Editor’s Note: The Henryetta Free-Lance will feature county residents who are making a difference in their community. These individuals don’t seek accolades for themselves, but go about their day doing all they can to change the lives of others. If there is someone you would like to nominate as one of Okmulgee County’s Unsung Heroes, please send your nominee name and the story of why to dawn@cookson.news.
How ‘dropping seeds’ leads to meeting needs
Editor’s Note: The Henryetta Free-Lance will feature county residents who are making a difference in their community. These individuals don’t seek accolades for themselves, but go about their day doing all they can to change the lives of others. If there is someone you would like to nominate as one of Okmulgee County’s Unsung Heroes, please send your nominee name and the story of why to dawn@cookson.news.
- “If you’re gonna love God, You’ve got to do for others…” If you have had the opportunity to meet Rev. Sheri Smith Lashley, I’m sure she has left an impression as she is not one to easily forget.
As the current pastor and leader of First United Methodist Church of Okmulgee, the Elk City native is here on a mission. Like most, Lashley believes that our heroes are those who put their lives on the line for others with no regard for themselves and doing things like running into burning buildings. But burning buildings come in all forms.
“Dropping little seeds can be a fire later lit in somebody and I recognize the fact that even though I’m doing what I’m supposed to do now, I may never see or hear of the good that has happened because of that seed,” Lashley said. “And so that has to be good enough for me. And so I think…the burning building is the burning seed or the tree that’s grown or the kid who goes to college and becomes a successful doctor who cures cancer. I mean, you know, you never know when you see a 2-year-old child or a 5-month child, that you’re keeping them out of the cold for a day, but later on you may be saving their life and in creating something that comes back to help the world or yourself so that has to be enough for me.”
Rev. Lashley says the feeling of needing to help comes from childhood and her parents, both who are still with Lashley today.
“Bless their hearts. My dad’s 90. My mom’s 88, we had four kids and it was just, it’s just what we did. You just did what you were asked to do because it was the right thing to do, you know. I tried to instill that in my two boys.
“So when I would ask them what they wanted for Christmas, they couldn’t think of anything,” Rev. Lashley said. “But if we walked into Walmart and there was an Angel Tree, they wanted to do that. It’s just what you do is just what your parents inbred into you. It’s not necessarily even in your bones, in your blood, but it is in your raising. It’s just what we do. It’s what we do as Christians. It’s what we do. We’re just supposed to do for others. And you know, they say your neighbor... it’s not just the person in your neighborhood, your neighbor’s across the world. We’re just supposed to do for others and be kind and sometimes that’s hard. Sometimes being kind is hard, because sometimes people aren’t nice. And we always laugh in my house and say, ‘Well, Sheri, that’s job security, you know, because if people aren’t nice, then you got somebody to minister to.’” And ministry or ministering to others is exactly what Sheri is here to do. It’s her seed sown and identifying her field is key.
During the beginning of the pandemic, though she had not been in Okmulgee long, Lashley saw another opportunity to get to work.
“I left the doors open,” she said. “We left the offices open. We didn’t shut down anything. We didn’t shut down any operations ever. In fact, during the time when people weren’t coming much, we got some things done. We revamped and I painted the children’s building. We hired somebody to fix one of our old sanctuary buildings that had nobody coming to it and made it into a youth building. We took back our youth building and made it into EMW. I mean, we did all kinds of things during that time. And I hired some of the people to do some of the work that were laid off from their regular job … we didn’t close and we kept stuff going and we kept doing stuff and we kept having potluck dinners.
“I literally felt like if I closed the door, I was telling the devil it was okay to come in. I felt like he was trying to stop church and I just couldn’t stop church if somebody needed us. We probably had more people off the street during that time… we kept doing stuff, because I think that’s what you have to do and we kept trying to help other people. I kept the pantry open. We have a full pantry back here and Miss Helen Nygaard … they would come in a day early and load up everything except refrigerator goods into all these baskets and they will say ‘this is for a family of six. This is for a family of four. This is for a family of two.’ And I had a young couple that helped me and we would hand it out the door,” Rev. Lashley said.
“We weren’t able to do the praying over them and bringing them in and letting them shop and do all of those things but a bunch of them asked for prayer…I was going shopping for groceries because the food bank wasn’t giving out food.
And it was a mess. But, we managed to keep the pantry open all that time because I’m just not giving up. It’s not what I’m supposed to do.”
Whether giving bottles of water on 5th Street during the summer at the block party, hosting the summer enrichment programs like the Multi Cultural program, making space available for community members and their meetings, hosting the community Thanksgiving Dinner or just keeping doors of the church open so the homeless and people trying to find their way during one of the worst times in the country, Rev. Sheri Smith Lashley will continue to find ways to simply be a help.
