I, Dr. Bob Holt, MD, was a successful Emergency Room Physician at that time, the  director of a group of doctors working at Sampson County Memorial Hospital in Clinton, North Carolina.  My wife Edie (pictured above) and I lived in our modest little home in Garland, North Carolina (also pictured above) that Edie had decorated in "Country French" style after I had expanded the house to accommodate Edie's four children from a previous marriage.  We had rented an empty Presbyterian church on Ingold Avenue, and starting as a Branch Sabbath School had recently gained enough members to become the Garland Seventh-day Adventist Church.

    We heard of a tour to Israel to be conducted that year by the Canadian Seventh-day Adventist evangelist Henry Feyerabend and at the proper date, Edie and I were on one of those air-conditioned buses peering out the windows at what our tour guide assured us were the very feilds near to Bethlehem that David as a shepherd boy had tended his flocks while playing his lyre or harp and then one thousand years later, a group of angels had serenaded other shepherds as Christ was being born in a cave nearer Bethlehem now marked with a silver star of David. A very old stone church was built a few centuries later over the cave to be called the "Church of the Nativity." Edie and I got off the bus and toured this church also, along with about 40 other people, mostly Seventh-day Adventists like us.