knows he has to make it better, safer, livable.
But then tragedy strikes. The Norwoods' daughter is killed in a hit-and-run accident. Authorities soon discover that it was Ulice who had unknowingly killed Joy.
Grover' s response of love and forgiveness is overwhelming. When he finds out Ulice has caused his daughter' s death, his first response is compassion for his friend. He immediately calls the Parkers' home. But he doesn' t stop there. He buys clothes for Ulice and his wife to wear to Joy' s funeral and makes sure they are seated on the front row—a place traditionally reserved for family.
Grover' s constant friendship sets an example to his family and friends. As a viewer, you will also be inspired by his demonstrations of love and kindness.
Grover is not the only one who inspired me. Hearing Jill, Joy' s mother, talk about her journey through this terrible tragedy was especially moving. Even though she suffers incredible pain, she is a woman of great faith, and she trusts God to sustain her. Her husband may be the focus of this DVD, but she is also an amazing example of how she has also chosen to forgive.
I was moved to tears watching this movie. I was sad for the Norwoods. But I was also crying because their story inspired and challenged me. They demonstrate how to truly forgive and truly love—even when it shouldn' t be possible.
Heart of Texas
By Mary Murphy 8/12/2009 11:24:53 AM
On a warm April evening in tiny Simonton, Texas, Jill Norwood is driving home from T-ball practice with her sone Graham, 8, and daughter Joy, 4. Joy needs to go to the bathroom, keeps saying she can’t wait, so Jill begins to pull the dark green, nine-passenger Ford van under the shade of a large tree. The children are chattering and teasing each other, as brothers and sisters do, Graham in his dark baseball cap, Joy in her pink stretchy pants and top.
It is dusk. There are no street lamps to illuminate the deserted, two-lane country road. Unseen, a weather-beaten pickup truck without lights is approaching.
Because of limited space on her side of the road, Jill has pulled the van onto the opposite shoulder. Joy suddenly pops open the passenger-side door and, confused about which side of the road they’re on, bolts right into the truck’s path. The truck slams into the little girl, hurling her body 80 feet through the air. The truck never slows down. It keeps going and disappears down the dusty road as Jill races to her daughter, lying in the road. Joy’s shoes have been knocked off. Her bladder has burst. Jill starts to cry.
“I am holding my tiny little child and I am wailing,” she remembers, dabbing tears as she recalls the tragedy. “Wailing like I had read about in the Old Testament. I am kneeling beside the van and I am holding her, and rocking back and forth, and I’m wailing. I felt her leave.”
Jill calls her husband, Grover. By the time he arrives, it is dark, and the night is lit up like a war zone with emergency vehicles everywhere. Joy is being airlifted to a hospital. Soon, all that is left are the police chalk marks where her body had lain. She died at the scene, a death with ironies, surprises, and lessons of loss and forgiveness impossible to imagine, and perhaps not of this world.
Simonton is two towns, really, symbolized by two churches that serve the area and the surrounding communities of Fulshear and Wallis on the flat Texas plains outside Houston. The churches stand about half a mile apart on a winding country road called FM-1489, flanked by woods and open pastures and farms growing mostly rice and corn. One church is what the locals call “country big,” 150 feet by 90 feet, with a towering white steeple that dominates the landscape. It can hold 350 people and does so every Sunday. Everything about the church is white, from the paint to the Agapanthus flowers to the congregation. The other is “country small,” with a tiny steeple but no bell. The bell was stolen years ago by drug addicts hoping to pawn it, and disappeared. Locals call this one the “welfare church.” If people sit close together, it can hold 50 to 60. For years, these two churches divided rich from poor—blacks from whites.
Until Joy’s father, Grover Norwood, brought them together.
Grover was the son of Wiley Norwood, a former military man who contracted tuberculosis during World War II and moved his wife and two sons, Grover and Steve, from city to city in the late ’40s and ’50s, searching for a cure. “I was in 12 different schools before ninth grade,” Grover recalls, “following Daddy from sanitarium to sanitarium.”
Grover Norwood, now 67 with salt-and-pepper gray hair, says all that moving around taught him three things: That you have to make friends fast, that you have to cope with sudden change, and that you “never give up.” He took those lessons with him to Vietnam in 1970, where he piloted nimble forward-air-controller spotter planes on more than 200 missions into the most dangerous battle zones, coordinating the rescue of American troops pinned down by the Viet Cong. During his 13 months of service, he was awarded two Silver Stars for valor.
“The piles of soldiers’ bodies in Ban Me Thout, the smell of the crematorium—a horrible, haunting smell that somehow let you know it was human before you even saw the bodies—those things still sometimes make me cry,” Norwood says.
Yet amid the devastation, he made time to pay attention to a couple of dozen Vietnamese girls and boys, roughly 4 to 10 years old, from a Montagnard village high up in the mountains near his base. The kids became the focus of a missionary zeal Norwood didn’t know he possessed.
On his days off, he’d bring them food and gifts, and solicited “hundreds of boxes of clothes for them from the States,” he says. He bonded with them and dreamed of helping them more with funds from back home. Then one day, the boys in the village were gone.
“They were recruited by the Viet Cong to become soldiers,” Norwood says. The children he had come to love were now enemies he would have to kill.
Norwood’s horror at this divide between good and bad, between the hunter and the hunted—all based on barriers created by man—never left him. It began to shape his life’s mission, his purpose.
He brought this sense of purpose to Texas after returning from Vietnam and earning a master’s degree in psychotherapy from the University of Southern California, after marrying an heiress to the Westinghouse fortune and divorcing, and after rediscovering the savior Jesus Christ he first found as a boy under the tutelage of his grandfather, C. R. Stegall, a Presbyterian pastor who had served 36 years as a missionary in the former Belgian Congo.
As Norwood was introduced to Jill on January 1, 1988, the words of Genesis 2:22 in the story of Adam and Eve came back to him: “And he brought her.”
“When I saw her walking towards me with her blond hair down to her waist, it came in my heart: ‘I’m bringing her to you,’ ” Norwood marvels. Always a man with flair, on one of their first dates he took her for a picnic in the Tomahawk plane he flew for a hobby.
They married, and moved to Simonton (population 718), where they lived the kind of life that made them wholesome models for the law-abiding community: Jill played the piano at the Simonton Community Church; Grover led the choir and taught Sunday school every week without fail. Soon they had two beautiful kids: a boy named Graham and, four. years later, a girl named Joy.
“I had everything,” Norwood reflects. “A beautiful house, a wonderful wife, two children, a great job as a brokerage manager at Prudential Insurance Company of America.”
Everything, that is, until Joy ran into the road just after sunset on April 10, 2000, and the truck struck her dead and didn’t stop.
“Grover has always been someone people looked up to spiritually,” says Steve Littlefield, pastor of Simonton Community Church. “What happened to him, terrible as it was, elevated that.”
Norwood says that he had no guiding principle as a young man. “I was a happy-go-lucky fighter pilot,” he says, “a people pleaser, self-indulgent as long as it was legal, and had no hunger for things of the spirit. After Vietnam, I could walk into any bar, drink any man under the table, and walk out of there with his lady. In fact, my feet took me in the opposite direction of the church.”
But in 1977, six years after his time in Vietnam, he found himself at spiritual rock bottom, sitting in a rocking chair at Miss Lutie Duncan’s boardinghouse in Midway, Kentucky, in an unfurnished room with no working faucets and sweet-pea vines growing out of the bathtub. He found himself reading the Bible, when he was literally struck with a spiritual awakening.
“I was somebody else and then suddenly I had a hunger for Jesus that has never left me,” he says. “I had nothing to do with it. To this day, I do not try to think for God. He comes and gets people and gives them an assignment. What he assigned to me was ‘a servant’s heart.’ ”
Perhaps nothing Grover did reflected his servant’s heart more than his relationship with Ulice Parker, a sweet man with Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses and a weathered face that radiated the light, not the storms, of his life, especially when he smiled with his mixture of gold and white teeth.
Parker was a deacon at St. Matthews, the little church without a bell where Simonton’s African Americans worshipped. He mowed the church grass, took up the Sunday collection, and picked up church mail every day at the post office and delivered it to the pastor.
Parker had a halting speech impediment that made it difficult for those who did not know him to understand what he was saying. But being slow of speech did not make him slow of heart, nor could anybody outwork him in his community garden, or the backyard pit where he turned out the best roasted wild hog in town. Most of all, he was known for his kindness and his simple, gentle wisdom.
Larry Smith, a wealthy businessman, remembers getting stuck with his tractor-mower in black clay mud up to the vehicle’s lower rim. Parker, who happened to be passing by, stopped and then waded knee-deep into the mud.
“He put one hand on the seat of the tractor and one hand on my back,” says Smith. “He pushed me out. Then he turned around and walked away and didn’t say a word.”
Larry Nemec, a captain with the local sheriff’s office, describes Ulice Parker as “a black Forrest Gump: functional, and in no way retarded.”
Parker had grown up on the east side of the Brazos River, deep in the woods, about five miles from Simonton, and had never traveled outside four square miles. He attended church every Sunday with his mother, who would dress him up, put him on a buckboard, hitch up a mule, and ride three miles to church. He was already pulling cotton and working in the Texas rice fields by the time he was six.
“He told me he picked cotton like in the slave days, with a sack on his back,” says Norwood. “He would drag it along, fill it up, take it to the truck, and at the end of the day he would get paid three dollars.”
Ulice Parker was seven years old when he asked Jesus into his heart. His mother, deciding he was becoming a bit of a discipline problem, had driven him to church and told him she’d wait outside, no matter how long it took, and to not come out of the house of worship until “he got somethin’ in him.”
When he came out, he told his mother he was reborn. “Mama,” he told her in his joyously simple way, “I got somethin’ in me.”
Norwood met Parker late in 1992. Driving his family home from church at Simonton Community, Norwood noticed a handful of men hovering over some elderly people in the grass parking lot outside St. Matthews. They had been trying to have church inside the little cracker-box sanctuary, but some of the older worshippers had been stricken by heatstroke in the sweltering 100-degree heat.
Norwood stopped his gray Toyota Cressida and walked over to the group. They told him the church’s air conditioner had been stolen, and pointed to a big hole in one of the walls. Later that day Norwood drove to Home Depot, bought a new air conditioner for $350, along with padlocks and heavy chains to make sure it would not end up stolen, too. When he returned to install it and help mend the wall, he met the deacon, Ulice Parker.
“He had a beautiful smile, and a beautiful face. He also had a beautiful little boy named Christopher,” says Norwood. “I was really excited because I had been praying, ‘Lord, let me meet someone. Let me meet someone outside of my circle that could use a helping hand.’ I felt that God was answering my prayers.”
The cotton fields had been mechanized, and after 40 years of picking for a living, Parker was now struggling to find a way to provide for his wife, Carrie, and their nine children. He made a tiny salary as a gardener and by growing vegetables in his garden and pushing them around in a handcart to sell to shut-ins in the community. The Parkers lived in a run-down firetrap of a shack, with raw wiring showing in the walls, no heat or hot water, and a leaky, crumbling roof.
Within weeks of meeting him, Norwood was helping with chores at Parker’s home, and working with him on St. Matthews’ church projects—the only white man in the community doing anything like that. He bought the church an organ, and sometimes worshipped with Parker at Sunday services.
“It was unusual for a black man and a white man to have that kind of bond,” says the Rev. Nathaniel Hall, pastor of St. Matthews. “In my 25 years of pastoring, he was the first white person who ever stopped by. We thought maybe he was runnin’ for mayor or something when he first brought that air conditioner out to us.”
Norwood pretty much adopted Parker and his family. When their roof finally fell in, he worked alongside Parker to repair it; when their blankets became intolerably threadbare, he bought them new ones; when their stove leaked dangerously, he got them a new one. They were not handouts in Norwood’s mind, because Parker put in the labor and gave generously to his neighbors.
Norwood also integrated his family with theirs. His son Graham, just a year old at the time, played with Parker’s son Christopher, almost 4, and when Joy was born, she played with Parker’s new granddaughter. The two families became as one. When Norwood and Parker went fishing, Graham would ride in a paint bucket inside the boat at Parker’s feet, while Norwood taught Christopher how to ride a Jet Ski.
After Joy was killed by the truck, it was his family’s bond with the Parkers that gave Grover Norwood a renewed sense of mission.
Norwood recalls every detail of the police investigation of Joy’s death.
There were no leads. There were no witnesses besides young Graham, who thought the truck was white, and Jill, who was no witness at all, because she was cradling her dying daughter in her arms. There was no highway surveillance camera evidence. There was almost nothing except for a small piece of a plastic front grille left in the road that could have been from a previous collision.
“It was a hit and run,” says Pastor Littlefield. “People were very concerned about a person who would commit such a crime. They wanted to see man’s justice as well as God’s justice done.”
Three days after the tragedy, on April 13, Deputy Sergeant David Fischer spotted a white and maroon Ford Ranger pickup truck with a strange-looking dent parked in front of the Quick Shop market in the town he served as police chief—Wallis, four miles from Simonton. Examining the shape of the dent, Fischer thought it could have been caused by impact with an animal, or perhaps a little girl. He called the wrecker in Wallis and had the truck impounded at police headquarters. He then compared the empty space on the front grille to the small part found at the crime scene. It was a perfect fit.
The police had the death weapon—and the driver.
Standing in his kitchen, in a house filled with grieving friends and relatives, Norwood got a call from Fischer. The police chief told Norwood that he knew who the killer was. He said Norwood knew him, too.
Norwood remembers repeating out loud what the officer said to him: “It was Ulice Parker.”
Norwood recalls nothing from the next few moments except the silence. Jill Norwood, sitting in the bedroom with friends, was too stunned to speak. There was a dead hush in every room of the house.
Finally, Norwood turned to his brother, Steve, who had flown in from North Carolina. “We’ve got to get over there,” Norwood said. “Ulice must be so scared.”
“There was no blame, no anger,” Steve Norwood says. “He just said we had to put our arms around him.”
Just as they were about to head out the door, the phone rang. It was Parker’s wife, Carrie, hysterical. “They tell me,” she sobbed, “that my Ulice killed your baby Joy.”
An hour after Norwood learned who killed his child, he was knocking on Parker’s front door. The moment the two men met, they fell into each other’s arms. Norwood says, “I felt sorry for both of us. I looked at him, and it was like looking at myself. He was broken, and I was broken. I hugged him as we both cried.”
Inside, they formed a prayer circle with Ulice and Carrie Parker and the Parkers’ granddaughter, the girl exactly the same age as Joy. They prayed that somehow God would be able to bring some sense of the tragedy. And Grover prayed for the ability to forgive his friend.
“In all my days of policing I have never seen anything like it,” says Captain Nemec.
“When I found out it was my deacon who hit the little girl it blew my mind,” Pastor Hall says. “I called Deac, and he was crying, and he told me, ‘Pastor, I did not see her.’ He said, ‘Pastor, as I was driving I felt a bump—hit something in the road or something like that.’ ”
In rural Texas, that’s not unusual, Nemec says. “I mean there’s road kill everywhere around here—armadillos, wild hogs, varmints, and stray dogs. If I am going somewhere and I hit an armadillo, I’m not stopping. I just say, ‘Okay, splat! Another armadillo.’ And besides, Ulice’s eyesight was horrible. He was probably legally blind and probably should never have been driving to begin with.”
Not only did Grover Norwood pray with the Parkers on the day he learned that Ulice Parker was driving the truck that killed his daughter, he also invited him to her funeral. Then he arranged for Carrie Parker to go to Foley’s, the local department store, to pick out new clothes for the family to wear to the ceremony.
At 9:30 a few days later, on a perfect morning, still and cool, with blue skies, more than 200 cars, led by six motorcycle cops, poured into the little Fulshear Cemetery to lay Joy Norwood to rest under a budding oak tree.
At the graveside ceremony, Norwood walked onto the scene hand-in-hand with Ulice Parker, a sight that Norwood’s friend Carol Smith says no one who was there that day will ever forget. Norwood sat Ulice and Carrie Parker in the front row next to himself and Jill and Graham. During the service he put a comforting arm around Jill and his other around Parker. When Grover got up to say a few words, he let everybody at the service know that he had forgiven Ulice, and wanted them to forgive him, too.
Few in town could imagine Norwood’s compassion. Pastor Clay Spears, of the predominantly black Greater New Faith Church of Wallis, recalls hiding close enough to the grave-site to protect Ulice Parker, just in case any of the whites decided they might need to take the law into their own hands.
“I couldn’t figure out any reason why a white man would invite this black man who killed his child to the funeral, unless it was for revenge,” says Pastor Spears, who is in his late 60s. “I grew up with that kind of white violence.”
When he became convinced that no violence would develop, Pastor Spears stepped out from behind a tree and announced to the crowd that he had prayed about forgiveness, had heard about forgiveness, but had never seen it before. “It was a miracle,” he says. “The love moved me. And I thought to myself, Only God. Only God could do that.”
Grover Norwood and his family struggled with the loss of their baby girl. For a while, his son Graham, now 17, tried to pretend Joy had never existed, a defense mechanism against blaming her dash into the road on the innocent teasing they were engaged in when she bolted. And Grover’s wife, Jill, was conflicted about the amount of time her husband began spending to help the Parkers. Jill participated in a one-hour film documentary about Grover’s act of forgiveness, called The Heart of Texas, which is winning awards at film festivals and bringing audiences to tears. But she was so nervous about talking about the tragedy that “I went into six weeks of depression and pneumonia leading up to appearing in the film,” she says.
“The accident was not malicious,” Jill Norwood said recently. “Ulice would never have hurt anyone on purpose. It should never have happened, but I never wished him harm or ill will.”
On the other hand, she said, “I am not going to camp out at his house. I’m going to try to heal, and I am going to struggle with my ministry. What was my ministry? Graham was my ministry. And he tells me now, ‘Mom, if it weren’t for you, I would have gone off the deep end.’ ”
She went on, “Grover and I healed differently. I think that when you lose a child, you need to stay home, hang out, and be quiet. That is how Graham and I healed—together. I don’t go to grief seminars, because they make me sad. The way Grover handled it is by consuming himself with Joy. Big picture on the fireplace. Her little bicycle, baseball bat, coat, every pair of shoes she ever wore were in his office. His office became a shrine. He handled it that way.” And by working out his “servant’s heart.”
As Jill spoke of the family’s struggle to heal, sorrow twisted her beautiful face. “Do I think this is pretty devastating on a marriage?” she said. “Yeah, I think it is.”
A few days later, Norwood said that he and his wife have talked of separating, of taking time apart to try to deal with unresolved grief. However, he said, he knows “most marriages by this time would have dissolved. While we are at a crucible, we are still together, and I still love my wife. When a child dies, you are caught in a crossfire of guilt and blame and lack of forgiveness of self and others. I just ask, ‘When will it be over, Lord? When will it finally be over?’ ”
Norwood’s acts of forgiveness continued after the funeral. Within a month, a grand jury was empowered to investigate the hit and run. On the second day of the hearing, he drove to the county seat to testify in the investigation. He took the elevator to the 11th floor and waited in the narrow hall outside the jury room until called inside.
“I wanted them to know that I held no grudge against Ulice. That I knew it was an accident, and that he was my friend,” says Norwood. He spent the next hour mentally rehearsing his testimony. But what he was not prepared for, as he stepped into the tiny room, crammed with a jury box and judge’s bench, were the pictures of his dead child taken at the crime scene.
“It was totally shattering,” he says. “I tried my best to mask it. I did not cry, but I was so on the edge of not even being able to speak. When they saw my face, I saw horror and embarrassment in their eyes as they looked to the table and realized what I had just seen. Someone began to turn over the pictures, but it was like trying to avoid an open wound.”
Still, despite a pain that few will ever know, despite a desire to flee in grief, Norwood told the grand jury: “Ulice is my friend. I have known him for years. Every time he looks at me, or sees a child playing, he will be forced to think of Joy. He’s already punishing himself. We don’t need to punish him anymore. He tells me it was an accident and I believe him and forgive him. And I would like for you to do the same.”
They asked if Ulice had a driver’s license.
No, he did not, Norwood told them, acknowledging that Parker was wrong to drive that night, and that he had asked him never to drive again.
Norwood had also done something he did not share with the grand jury: He paid Parker $400 for the old pickup truck and then had it taken to Charles Spates’s junkyard near the Wallis railroad tracks, where he got Spates’ word that the truck would never be sold. Spates promised to leave it forever in the weeds, where it is today, in case Grover or Graham or Jill ever needed to see it again as part of their healing.
After testifying before the grand jury, “when I was done I walked across the street to a little café, drank a cup of coffee, got myself together, and drove home,” Norwood says.
How could Grover Norwood possibly forgive Ulice Parker for killing his child while driving nearly blind without a license, and then leaving the scene of the crime? To this day, many of his friends still can’t imagine themselves being able to do that. And don’t understand how he has.
“It was not as hard as it would have been if he was drunk or if he was someone who had just beaten his wife,” Norwood says. “But even then I would have been called on to forgive. The bottom line is that every Christian is called to offer forgiveness. The Bible tells us to forgive as God has forgiven us. And the prayer I have to say every day is this: ‘O God, I do want your forgiveness. I understand that as I do this, I am a new person in your eyes. As Jesus said in John 5:24: I have crossed over from eternal death to eternal life. Thank you!’ ”
The grand jury elected not to prefer charges against Ulice Parker. “There was no way to prove Parker intentionally left the scene of the accident or that he should have known that somebody was killed or injured,” says Travis J. Koehn, the district attorney who presented the case. Koehn quickly adds that he had never seen anything like Norwood’s amazing act of mercy: “It would be more usual for someone to come to my doorway and say, ‘He killed my little girl; I want him in prison.’ ”
And Norwood’s amazing grace continued. His kindness toward the Parker family rippled through both Simonton churches, helping the town bridge a racial divide stretching back a couple of centuries. Like Pastor Spears at the funeral, Parker himself feared reprisals. “He grew up with prejudice,” says Pastor Hall.
Rather than revenge, Grover Norwood convinced his fellow churchgoers at Simonton Community to work with the folks at St. Matthews to design and build a new home for Ulice Parker. The construction crew began with Norwood and Larry Smith and two friends. They called themselves “the four hammers,” and were soon joined by more than 100 volunteers from both churches. It was sort of a “field of dreams” experience, according to Norwood. He and the four hammers started working and the people just started coming. “Some of them showed up at first to see this guy whose daughter died who was going to build a house for the guy that did it,” says Norwood. No matter what motivated them, he personally gave each one a tour of Parker’s dilapidated house, and then asked the question he knew was on their minds: “Why are we doing this?”
His answer: “Because it is a death trap.” And because this man Parker was their brother.
“When Grover gets something in his crosshairs,” says Jill Norwood, “it is going to get done.”
A year after Joy’s death, Parker’s new house was finished. Women from both churches filled it with new furniture, bedding, and appliances. Then everybody celebrated together, black and white, by forming a circle around the new house and praying.
“It was unreal,” says Pastor Hall. “I’ve never seen nothing like that. Someone kills my child, you think I’d build a home for him? That’s a lot of God in him, a lot of love. When I heard that Brother Norwood was encouraging everybody to build a new home, I could not believe it. I said, ‘Huh!’ That’s what I said to myself.”
Ulice Parker has been dead for three years now—felled by a heart attack while tending his garden at age 74—and his wife Carrie, at 62, passed too. He and Norwood remained friends to the end, and a few of Parker’s kids still live in the house that the two churches built.
For many people, the most memorable moment happened the morning of the grand jury proceeding. Several members of all-white Simonton Community Church arrived at all-black St. Matthews Church, where they asked Pastors Hall and Spears if they could join in prayer for Grover Norwood and Ulice Parker, for the jury members, and for God’s will to be done, whatever that was.
Sometime later a wind whipped through the Texas trees and blew open the front door of the church, quieting the prayerful throng. A moment later, a cell phone rang and someone from the courthouse was on the other end, reporting that the grand jury had decided not to prosecute Ulice. A spontaneous celebration erupted inside the house of worship. Except for Pastor Spears, who was sitting soberly.
He told them he believed they had witnessed a “burning-bush-like” moment. He said because of one man’s love and forgiveness of another man, an invisible God had been made visible on this day deep in the heart of Texas.
It is dusk. There are no street lamps to illuminate the deserted, two-lane country road. Unseen, a weather-beaten pickup truck without lights is approaching.
Because of limited space on her side of the road, Jill has pulled the van onto the opposite shoulder. Joy suddenly pops open the passenger-side door and, confused about which side of the road they’re on, bolts right into the truck’s path. The truck slams into the little girl, hurling her body 80 feet through the air. The truck never slows down. It keeps going and disappears down the dusty road as Jill races to her daughter, lying in the road. Joy’s shoes have been knocked off. Her bladder has burst. Jill starts to cry.
“I am holding my tiny little child and I am wailing,” she remembers, dabbing tears as she recalls the tragedy. “Wailing like I had read about in the Old Testament. I am kneeling beside the van and I am holding her, and rocking back and forth, and I’m wailing. I felt her leave.”
Jill calls her husband, Grover. By the time he arrives, it is dark, and the night is lit up like a war zone with emergency vehicles everywhere. Joy is being airlifted to a hospital. Soon, all that is left are the police chalk marks where her body had lain. She died at the scene, a death with ironies, surprises, and lessons of loss and forgiveness impossible to imagine, and perhaps not of this world.
Simonton is two towns, really, symbolized by two churches that serve the area and the surrounding communities of Fulshear and Wallis on the flat Texas plains outside Houston. The churches stand about half a mile apart on a winding country road called FM-1489, flanked by woods and open pastures and farms growing mostly rice and corn. One church is what the locals call “country big,” 150 feet by 90 feet, with a towering white steeple that dominates the landscape. It can hold 350 people and does so every Sunday. Everything about the church is white, from the paint to the Agapanthus flowers to the congregation. The other is “country small,” with a tiny steeple but no bell. The bell was stolen years ago by drug addicts hoping to pawn it, and disappeared. Locals call this one the “welfare church.” If people sit close together, it can hold 50 to 60. For years, these two churches divided rich from poor—blacks from whites.
Until Joy’s father, Grover Norwood, brought them together.
Grover was the son of Wiley Norwood, a former military man who contracted tuberculosis during World War II and moved his wife and two sons, Grover and Steve, from city to city in the late ’40s and ’50s, searching for a cure. “I was in 12 different schools before ninth grade,” Grover recalls, “following Daddy from sanitarium to sanitarium.”
Grover Norwood, now 67 with salt-and-pepper gray hair, says all that moving around taught him three things: That you have to make friends fast, that you have to cope with sudden change, and that you “never give up.” He took those lessons with him to Vietnam in 1970, where he piloted nimble forward-air-controller spotter planes on more than 200 missions into the most dangerous battle zones, coordinating the rescue of American troops pinned down by the Viet Cong. During his 13 months of service, he was awarded two Silver Stars for valor.
“The piles of soldiers’ bodies in Ban Me Thout, the smell of the crematorium—a horrible, haunting smell that somehow let you know it was human before you even saw the bodies—those things still sometimes make me cry,” Norwood says.
Yet amid the devastation, he made time to pay attention to a couple of dozen Vietnamese girls and boys, roughly 4 to 10 years old, from a Montagnard village high up in the mountains near his base. The kids became the focus of a missionary zeal Norwood didn’t know he possessed.
On his days off, he’d bring them food and gifts, and solicited “hundreds of boxes of clothes for them from the States,” he says. He bonded with them and dreamed of helping them more with funds from back home. Then one day, the boys in the village were gone.
“They were recruited by the Viet Cong to become soldiers,” Norwood says. The children he had come to love were now enemies he would have to kill.
Norwood’s horror at this divide between good and bad, between the hunter and the hunted—all based on barriers created by man—never left him. It began to shape his life’s mission, his purpose.
He brought this sense of purpose to Texas after returning from Vietnam and earning a master’s degree in psychotherapy from the University of Southern California, after marrying an heiress to the Westinghouse fortune and divorcing, and after rediscovering the savior Jesus Christ he first found as a boy under the tutelage of his grandfather, C. R. Stegall, a Presbyterian pastor who had served 36 years as a missionary in the former Belgian Congo.
As Norwood was introduced to Jill on January 1, 1988, the words of Genesis 2:22 in the story of Adam and Eve came back to him: “And he brought her.”
“When I saw her walking towards me with her blond hair down to her waist, it came in my heart: ‘I’m bringing her to you,’ ” Norwood marvels. Always a man with flair, on one of their first dates he took her for a picnic in the Tomahawk plane he flew for a hobby.
They married, and moved to Simonton (population 718), where they lived the kind of life that made them wholesome models for the law-abiding community: Jill played the piano at the Simonton Community Church; Grover led the choir and taught Sunday school every week without fail. Soon they had two beautiful kids: a boy named Graham and, four. years later, a girl named Joy.
“I had everything,” Norwood reflects. “A beautiful house, a wonderful wife, two children, a great job as a brokerage manager at Prudential Insurance Company of America.”
Everything, that is, until Joy ran into the road just after sunset on April 10, 2000, and the truck struck her dead and didn’t stop.
“Grover has always been someone people looked up to spiritually,” says Steve Littlefield, pastor of Simonton Community Church. “What happened to him, terrible as it was, elevated that.”
Norwood says that he had no guiding principle as a young man. “I was a happy-go-lucky fighter pilot,” he says, “a people pleaser, self-indulgent as long as it was legal, and had no hunger for things of the spirit. After Vietnam, I could walk into any bar, drink any man under the table, and walk out of there with his lady. In fact, my feet took me in the opposite direction of the church.”
But in 1977, six years after his time in Vietnam, he found himself at spiritual rock bottom, sitting in a rocking chair at Miss Lutie Duncan’s boardinghouse in Midway, Kentucky, in an unfurnished room with no working faucets and sweet-pea vines growing out of the bathtub. He found himself reading the Bible, when he was literally struck with a spiritual awakening.
“I was somebody else and then suddenly I had a hunger for Jesus that has never left me,” he says. “I had nothing to do with it. To this day, I do not try to think for God. He comes and gets people and gives them an assignment. What he assigned to me was ‘a servant’s heart.’ ”
Perhaps nothing Grover did reflected his servant’s heart more than his relationship with Ulice Parker, a sweet man with Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses and a weathered face that radiated the light, not the storms, of his life, especially when he smiled with his mixture of gold and white teeth.
Parker was a deacon at St. Matthews, the little church without a bell where Simonton’s African Americans worshipped. He mowed the church grass, took up the Sunday collection, and picked up church mail every day at the post office and delivered it to the pastor.
Parker had a halting speech impediment that made it difficult for those who did not know him to understand what he was saying. But being slow of speech did not make him slow of heart, nor could anybody outwork him in his community garden, or the backyard pit where he turned out the best roasted wild hog in town. Most of all, he was known for his kindness and his simple, gentle wisdom.
Larry Smith, a wealthy businessman, remembers getting stuck with his tractor-mower in black clay mud up to the vehicle’s lower rim. Parker, who happened to be passing by, stopped and then waded knee-deep into the mud.
“He put one hand on the seat of the tractor and one hand on my back,” says Smith. “He pushed me out. Then he turned around and walked away and didn’t say a word.”
Larry Nemec, a captain with the local sheriff’s office, describes Ulice Parker as “a black Forrest Gump: functional, and in no way retarded.”
Parker had grown up on the east side of the Brazos River, deep in the woods, about five miles from Simonton, and had never traveled outside four square miles. He attended church every Sunday with his mother, who would dress him up, put him on a buckboard, hitch up a mule, and ride three miles to church. He was already pulling cotton and working in the Texas rice fields by the time he was six.
“He told me he picked cotton like in the slave days, with a sack on his back,” says Norwood. “He would drag it along, fill it up, take it to the truck, and at the end of the day he would get paid three dollars.”
Ulice Parker was seven years old when he asked Jesus into his heart. His mother, deciding he was becoming a bit of a discipline problem, had driven him to church and told him she’d wait outside, no matter how long it took, and to not come out of the house of worship until “he got somethin’ in him.”
When he came out, he told his mother he was reborn. “Mama,” he told her in his joyously simple way, “I got somethin’ in me.”
Norwood met Parker late in 1992. Driving his family home from church at Simonton Community, Norwood noticed a handful of men hovering over some elderly people in the grass parking lot outside St. Matthews. They had been trying to have church inside the little cracker-box sanctuary, but some of the older worshippers had been stricken by heatstroke in the sweltering 100-degree heat.
Norwood stopped his gray Toyota Cressida and walked over to the group. They told him the church’s air conditioner had been stolen, and pointed to a big hole in one of the walls. Later that day Norwood drove to Home Depot, bought a new air conditioner for $350, along with padlocks and heavy chains to make sure it would not end up stolen, too. When he returned to install it and help mend the wall, he met the deacon, Ulice Parker.
“He had a beautiful smile, and a beautiful face. He also had a beautiful little boy named Christopher,” says Norwood. “I was really excited because I had been praying, ‘Lord, let me meet someone. Let me meet someone outside of my circle that could use a helping hand.’ I felt that God was answering my prayers.”
The cotton fields had been mechanized, and after 40 years of picking for a living, Parker was now struggling to find a way to provide for his wife, Carrie, and their nine children. He made a tiny salary as a gardener and by growing vegetables in his garden and pushing them around in a handcart to sell to shut-ins in the community. The Parkers lived in a run-down firetrap of a shack, with raw wiring showing in the walls, no heat or hot water, and a leaky, crumbling roof.
Within weeks of meeting him, Norwood was helping with chores at Parker’s home, and working with him on St. Matthews’ church projects—the only white man in the community doing anything like that. He bought the church an organ, and sometimes worshipped with Parker at Sunday services.
“It was unusual for a black man and a white man to have that kind of bond,” says the Rev. Nathaniel Hall, pastor of St. Matthews. “In my 25 years of pastoring, he was the first white person who ever stopped by. We thought maybe he was runnin’ for mayor or something when he first brought that air conditioner out to us.”
Norwood pretty much adopted Parker and his family. When their roof finally fell in, he worked alongside Parker to repair it; when their blankets became intolerably threadbare, he bought them new ones; when their stove leaked dangerously, he got them a new one. They were not handouts in Norwood’s mind, because Parker put in the labor and gave generously to his neighbors.
Norwood also integrated his family with theirs. His son Graham, just a year old at the time, played with Parker’s son Christopher, almost 4, and when Joy was born, she played with Parker’s new granddaughter. The two families became as one. When Norwood and Parker went fishing, Graham would ride in a paint bucket inside the boat at Parker’s feet, while Norwood taught Christopher how to ride a Jet Ski.
After Joy was killed by the truck, it was his family’s bond with the Parkers that gave Grover Norwood a renewed sense of mission.
Norwood recalls every detail of the police investigation of Joy’s death.
There were no leads. There were no witnesses besides young Graham, who thought the truck was white, and Jill, who was no witness at all, because she was cradling her dying daughter in her arms. There was no highway surveillance camera evidence. There was almost nothing except for a small piece of a plastic front grille left in the road that could have been from a previous collision.
“It was a hit and run,” says Pastor Littlefield. “People were very concerned about a person who would commit such a crime. They wanted to see man’s justice as well as God’s justice done.”
Three days after the tragedy, on April 13, Deputy Sergeant David Fischer spotted a white and maroon Ford Ranger pickup truck with a strange-looking dent parked in front of the Quick Shop market in the town he served as police chief—Wallis, four miles from Simonton. Examining the shape of the dent, Fischer thought it could have been caused by impact with an animal, or perhaps a little girl. He called the wrecker in Wallis and had the truck impounded at police headquarters. He then compared the empty space on the front grille to the small part found at the crime scene. It was a perfect fit.
The police had the death weapon—and the driver.
Standing in his kitchen, in a house filled with grieving friends and relatives, Norwood got a call from Fischer. The police chief told Norwood that he knew who the killer was. He said Norwood knew him, too.
Norwood remembers repeating out loud what the officer said to him: “It was Ulice Parker.”
Norwood recalls nothing from the next few moments except the silence. Jill Norwood, sitting in the bedroom with friends, was too stunned to speak. There was a dead hush in every room of the house.
Finally, Norwood turned to his brother, Steve, who had flown in from North Carolina. “We’ve got to get over there,” Norwood said. “Ulice must be so scared.”
“There was no blame, no anger,” Steve Norwood says. “He just said we had to put our arms around him.”
Just as they were about to head out the door, the phone rang. It was Parker’s wife, Carrie, hysterical. “They tell me,” she sobbed, “that my Ulice killed your baby Joy.”
An hour after Norwood learned who killed his child, he was knocking on Parker’s front door. The moment the two men met, they fell into each other’s arms. Norwood says, “I felt sorry for both of us. I looked at him, and it was like looking at myself. He was broken, and I was broken. I hugged him as we both cried.”
Inside, they formed a prayer circle with Ulice and Carrie Parker and the Parkers’ granddaughter, the girl exactly the same age as Joy. They prayed that somehow God would be able to bring some sense of the tragedy. And Grover prayed for the ability to forgive his friend.
“In all my days of policing I have never seen anything like it,” says Captain Nemec.
“When I found out it was my deacon who hit the little girl it blew my mind,” Pastor Hall says. “I called Deac, and he was crying, and he told me, ‘Pastor, I did not see her.’ He said, ‘Pastor, as I was driving I felt a bump—hit something in the road or something like that.’ ”
In rural Texas, that’s not unusual, Nemec says. “I mean there’s road kill everywhere around here—armadillos, wild hogs, varmints, and stray dogs. If I am going somewhere and I hit an armadillo, I’m not stopping. I just say, ‘Okay, splat! Another armadillo.’ And besides, Ulice’s eyesight was horrible. He was probably legally blind and probably should never have been driving to begin with.”
Not only did Grover Norwood pray with the Parkers on the day he learned that Ulice Parker was driving the truck that killed his daughter, he also invited him to her funeral. Then he arranged for Carrie Parker to go to Foley’s, the local department store, to pick out new clothes for the family to wear to the ceremony.
At 9:30 a few days later, on a perfect morning, still and cool, with blue skies, more than 200 cars, led by six motorcycle cops, poured into the little Fulshear Cemetery to lay Joy Norwood to rest under a budding oak tree.
At the graveside ceremony, Norwood walked onto the scene hand-in-hand with Ulice Parker, a sight that Norwood’s friend Carol Smith says no one who was there that day will ever forget. Norwood sat Ulice and Carrie Parker in the front row next to himself and Jill and Graham. During the service he put a comforting arm around Jill and his other around Parker. When Grover got up to say a few words, he let everybody at the service know that he had forgiven Ulice, and wanted them to forgive him, too.
Few in town could imagine Norwood’s compassion. Pastor Clay Spears, of the predominantly black Greater New Faith Church of Wallis, recalls hiding close enough to the grave-site to protect Ulice Parker, just in case any of the whites decided they might need to take the law into their own hands.
“I couldn’t figure out any reason why a white man would invite this black man who killed his child to the funeral, unless it was for revenge,” says Pastor Spears, who is in his late 60s. “I grew up with that kind of white violence.”
When he became convinced that no violence would develop, Pastor Spears stepped out from behind a tree and announced to the crowd that he had prayed about forgiveness, had heard about forgiveness, but had never seen it before. “It was a miracle,” he says. “The love moved me. And I thought to myself, Only God. Only God could do that.”
Grover Norwood and his family struggled with the loss of their baby girl. For a while, his son Graham, now 17, tried to pretend Joy had never existed, a defense mechanism against blaming her dash into the road on the innocent teasing they were engaged in when she bolted. And Grover’s wife, Jill, was conflicted about the amount of time her husband began spending to help the Parkers. Jill participated in a one-hour film documentary about Grover’s act of forgiveness, called The Heart of Texas, which is winning awards at film festivals and bringing audiences to tears. But she was so nervous about talking about the tragedy that “I went into six weeks of depression and pneumonia leading up to appearing in the film,” she says.
“The accident was not malicious,” Jill Norwood said recently. “Ulice would never have hurt anyone on purpose. It should never have happened, but I never wished him harm or ill will.”
On the other hand, she said, “I am not going to camp out at his house. I’m going to try to heal, and I am going to struggle with my ministry. What was my ministry? Graham was my ministry. And he tells me now, ‘Mom, if it weren’t for you, I would have gone off the deep end.’ ”
She went on, “Grover and I healed differently. I think that when you lose a child, you need to stay home, hang out, and be quiet. That is how Graham and I healed—together. I don’t go to grief seminars, because they make me sad. The way Grover handled it is by consuming himself with Joy. Big picture on the fireplace. Her little bicycle, baseball bat, coat, every pair of shoes she ever wore were in his office. His office became a shrine. He handled it that way.” And by working out his “servant’s heart.”
As Jill spoke of the family’s struggle to heal, sorrow twisted her beautiful face. “Do I think this is pretty devastating on a marriage?” she said. “Yeah, I think it is.”
A few days later, Norwood said that he and his wife have talked of separating, of taking time apart to try to deal with unresolved grief. However, he said, he knows “most marriages by this time would have dissolved. While we are at a crucible, we are still together, and I still love my wife. When a child dies, you are caught in a crossfire of guilt and blame and lack of forgiveness of self and others. I just ask, ‘When will it be over, Lord? When will it finally be over?’ ”
Norwood’s acts of forgiveness continued after the funeral. Within a month, a grand jury was empowered to investigate the hit and run. On the second day of the hearing, he drove to the county seat to testify in the investigation. He took the elevator to the 11th floor and waited in the narrow hall outside the jury room until called inside.
“I wanted them to know that I held no grudge against Ulice. That I knew it was an accident, and that he was my friend,” says Norwood. He spent the next hour mentally rehearsing his testimony. But what he was not prepared for, as he stepped into the tiny room, crammed with a jury box and judge’s bench, were the pictures of his dead child taken at the crime scene.
“It was totally shattering,” he says. “I tried my best to mask it. I did not cry, but I was so on the edge of not even being able to speak. When they saw my face, I saw horror and embarrassment in their eyes as they looked to the table and realized what I had just seen. Someone began to turn over the pictures, but it was like trying to avoid an open wound.”
Still, despite a pain that few will ever know, despite a desire to flee in grief, Norwood told the grand jury: “Ulice is my friend. I have known him for years. Every time he looks at me, or sees a child playing, he will be forced to think of Joy. He’s already punishing himself. We don’t need to punish him anymore. He tells me it was an accident and I believe him and forgive him. And I would like for you to do the same.”
They asked if Ulice had a driver’s license.
No, he did not, Norwood told them, acknowledging that Parker was wrong to drive that night, and that he had asked him never to drive again.
Norwood had also done something he did not share with the grand jury: He paid Parker $400 for the old pickup truck and then had it taken to Charles Spates’s junkyard near the Wallis railroad tracks, where he got Spates’ word that the truck would never be sold. Spates promised to leave it forever in the weeds, where it is today, in case Grover or Graham or Jill ever needed to see it again as part of their healing.
After testifying before the grand jury, “when I was done I walked across the street to a little café, drank a cup of coffee, got myself together, and drove home,” Norwood says.
How could Grover Norwood possibly forgive Ulice Parker for killing his child while driving nearly blind without a license, and then leaving the scene of the crime? To this day, many of his friends still can’t imagine themselves being able to do that. And don’t understand how he has.
“It was not as hard as it would have been if he was drunk or if he was someone who had just beaten his wife,” Norwood says. “But even then I would have been called on to forgive. The bottom line is that every Christian is called to offer forgiveness. The Bible tells us to forgive as God has forgiven us. And the prayer I have to say every day is this: ‘O God, I do want your forgiveness. I understand that as I do this, I am a new person in your eyes. As Jesus said in John 5:24: I have crossed over from eternal death to eternal life. Thank you!’ ”
The grand jury elected not to prefer charges against Ulice Parker. “There was no way to prove Parker intentionally left the scene of the accident or that he should have known that somebody was killed or injured,” says Travis J. Koehn, the district attorney who presented the case. Koehn quickly adds that he had never seen anything like Norwood’s amazing act of mercy: “It would be more usual for someone to come to my doorway and say, ‘He killed my little girl; I want him in prison.’ ”
And Norwood’s amazing grace continued. His kindness toward the Parker family rippled through both Simonton churches, helping the town bridge a racial divide stretching back a couple of centuries. Like Pastor Spears at the funeral, Parker himself feared reprisals. “He grew up with prejudice,” says Pastor Hall.
Rather than revenge, Grover Norwood convinced his fellow churchgoers at Simonton Community to work with the folks at St. Matthews to design and build a new home for Ulice Parker. The construction crew began with Norwood and Larry Smith and two friends. They called themselves “the four hammers,” and were soon joined by more than 100 volunteers from both churches. It was sort of a “field of dreams” experience, according to Norwood. He and the four hammers started working and the people just started coming. “Some of them showed up at first to see this guy whose daughter died who was going to build a house for the guy that did it,” says Norwood. No matter what motivated them, he personally gave each one a tour of Parker’s dilapidated house, and then asked the question he knew was on their minds: “Why are we doing this?”
His answer: “Because it is a death trap.” And because this man Parker was their brother.
“When Grover gets something in his crosshairs,” says Jill Norwood, “it is going to get done.”
A year after Joy’s death, Parker’s new house was finished. Women from both churches filled it with new furniture, bedding, and appliances. Then everybody celebrated together, black and white, by forming a circle around the new house and praying.
“It was unreal,” says Pastor Hall. “I’ve never seen nothing like that. Someone kills my child, you think I’d build a home for him? That’s a lot of God in him, a lot of love. When I heard that Brother Norwood was encouraging everybody to build a new home, I could not believe it. I said, ‘Huh!’ That’s what I said to myself.”
Ulice Parker has been dead for three years now—felled by a heart attack while tending his garden at age 74—and his wife Carrie, at 62, passed too. He and Norwood remained friends to the end, and a few of Parker’s kids still live in the house that the two churches built.
For many people, the most memorable moment happened the morning of the grand jury proceeding. Several members of all-white Simonton Community Church arrived at all-black St. Matthews Church, where they asked Pastors Hall and Spears if they could join in prayer for Grover Norwood and Ulice Parker, for the jury members, and for God’s will to be done, whatever that was.
Sometime later a wind whipped through the Texas trees and blew open the front door of the church, quieting the prayerful throng. A moment later, a cell phone rang and someone from the courthouse was on the other end, reporting that the grand jury had decided not to prosecute Ulice. A spontaneous celebration erupted inside the house of worship. Except for Pastor Spears, who was sitting soberly.
He told them he believed they had witnessed a “burning-bush-like” moment. He said because of one man’s love and forgiveness of another man, an invisible God had been made visible on this day deep in the heart of Texas.
Buy this inspirational video here (see trailer):
