My Aunt Martha

Photo Courtesy of Jeanette Anderson

It was a cool week in late October, 2013. While visiting my dad and brother in South Dakota, I attended services at Evangelical Mennonite Church, which is the worshiping community where I grew up.

An elderly aunt was on tap to bring music to the congregation. At 100 years old, Martha walked to the front of the sanctuary of "Country Church". 

“I would like to tell you about the friend I have in Jesus,” she began.

The sanctuary of Country Church has an oak pulpit, oak pews and a vaulted ceiling with wooden beams. The front has a full-sized organ, Steinway piano, choir loft, and an oak offering table. Like a good massage, a visit here can ease the numbness of my soul as it connects me to my roots of the 70s and 80s. 

“I’m so glad that I have Jesus, not just as my attorney, but also as my friend,” Martha added.

Martha was a career missionary in Ecuador from the 1940s through the 70s. She helped open and operate a Christian bookstore serving both scholarly and popular audiences. When she left the field, she retired in Freeman, S.D. where she had been raised. The beginning of her retirement coincided with my entrance into kindergarten in nearby Marion, S.D. Before working in Ecuador, Martha had served as a missionary to loggers and their families near Thief River Falls, Minnesota for seven years. Thief River Falls is located approximately 300 miles north of my adult home of Minneapolis.

If, at age 100, Martha could call Jesus her Good Friend, I intended to listen.

“God is Someone to whom I can turn, at any time, and at any place,” Martha said.

She set her walker aside, turned around, and sat down at the piano to play several verses of “What a Friend I Have in Jesus.”

“What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer!
Oh, what peace we often forfeit,
Oh, what needless pain we bear
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer!”

The analogy of friendship worked for me.

Inspired, I decided to take advantage of any opportunity to pursue friendship with Martha. The next morning, I drove to her assisted living facility, the Salem Mennonite Home in Freeman. I wasn't sure Martha would recognize me; however, she instantly greeted me by name. She listened intently as I told her about my work as a payroll and business specialist at a national consumer goods company in the Cities. 

“Who even knows about these things?” she marveled.

As I was beginning to learn, Martha was an authentic if humble intellectual in a community of farmers. She was recognized a local expert on topics ranging from genealogy to the canonicity of Scriptures.

After we chatted, she offered to give me a walking tour of Salem Home. Two years prior, at the age of 98, she had had a pacemaker implanted in her heart. I remember my mom telling me how Martha struggled making the decision.

“At my age, is this even God’s will?” Martha had asked.

“Well, in other ways you are in good health, so I think you should go after it,” her doctor told her. 

Martha’s walking tour of the home took me across three floors of an old yet polished building. We toured a large kitchen and dining hall, a nurse’s station; two floors of residents' rooms, a large activity hall, and an enclosed outdoor patio with a water fountain. Martha introduced me to each person we met as her niece. One of them was a resident with whom Martha met regularly for one-to-one Bible studies.  Another was a 4-H leader I recognized from my childhood, now working in the home's laundry department.

By the time we finally sat down, Martha was winded, yet she continued to share her thoughts. Overall, she said, between deep breaths, she felt better than she had in years. 

I stayed for lunch, meeting some of Martha's table mates. Then I stayed for the afternoon's planned activity: a video recording of some gospel singers performing on a boat outside a lakefront home. After that, Martha and I had coffee and crackers and continued to chat in a fireside lounge near her room where I learned more about her laborious translations of German letters. It was 5 pm when I left.

The next day, I returned to Salem Home, this time to follow-up on a conversation I had had with one of Martha’s friends regarding his book collection. As I was leaving, I bumped into the pastor of Country Church in the hallways as he was doing his weekly visitations.

“What are you doing? Looking for friends?” Randy asked me.

Pretty much! 

The following day, I returned to the Cities, stopping to have dinner with my friend in Edina before arriving home. As a never-married individual, I had often found my non-romantic friendships to be a formidable source of strength in times of hardship. No one else, though, had ever pointed me so powerfully to my One and Only True Friend, Jesus Christ.

What a good friend I had in Martha indeed!