The first time I saw Myra, I was sitting in the Jones Hall dining room at Memphis State University with friends, including her then-current boyfriend. Barry and I were a part of Young Life Leadership, a para-church organization devoted to introducing adolescents to Jesus Christ and helping them grow in their faith. Interestingly, Barry had piqued a curiosity in Myra to know more about Christ. But, that particular day, she stormed up to the table and gave her a piece of her mind about something he had done that made her mad. She left and he laughed it off…but that was the beginning of the end for Barry. However, I didn’t know that.
A few months later, I began to see her at my home church. I later learned that a young adult member of the church and Myra’s co-worker, Lisa Woods Cannon, had been fielding some spiritual questions that Myra had. Lisa got to a point where she said, “You need to talk to my pastor.” So, Myra came one Sunday morning and told Herb Hodges that she would like to visit with him. He told her to come back for the evening service and she did. However, that night a missionary spoke, and she was bored to tears. She said if he had spoken in the morning service she would never have returned. The irony is that a few years later she had a passion for teaching GAs, a girls’ mission organization, and she made three mission trips to Venezuela.
Nevertheless, she made an appointment to meet Herb. Although she had gone to church as a child and early adolescent, she never knew what it was to have a personal and growing relationship with Christ. Myra came week after week with new questions that she had from reading assignments Herb had given her from God’s word.
As a result of those meetings with Herb, she professed her faith in Jesus as he Lord and Savior. He explained that she should be baptized in obedience to Christ’s command to give a public response or an outward symbol of her new inward commitment. He suggested, what better time could there be than the upcoming Easter Sunday morning to announce to the church her intent to be baptized and also give her testimony of coming to faith in Christ. She didn’t know that the testimony component was not the regular practice in our church when one walked the aisle…so she just did it. At the end of the service, she stood at the front of the church and a long line of members welcomed her into the church family. I wanted to make a connection with her by mentioning the mutual friendship we had with Barry. Fortunately, the Lord thwarted that comment because when I took her hand, I lost my prepared speech. Instead, I stammered out something like “I’m Chuck Spindler and I have a friend who is a friend of yours.” I walked on, thinking “stupid, stupid, stupid.” I even told my sister, Mary how foolish I felt in that encounter. However, it was just peculiar enough of a church pickup line to generate some curiosity later, for she asked Lisa, “Who is Chuck Fenton?”
Myra did not immediately merge into the young adult (collegiate) group. She often sat by herself in our large sanctuary. But one Sunday night I got the courage to invite her to join our group for pizza after church. She accepted, and we began to hang out in group settings over the spring and summer months of 1976. We developed a strong friendship without the pressure of romance for the next six months. We prayed together, we talked about what we were learning through our personal Bible studies, and we memorized scripture together. And when we started dating in August those habits continued into our marriage on December 18, 1977.
Myra was involved in the collegiate Navigator ministry with a strong emphasis on discipleship, reproducing believers after the pattern of 2 Timothy 2:2. She took seriously the call to entrust to faithful people what she had learned, so they, in turn, could teach others also. Whether it was the milk of the foundational, elemental Bible truths in children’s Sunday School or the solid food and the word of righteousness for the maturing woman of faith, her goal was as the writer of Hebrews says, to train them to discern good and evil. (5:12-14).
Along the way, many of you have been her disciples, you might not have known to put that word to it, but you were. Just as Paul said “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ” you have discerned in her those winsome ways of Christ that were demonstrated in her lifestyle and teaching and by which you find yourself imitating Myra’s words and actions.
Psalm 90:10 says, “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” Now this verse does not say God caps our life at the age of 70 or 80. Nor is it a promise that we will live that long. However, it does speak of the toil and trouble that we endure in life and that all too soon it is finished, and we fly away or die. Coincidentally, Myra lived exactly to the age of seventy and struggled with Parkinson’s disease for over 30 years, initially with just weakness on her right side but finally with the inability to verbally communicate, ambulate, and personally take care of her own needs.
My sister, Mary, wrote of the losses that we all experienced over the year of her disease:
“I’ve missed the talks alone with Myra that Parkinson’s Disease (PD) robbed. I hate that PD robbed Mackie’s grandchildren of the fullness of her creativity, quiet humor, and open expressions of delight in children. I’m sorry that Bethany [our Associate Pastor’s wife] couldn’t draw on the years of experience as a pastor’s wife: with all its ups and downs, disappointments, joys, misunderstandings, and spiritual breakthroughs. I hate that Chuck will not have a couple’s trip to the beach or the Grand Canyon. But oh, Myra is restored. She’s living with sight after faith. She’s absent – but present with the Lord. Thank you, Jesus: for my sister, for her sharing, for the love and acceptance and welcome she always showed me. And thank you that she introduced Denny [her husband] to Culvers.”
POSTSCRIPT: Myra and I celebrated our 46th wedding anniversary on December 18. It was a non-event for at that time she was bedridden and had begun the process of active dying. refusing food and water. Early on December 27, I awakened after dozing off for about an hour to discover she had made the transition from mortal to immortal, from the temporal to the eternal.
While there is and will continue to be sadness in her absence, there is joy in the assurance we know she is whole and healed and in the presence of her Lord and Savior. We have the hope that we will see her again and our grandson, Silas [see My Birthday Present]. We grieve with hope!
5 For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, 3 inasmuch as we, having put it on, will not be found naked. 4 For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life.5 Now He who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge. 6 Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord— 7 for we walk by faith, not by sight— 8 we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. (2 Corinthians 5:1-8, NASB)
2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. 3 And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure. (1 John 3:2-3, NASB)
Rural Iowa Pastor 