“... the big wheel run by faith and the little wheel run by the grace of God…”
We decided what we wanted to do; take food from everywhere we could find it and give it away in every place where folks could use it., We then realized we had to call this endeavor something. What, it turned out, was not as easy as one might think. Sitting with another pastor, Mother Val Redpath, we began brainstorming.
We went through a bunch of possible names, each of us rejecting one after another.
Finally, one of us said that picking a name was really the least of our concerns.
We had no money, no volunteers to do the work, nothing but my vehicle to move whatever food we could find and only her church to receive and distribute it. In short, it was going to be up to God as to where all this went.
A favorite singer in my youth was Harry Belafonte; one of my favorite singers from the 1960's did a version of a traditional folk song that I really enjoyed called of his was “Ezekiel Saw de Wheels [way up in the middle of the air].” One of the lines of this traditional folk the song went: “…... the big wheel run by faith and the little wheel run by the grace of God…”
I mentioned the tune to Val who immediately said that it sure sounded like what we were going to do. Thus, our name became Ezekiel’s Wheels of LBNJ [Long Branch, New Jersey].
Two little side notes on the name, though. When I first went to our County seat to register the name, I discovered that a rock band in Massachusetts, 2 or 3 ‘gentlemens’ clubs’ in several states and no less than 28 other businesses were also called some variation of Ezekiel’s Wheels! The other note is a bit sadder. I have found that less and less people read are reading the Bible and, therefore, have no clue as to who the prophet, Ezekiel, the prophet is, much less how to spell his name. Over the years, I have spelled it hundreds of times. When you see us using the initials EW, you'll understand why! No wonder we’ve often shortened our name to EW!