S B C U P D AT E
Serving with Integrity and Skill
Image Courtesy of GuideStone Financial Resources
O. S. Hawkins Reflects on a Half-Century of Ministry BY ROY HAYHURST
O
n a clear day from O. S. Hawkins’s office in a North Dallas high-rise, you can see all the way to Fort Worth, his hometown. It may be fewer than forty miles from Crenshaw Street on Fort Worth’s East Side, where Hawkins grew up, to GuideStone’s offices. But in many ways, it’s a world away and part of the culmination of a journey the Lord Himself orchestrated. Raised in a moral, but not church-going, home, Hawkins’s parents were married a long time before he was born. An only child, Hawkins said his parents taught him a tremendous work ethic, respect and responsibility, along with sacrifice and dedication to family. “They were great, moral people who loved me very much,” Hawkins recounted. “I never played in a ball game from Little League on that my dad wasn’t there.” Hawkins first was introduced to the Lord in high school.
52
SBC.NET | SUMMER 2021
“What a time to be in high school in the 1960s,” Hawkins said. “Those were the days of pep rallies and pom-poms, glass pack mufflers and drag races, Bass weejuns and Levi’s, madras windbreakers and buttoned-down collars, hayrides and sock hops—and the Beatles.” COMING TO KNOW THE LORD
“But I was seventeen years old and never remember hearing a prayer in my home or seeing the Bible opened,” Hawkins said. “One day, after a basketball game one Saturday night, a young man witnessed to me about Christ and took me the next morning to Sagamore Hill Baptist Church in Fort Worth where I heard the Gospel and there trusted Christ as my personal Savior. I’m not what I ought to be today, but I’ve never been the same since.”
