The Lord Has Always Been Faithful

My grandmother—my mother’s mother—was born Martha Alice Hamilton…named Martha after one aunt and Alice after another.  Grandma’s  parents, John Hoyle and Melissa Catherine Hamilton.  John and Melissa were married quite young—he was 19 and she was 16 when they married in 1876. Grandma was the fifth of eight children born to the Hamiltons.  The family made their home in rural Tennessee, surrounded by the beautiful Smoky Mountains, where John was a country doctor.  The life of a doctor was exhausting in those days, and the pay was undependable—sometimes in small amounts of cash, often in garden produce and gifts of meat and eggs from families too poor to pay any other way.

Grandma’s growing up wasn’t all hardship; her parents were both believers and filled their home with hymns and Scripture songs, teaching their children to read from the family Bible, encouraging them to memorize Scripture, to pray every day.  

But when Grandma was just a little girl, her father lost his medical license when he couldn’t pay the fee to register it in the state of Tennessee, and the family had to sell their home and most of their possessions and move back into the old family home with John’s parents.  Great-grandpa did everything he could to support the family—he learned to make shoes and furniture, bought a used camera and became a photographer around the area, taught singing lessons—anything he could do to support his family.  Then an epidemic of smallpox came through Rhea County, sweeping through the Hamilton family and leaving John Hamilton chronically weak and ill.  He died when Grandma was only 11, leaving his family destitute.  And soon afterward, Homer, the youngest Hamilton child, died of pneumonia at the age of 8.

The older boys did what they could to support the family.  John’s widow, Melissa, took the youngest girls—my grandma and her sister Annie—to live with her brother in Oklahoma.  It was a hard time. “Mother never lost her faith in the Lord,” Grandma wrote later.  “She told us not to be afraid—that the Lord would take care of us—and He did!”

Grandma wanted to be a missionary to China.  That was always her dream, ever since she was a little girl.  The stories coming back to the States of the missionaries in China following the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century—stories of hardship and martyrdom, stories of souls won for Jesus—these stories inspired my Grandma, and convinced her that she, too, should be a missionary.  She worked every job she could find, saving and planning, and enrolled in BIOLA in Los Angeles, California—leaving for that far-away destination in the fall of 1919.

Grandma’s first year there was the hardest; she contracted influenza, which settled in her back and left her unable to attend classes the first semester.  She worked so hard studying to catch up that she suffered severe eyestrain; she had always had poor eyesight.  When, at the end of her first year at BIOLA, she applied to the China Inland Mission, she was rejected because of her eye trouble.  “No mission organization will ever accept you because of your eyesight,” she was told.  And in 1921 her mother died—far away in Oklahoma—and there was no money to go home for the funeral.   

But God still had plans for this young woman.  “God was still faithful, through all of these hard days,” she wrote in her journal years later.  She continued her studies, continued to teach Sunday School and babysit for her teachers’ children and mop floors at the school and work in the cafeteria…any job she could find to earn her tuition. “I just kept trusting the Lord,” she said.  “I wasn’t afraid.  I knew He loved me.  I knew He would be faithful.” 

In the fall of 1922 Grandma met my grandpa—John Roos—also a BIOLA student, a young German man bound for ministry.  They were married two weeks after they graduated, and spent their honeymoon driving a second-hand Model T Ford from California to Iowa, where Grandpa began his pulpit ministry at Rock Rapids, Iowa—the first of ten small Presbyterian churches he was to pastor during his life. 

The churches were small, the salaries were small, and there were hardships along the way—after my uncle and mother were born, their third child, a daughter, died at birth.  In the 1930’s they were in Kansas during the years of the Great Kansas Dust Bowl and during the Great Depression; one year, in Missouri, the church treasurer left town with all the church’s money, and the pastor wasn’t paid for 6 months—Grandma said they had to get along on donations of chickens and rabbits and garden vegetables that the parishioners brought them, making dresses and shirts of flour sacks.

“But God was always faithful to us,” she told me later, sitting in her rocking chair in her little living room, nodding and rocking; “He was ALWAYS faithful.  I wasn’t afraid.  I knew He would be faithful.” 

There are more stories—oh, my, SO many stories!  Obviously, my mother grew up and married, had kids—me and my brother and two sisters—but my grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack in 1953; he was 63 and Grandma only 58.  Then Mom’s brother –Grandma’s only son—was tragically drowned as a young man in 1958, and the following year Grandma was stricken with terrible headaches.  This was before MRI’s and CT scans, you understand, but the doctor said he was pretty sure she had a brain tumor.  It turned out to be a benign tumor, but the surgery itself left Grandma disabled for the rest of her life—she had very little balance, and her right eye, hand, and leg were all partially paralyzed.   

Wow.  That’s a lot to live through, isn’t it?  Hardship, tragedy, poverty, grief, heartbreak, loneliness….

Why am I telling you this long and sad story?  Because it isn’t HOPELESS.  The story ends well—my Grandma Roos is in heaven, rejoicing with her Savior, whom she loved and served.  

Grandma lived next door to me all of my growing-up years; after Grandpa died and she had her surgery, Dad built Grandma a house next to ours.  So I knew her well.  I spent hours with her as a child, playing Scrabble, playing Chinese Checkers, listening to her stories.  And the theme of those stories—always, ALWAYS the theme of those stories:

DO NOT FEAR.  GOD IS FAITHFUL.  “I was never afraid,” Grandma assured me, “because I always knew that God is faithful.”  There were hard times, yes, and grief and struggle.  “But the Lord has always been faithful to me,” she would say, nodding her head and rocking just a bit in that maple rocking chair. And she would quote her favorite Psalm: ‘I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?  My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.  He will not let your foot be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber.  Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.’ 

“I like that,” she would tell me, her eye glistening behind those thick tri-focal lenses.  “He will not slumber.  Yes, the Lord has always been faithful.  He has always been faithful to me.”  And she would nod again and put another Scrabble tile in its place on the board. 

If this little old lady had placed her faith—her sense of security and safety and happiness—in circumstances, in things “going as planned,” in everything going smoothly—she would not have been able to say that.  Things didn’t go particularly well much of the time.  Her parents and a brother died when Grandma was young.  She never got to go to China.  Grandpa and Grandma Roos were pretty poor during their lives—those churches were small and so were the salaries.  Their lives were hard. Grandpa Roos was not a famous preacher or writer; he was loved by his small congregations, but few people on the earth knew of him then or remember him now.  Fame and fortune were not theirs.  They lost loved ones.  Their baby daughter died.  Grandpa died suddenly while still fairly young; Uncle Maurice died tragically, and Grandma lived her last days crippled and nearly house-bound, dying in the end of liver cancer.  How did she not feel afraid?  How could she hold onto that faith, that steadfast faith?

Because her faith was not in circumstance, but in her Lord.  I never heard her say, “The Lord has showered me with pretty belongings and easy times.”  And I never ever heard her complain that He didn’t.  But I ALWAYS heard her say, “The Lord has been faithful to me.  I was never afraid because I knew He would be faithful. The Lord has always been faithful to me.”

Thank you, Grandma Roos, for this precious heritage of faith!