Dr. Wayne E. Oates
was probably the wisest teacher I ever sat under—and since I was a full-time
student for 22 years, from 1944 to 1966, I had a lot of teachers.
Oates was born
into a poor South Carolina family in 1917, and he passed away 15 years ago tomorrow,
on Oct. 21, 1999. Abandoned by his
father in infancy, young Wayne
was brought up by his grandmother and sister while his mother supported them by
working in a cotton mill.
At the age of fourteen he
was one of a small number of impoverished boys selected to serve as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives. Stimulated by that experience,
he became the first of his family to go to college.
Oates went on
to earn a doctor’s degree in the psychology of religion and then taught at The
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) from 1947 to 1974 and at the
University of Louisville Medical School after that.
When I was in
his pastoral counseling class at SBTS, I made an appointment to talk with Dr.
Oates about a troublesome matter in the church I was serving as pastor. After
listening carefully to my explanation of the problem, he leaned toward me and
said, “Brother Seat, there are some situations we just can’t change. All we can
do is learn from them.”
Wise words!
Several years
later, in 1971, Dr. Oates wrote a book titled Confessions of a Workaholic. He
begins, “Workaholism is a word which I have invented. It is not in your
dictionary.”
But now “workaholic”
is in most dictionaries. In a brief
article about his death, the New York Times reported that Oates’s 1971 book
resulted in “workaholic” being added “to the American lexicon; the Oxford
English Dictionary credits him with inventing it.”
At the age of
66, Dr. Oates wrote an autobiographical book titled The Struggle to Be Free. The first chapter is about his boyhood and the struggle to be free of poverty.
Next he writes
about the struggle to be free from a feeling of inferiority. “Poverty,” he
contends, “leaves you with wounds to your self-esteem” (p. 29).
“To Be Free
from the Slavery of Overcommitment” is the title of the seventh chapter, and
there Dr. Oates tells how he wrote the book about workaholism because of his
own struggle with "an overcommitment to work.”
He came to
realize that part of the reason for that was due to the poverty he had
experienced as a boy. He writes, “I do not think that economics determines our destiny. I do think that
economics shapes our thoughts and
decisions far more than the pious people of the earth know or are willing to
admit” (p. 136).
Throughout his
lifetime, Dr. Oates wrote 57 books—far more than he probably would have written
if he had not been a workaholic. (In some cases we can thank God for
workaholics!)
Those books
have been greatly beneficial not only to his many students and to other
teachers in the field of counseling, but also to many people in the general
public who have been able to learn from the wisdom shared in his books.
Please
join me in thanking God for wise teachers—and even for workaholics like Dr.
Oates.
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