It was divine intervention that influenced Tommy Miller to take over as director of the Good Shepherd Community Center 20 years ago.

An ordained United Methodist Minister, he had been music and program director at Hawkins United Methodist Church for 15 years when Bill Watkins, then Good Shepherd’s director, approached him about taking over the center.

“When Bill told me he wanted me to take over Good Shepherd, I laughed,” he said. “But my wife, Debby, and I prayed about it; we prayed about it for a year, and I told my wife, ‘This is what God wants us to do.’ When he asked again, I told him I’d accept it. I’m now in my 20th year. I’ve been in Vicksburg 35 years. I spent 15 of those at Hawkins.” He said he still directs music at Hawkins.

But his tenure at Good Shepherd almost stopped at 14 days.

He said his first week as director almost caused him to briefly reconsider his decision to take over as director.

“If my second week would have been as bad as my first, I would have left,” he said with laugh. “Everything went wrong. It was a circus. The second week was better, and third was good. God has seen us through.”

As Good Shepherd director, Miller oversees a staff of 21 full- and part-time employees and the center’s programs. It’s an extensive list that includes daycare for children ages six weeks to 4 years old, tutorial and after school programs, GED classes, free medical clinic, Thanksgiving and Christmas assistance and emergency food service.

The daycare program, he said, is open not only to those who can pay the full tuition for the program, but the staff also works with parents who work a lower-paying jobs by allowing their children to come at a reduced rate as low as $10 a month. Debby Miller, he said, is in charge of the tutorial program and assists with the daycare program.

“Our medical clinic is open three days a week; we usually see people with chronic illnesses like diabetes and high blood pressure,” he said. “We don’t see many acute cases. We have a relationship with the city’s medical community and we are able to refer them to several clinics and physicians in town.”

The GED class, he said will average from 30 to 50 participants a year, while the clinic is visited by about 2,500 people per year. The daycare program serves from 80 to 85 children a year.

Like all non-profit agencies, Good Shepherd in constantly looking for funding and dealing with changing regulations that govern how an organization like Good Shepherd operates, sometimes, he said, regulations contradict themselves, adding some recently passed state regulations “telling us not to follow the regulations they passed a few years ago.”

The center is a United Way of West Central Mississippi agency — which Miller said has been very beneficial to Good Shepherd — and he is always on the lookout for grants from other sources that can help the center.

And the search for funding is one of the low spots of his job, he said.

“I feel like we make a difference (in the community), and the programs we provide are instrumental in doing that, but finances are always tight, and sometimes decisions had to be made because we don’t have the money for outreach programs (outside of the center) that need to be done,” he said.

“I’m working on a grant for the daycare,” he said. He held up a large stack of papers. “That’s 252 pages of regulations for follow to apply for the grant. I’m looking at another grant site for others.”

“I’d like to renovate the building and make it more energy efficient,” Miller said. “These metal windows we have let the cold air in during the winter and suck it out in the summer. I’d like to restart our gym program. We had to close it for lack of money. Every night, we would have from 25 to 50 young men in here ages from 16 to their 20s or 30s in here playing basketball.

“I’d like to have one more physician to volunteer for the clinic. If we had one more, we could have it open four days a week.”

But those concerns sometimes evaporate with what Miller says is the high point of his service.

“When I’m in Kroger or Walmart and a child sees me and runs up to me and hugs me and says, ‘I love you Rev. Miller.’ That’s a wonderful feeling.”

Miller plans to continue his work at the center, adding, “I have no plans at the time to leave Good Shepherd as long as God wants me to be here.

“This is where God called us to be,” he said. “And we’ll stay here. Tomorrow, God may call us to go someplace else. And wherever he calls us to go, we will follow.”