The cold water lapped at Martha Elliot’s chest as she held her three-year-old daughter on her shoulder.
Martha, her daughter, and two other relatives were trapped in a truck, victims of a May, 1979 Texas flash flood.
The flood had already claimed the lives of Martha’s husband and her two sons, swept away when they tried to pull another truck, the truck the husband and boys were riding in, out of the water.
Martha may have been in shock, scared, maybe unable to process what had just happened to her, but she was determined that her daughter would survive. No matter how tired her arms grew, she was going to hold that child above water.
It was nighttime, the time when scary thoughts love to appear and torment the thinker. Who knows what Martha was thinking as the truck filled with water? Am I going to die, Lord? My boys are gone. My husband is gone. Will I join them?
But my daughter will survive.
The morning came, and rescuers also came for Martha, her daughter, and the two other relatives.
When the shock of the flood and the deaths of her husband and sons receded, Martha knew that it was she and her daughter now, on their own.
So she squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, mustered all the faith she had (and probably some she didn’t have) and moved to Abilene, Texas to start her life over.
Her first step was to enroll in Abilene Christian University. Her goal: to eventually have a degree that would help her to raise her daughter. People rallied around her, and six years later, she graduated with a degree in home economics and early childhood education.
She eventually started teaching kindergarten, and was surprised on the first day of school to have a five-year-old call her a profane word. Had that been me, I might have quit.
Not Martha.
For 19 years, she poured herself into her students, and not only did her influence affect them, it affected the teachers around her. Perhaps they were attracted to an inner strength that Martha may not have realized she had.
Seventeen years after that horrible year of 1979, the daughter Martha held above water level in the truck, her daughter Debbie, got married and moved to Atlanta. While Martha was happy for her daughter and welcomed a son-in-law, Debbie’s marriage meant that Martha would be living alone for the first time in her life.
She came to Atlanta to care for Debbie while Debbie was on bed rest during her pregnancy with twins. And after the twins were born, Martha found every reason to visit Atlanta as often as she could.
Martha retired from teaching in 2011. The next year, she had a heart attack, and after rehab, she came to Atlanta to live with Debbie and her family. They welcomed her, arms open. So did their church.
Family, by blood, marriage, and church, meant a great deal to Martha. She was a familiar presence at ladies’ Bible study class on Tuesdays and later, in the seniors’ Bible study classes on Sunday and Wednesday mornings. She was the one who kept up on the prayer list for her small group. She made sure that birthday and get well cards were sent out from the senior class to those who needed them. And for a time, she helped teach a Sunday School class full of kids from eight to ten years old.
Martha Elliot died of cancer on January 8th. Her funeral was yesterday. I was not able to attend but did watch the livestream. Her daughter Debbie posted a long tribute to her mother on Facebook. She wrote, “Martha did not consider herself to be a strong person. Her life proved otherwise. When Debbie mentioned at one point how strong and independent Martha was, she said, ‘No, I am not. I just did what I had to do. I didn’t have a choice.’”
I beg to differ. I think Martha did have a choice. She could have chosen, after the death of her husband and two sons, to figuratively curl up in a ball and live the rest of her life in bitterness and self-pity, angry about what had been taken from her so suddenly.
She could have communicated that attitude to her daughter.
But she drew on a deep faith in God, believed in Him, and then set about doing what she had to do.
A speaker at Martha’s funeral mentioned her “empathy”. Upon hearing that, my mind flashed back several years to when we had an auto accident. While no one was hurt, our car was totaled. It was Debbie’s family that said, we have an extra car. Please use it. I believe that car belonged to Martha.
After hearing about Martha’s empathy yesterday, I knew where Debbie had gotten her own empathy from.
That daughter, held above chest-high cold water, grew to be a wonderful woman with faith of her own and creativity with her twins and her younger son.
I did not know until after Martha died that she had lost her husband and sons in such a tragic way. Being the researcher I am, I was able to find a short article about the flood and Martha’s loss of her husband and sons.
Usually, the word “forge” is associated with heat and metal, as in forging a suit of armor or forging horseshoes.
In thinking about Martha’s life, and her faith, I believe that that faith was forged by cold water on a horrible night that she never forgot. Cold water may have taken her husband and sons, but it did not take her daughter and it did not take her faith.
Instead, it acted like a fire in a forge, shaping her into the strong, empathetic, faithful and kind woman she was and that we remember.
She will be missed, missed by her blood family, her family by marriage, and her church family.
And she will be remembered as a woman who, with her faith in God, overcame a nightmarish loss and left us an example of faith forged, not by fire, but by cold water.
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