Once in a while, even reporters need a glimpse of the light.
There’s not much beautiful orthodoxy on the God-beat these days. The headlines are dominated by lawsuits, affairs, and seemingly endless conflicts, many of them between believers of different stripes. These are troubling times for those who write about matters of faith, says Laurie Goodstein, a national religion reporter for The New York Times.
“Every day I wake up and I say, is there anything we can do?” she told members of the Religion Newswriters Association recently. “. . . There are days when I feel despair about the news and the place of religion in it.”
Yet sometimes still, we are surprised by hope. Take the case of Miss Barbour “Bobbie” Wright.
For 30 years, Miss Bobbie stood outside the doors of Hillview Baptist Church, a small congregation south of Nashville, and waited for a miracle. She was there in the early 1980s, when the Hillview held its first service with 7 people in a tent on a snowy Easter Sunday. And she was there a year ago, on the day that Hillview Baptist met for the last time. All along, Miss Bobbie hoped and prayed the church would one day be filled to overflowing.
But Hillview, which once had as many as 100 people, had dwindled to a congregation of 14. Last spring, they voted to merge with Conduit Church, a relatively new congregation meeting in a nearby school. Conduit had people but no building. Hillview Baptist had few people and a building. It seemed like a perfect match.
Still, Miss Bobbie said that God told her to vote against the merger. The final vote was 13 to 1. The merger went forward. And then she almost walked away.
“This is when I’m going to leave,” she told her former pastor after the vote.
But she came back for the next Sunday and saw the church filled for worship.
“You can’t describe what it would be like when you see these people walking in through the door,” she said recently. “That’s what you had dreamed for, but you never thought you’d ever see your dream come true.”
For churches like Hillview, a merger can be a chance for rebirth—to see ministry flourish after years of struggling. Yet grief continues after a church closes down. And the work of faithful believers like Miss Bobbie is easily forgotten.
It turns out that quitting isn’t really Miss Bobbie’s style. And she’s not easily forgotten.
After that first service, the newly-merged congregation held a meet-and-greet session. But there wasn’t much meeting or greeting going on at first. The older members of Hillview sat at one table, set apart from the newcomers.
So Miss Bobbie got up and went from table to table, introducing herself.
“I thought if God wants us to be together, this is no way to start off,” she said.
The next Sunday she took up her post at the front door, and she’s been there for two services every Sunday since. Among the people she greeted were two new friends: Sue Mohr, 54, and Kerry Stewart, 45. The three hit it off and began to hang out together.
“We’re the ladies who do lunch,” says Mohr, who works as a marketing director for a Christian ministry.
Little by little, Stewart and Mohr learned Miss Bobbie’s story. How she quit school at 15 to get married and started working full-time. How for the next 67 years, she worked as many as three jobs as at time, trying to keep her family’s head above water while raising three children and nursing her beloved husband, Jimmy, through 56 surgeries in their 59 years of marriage. How she and a small group of friends scrimped and saved to buy a small piece of land to start Hillview Baptist, doing much of the work on the church themselves.
How, in all those years, she never took a real vacation.
“You get so busy doing what you have to do, that there’s no time to do what you want to do,” said Bobbie, who still runs a heavy equipment repair shop in Nashville from her modest home in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
These days, it’s harder for her to keep up. Miss Bobbie beat cancer once. Now it is back. She says she’s done with surgeries and treatments (she once left the hospital after major surgery and went to work before going home).
“I want my time where I can enjoy it and be myself,” she said. “I’d rather have two weeks or two minutes than to be doped up and have ten years.”
Recently, her new friends decided to take Miss Bobbie on a little trip.
The inspiration for the trip came after a Wednesday Bible study. A group leader asked an icebreaker question: Which do you like better, the beach or the mountains?
“What difference does it make?” Miss Bobbie told the group. “I’ve never been to either.”
Not long afterward, Mohr and Stewart decided to try and get Miss Bobbie to the beach.
“We don’t look at Miss Bobbie as an older lady,” said Mohr. “She’s still a girl who has dreams and desires, and life’s not done. The beach is still there and she’s still here. Why not make it happen?”
They posted a short story about Miss Bobbie at GiveForward.com with a goal of raising $2,800 to give her the time of her life.
“We want to help Miss Bobbie ‘play,’” wrote Mohr and Stewart. “Just for a couple of days. To experience the vast beauty of one of God’s creations. To dip her toes in the salt water and breathe in the fresh sea air. To help her just relax for a bit and forget her daily tasks. To show her that her Father God cares for this daughter and has seen her work tirelessly for his Kingdom.”
So far, they’ve raised $3,840. The hardest part of the project was convincing Miss Bobbie to go along.
“I said no at first,” she said.
That’s not exactly true, according to her friends.
“What she actually said was, ‘I need to save my own money. I won’t do this with charity,’” said Mohr.
When news came in about how much money had been raised, Miss Bobbie was overwhelmed. She dropped her head and said, “I don’t deserve this.”
“I didn’t do anything for it,” she said. “What I did, I did for love, for God. Man, he’s seen me through some bad times, and how anybody can get by or get through without knowing him is beyond me. The little I’ve done is so very little.”
Mohr asked her friend to reconsider. Then she told Miss Bobbie a story.
Some years earlier, she’d been working on an end-of-year update for her nonprofit, which included a request for prayers and for funds. She knew of one donor who’d had a particularly rough year. So she sent an update but no request for funds. Not long afterwards, the woman appeared at Mohr’s door. She was beside herself. Susie, I’m very disappointed at you, she told Mohr. Then she handed Mohr a five dollar bill.
“Don’t ever take my blessing away,” the woman said.
“I told Bobbie that story, and we all cried, didn’t we?” she recalled, sitting in Miss Bobbie’s living room. “We all cried at this table, and I said, Miss Bobbie, you can’t take away the blessing of all these people.”
That was enough to change Miss Bobbie’s mind.
These days, when she has a few minutes to spare, she works on getting ready for the trip. She’s got a new beach blanket, some sand shoes, and even a new umbrella. There’s even talk that she might get her first bikini.
She’s also bringing along her cell phone. Even though she’ll be at the beach, Miss Bobbie doesn’t want the guys at her shop to know she’s gone.
“I’m not letting those boys know that I’m on vacation,” she told her friends. “The cat’s away, mouse can play. I don’t think so.”
A story of a few friends going to the beach doesn’t cancel all bad news out there. But it does remind me that Miss Bobbie and her friends are not alone. There are tens of thousands of people like them. They don’t make headlines, but they live out their faith with quiet grace and determination, filling their days with small acts of kindness that remind us of the goodness of God.
Bob Smietana is senior news editor at Christianity Today.
