I Call Her “Blessed”

Today my mother is 98 years old. I wrote about her a couple of years ago in “Teach Us to Number Our Days.” In that post, I described my mother’s shrinking world with memory loss and limited mobility, urging us all to use our days wisely in the Lord’s service.

In today’s post, I want to simply give tribute to my mother and her faithful life of Christian service. Her strength is rapidly ebbing, and we think she will not be with us many more days. Perhaps we will get a few bonus weeks or even a month or two, but, surely, she will see the Saviour soon.

My mother grew up on a farm just north of Edmonton, Alberta. Her mother, my grandmother, was the daughter of Anglican missionaries among the people we in Canada now call “First Nations.” My grandfather wasn’t a believer until late in life. Although my grandmother was a great influence, it wasn’t until my mother went off to the big city (Edmonton) for nurse’s training that she became a Christian. She got involved in a local church, became very active and then decided to go off to Bible school, working her way through by nursing. First was a small Bible college in Alberta then on to a larger school in Portland, Oregon, where she got a B.A. in Christian Education (something like the old Church Administration major that BJU used to offer).

After her education, she went to a small town in Alberta to help in a local church there. The church needed revival, and she and some fellow Bible school grads became part of a team trying to give it new life. It was in that church she met my dad. They both became very active in the church, holding many offices and positions through the years.

My mother’s spiritual life made a big impact on me in many ways. Her personal devotional life was a constant testimony. She would read her Bible faithfully and lead us in prayers at bedtime. My brother and I had our own set prayers that we would rattle through each night, but we were often amazed at how long mom could pray. I think we timed her one night and compared her times to our times… not even close! (We had a long way to go, my brother and I.)

The most striking thing about my mother’s Christian life, however, was her constant zeal to win souls. There was a family up the street from us. The dad was a bartender. That lifestyle meant the family had very little resources. They also had a passel of kids. Mom made sure that this family, as many as would come, would be involved in Sunday school. She worked with those kids, befriended them, provided for them to go to camp, helped some of them go to Christian college, and loved many of them to the Lord Jesus.

This family wasn’t the only focus of her interest. We had never heard of a bus ministry, but mom and others in the church organized a ministry of bringing in kids to Sunday school from some of the farms outside town. I can remember riding along on some of those trips over snowy winter roads and piling four or five extra kids in the car to bring them to church. As in all efforts like this, some of those kids drifted away, but not all of them. There are Christians who we will rejoice with in heaven forever because of ministries like this. Some of those young fellows went into the ministry themselves, so who can really count the number of lives reached out of this little small-town church?

And besides that, even as with age she became less involved in the Sunday school, mom would still get young girls from the neighbourhood to help her around the house… and come to Sunday school too, of course.

My mother isn’t a perfect person, but what I am trying to show is that when she became a Christian, she put her life into it. She did what anyone can do, if they really want to live for the Lord. She got involved in the lives of others, recruited kids and families for Sunday school, taught Sunday school, taught Sunday school teachers, recruited kids and workers for going to Christian camp, counseled and taught at camp, and just busied herself in the work of the Lord.

And she had her own family to raise as well. She encouraged our spiritual lives, influenced us to faith, volunteered us for Christian activity (I didn’t want to teach my first Sunday school class, but I had no choice), while trying to curb our sin natures and point us to faithfulness to Christ.

And… she worked outside the home once we were all well into school years, first selling World Book encyclopedia, then selling insurance and real estate in my dad’s business. She was a going concern!

Our days offer different opportunities — you couldn’t reduplicate everything my mother did in reaching out to people today. Our culture has changed in ways that might prohibit an exact duplication of specific activities. But you can still find ways to get involved in the lives of others, especially those people on your street who don’t know the Lord.

Yesterday, I went up to see my mom. She is bedridden now, sleeps most of the day. She woke up to see me, laughed at one of my jokes (she always laughs with me), and had me read stories out of the Egermeier’s Bible Story Book.¹ “I love stories,” she said. She especially loves the Old, Old, Story that we all have loved so long.

UPDATE: Frances Evelyn Johnson passed into her Saviour’s presence about 11:30 PM Pacific Standard Time, December 20, 2021, just six days past her 98th birthday.

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Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.

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The photo is my mom, celebrating a birthday over twenty years ago.

1. I highly recommend this book, it was what my parents used with me and was instrumental in my coming to an understanding of the gospel and faith in Christ. [↩]