My Glimpse of Eternity (11 page)

T
he call away from Florida and to a new life in the west began with the death of my gentle and devout mother—Fern Perkins—on December 19, 1969. Several months later, Brenda began seriously thinking of attending a college the following September in Springfield, Missouri. Brenda, April Dawn, and I drove to Springfield to look over the school and enroll her, it if seemed right.

It was a low period for me. There was the recent loss of my mother, I had gone through almost five years of the loneliness of widowhood, and now I was having to face up to the fact that Brenda would soon be away at college.

Shortly after arriving in Springfield, we fell in love with and bought an old, three-story, twelve-room Victorian house, a hundred-year-old landmark. The girls and I began immediately restoring and redecorating the interior. We decided to stay on in Springfield, had our furniture and possessions shipped to us, and the girls enrolled in local schools.

At almost the same time we were led to settle in Springfield, one of God’s special missionaries, Carl Malz, decided to move his family from Beirut, Lebanon, to Springfield. His wife Wanda was terminally ill with cancer. Connie, their daughter, was thirteen. Carl had been overseas for many years in Egypt, served as President of the Southern Asia Bible College in Bangalore, India, and founded the Middle East Evangelical Theological School in Beirut in 1968.

Wanda Malz died several months after arriving in Springfield.

While teaching a Vacation Bible School class in church that next summer, I was attracted to a young teenage girl who was having trouble adjusting to her new home. Connie Malz and I had a grief we could share together—we had both recently lost our mothers.

It was Connie who introduced me to her father. Carl and I knew almost from the beginning that God had brought us together. Connie confirmed it when she confided to me, “You’re the first lady I’ve met whom I’d like to have for my mother.”

April Dawn the previous Christmas had asked, “Oh, God, give me a daddy for Christmas—a big ’un.”

Carl Malz is six feet three inches tall and weighs 205 pounds. He and I were married the following June 3, 1971. Several months later Carl received a call to the Trinity Bible Institute in North Dakota to teach Foreign Missions. We were there for four years when Carl accepted a pastorate in Pasadena (outside Houston), Texas, where we now live and work.

Brenda did not enroll at the college in Springfield, but at Presbyterian College, Jamestown, North Dakota. There she fell in love with the son of her professor. She and Miles Millard Smart III were married in July 1974. Everyone calls him Bud. We tell people that “Bud went to college to make Bud-wiser, but Brenda went to college to get smart and did—Bud Smart.”

Several years after Mother passed away, Dad moved to Kennard, Texas, a small town 159 miles north of Houston where his son Jim has a cattle ranch. Dad, at seventy, works on the ranch, teaches a Christian growth class at his church and handles a counseling ministry, giving him a full, balanced, rewarding life.

Meanwhile, Mother Upchurch and I continued our correspondence. She and Oscar had retired to a small place near Albany, Kentucky. I’ll never forget the visit we made there in August 1976. Brenda, her husband, April Dawn, and I flew to the nearest airport and then rented a car to drive the additional 126 miles. Inside, I marveled at how important this visit was to me. When Mother Upchurch lived only a short seven blocks away when John and I were first married, I hardly ever went to visit her; now it was costing us almost a thousand dollars and I could hardly wait to see her and Oscar Upchurch.

It was almost sundown when we drove into the driveway of their small nature farm at the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains in Duvall Valley, Kentucky. From Mother Upchurch’s letters I learned that they raised their own food through beef cattle, corn, grain, and a small orchard.

Dad Upchurch was on the porch of their five-room house, standing tall and straight, with hair now white, blue eyes faded, as he greeted us. Tears brimmed his eyes. Mother Upchurch burst forth from the kitchen, dark hair now full of gray, her step slowed, but the vitality still there. She hugged us, one by one. It was real. The love was genuine.

We sat down to a table groaning under home-grown food: a famous Kentucky smoked ham, homemade cornbread, homemade jelly, applesauce from fresh apples, fresh vegetables, milk, cheese. The next day was spent in talk and leisurely walks about the farm, while the two elderly people feasted their eyes on their two grandchildren. How important it is to keep these family ties, I thought to myself.

Before we left on the third day, Mother Upchurch presented me with several jars of blackberry jelly. Dad Upchurch whispered to me that back in June, when his wife knew we were coming, she had climbed the mountain paths in the area, picking fresh wild blackberries and making the jelly the old-fashioned way, slowly boiling the nectar together with sugar for hours until it had the right consistency.

That night back in our home I saw it: Dorothy Upchurch had always been the same sweet, thoughtful person I had seen that day. I had simply been too self-centered, jealous, and blind to see her as she really was. Why had I not been able to accept people as they were rather than always wanting to change them? Why could I not live fully and joyously in the present moment?

Now I knew! I had to die in order to live.

O Lord my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me.

O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from the grave: thou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.

Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

And in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved.

Lord, by thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong: thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.

I cried to thee, O Lord; and unto the Lord I made supplication.

What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit?

Shall the dust praise thee? shall it declare thy truth?

Hear, O Lord, and have mercy upon me: Lord, be thou my helper.

Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness;

To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.

(Psalm 30:2–12, KJV)