Faithful servant sets fine example

My mother-in-law passed away on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It was unexpected. On the other hand, she was a frail, little woman in her 80s, and stuff started breaking down. Ruth Martinez will be greatly missed.

Ruth was a woman of faith. Her standard greeting was not, “Hey! How’s it going?” but rather, “Praise the Lord!” To the end, she clung to a promise she knew she had received from her God, that all of her children would enter into his kingdom. She prayed for each of them constantly, and became a servant to them, who never stopped working until health betrayed her.

The void she leaves behind is enormous.

I am led to write about her in this column as a way of acknowledging the grace of God in my own life, as he funneled it to me through my mother-in-law. You could make the case that I might not have come to faith in Jesus Christ at all if it had not been for her very simple, and sometimes sneaky, witness.

Her daughter, Joyce, was beguiled by my many charms as a teenager, and we were married while I was in the Navy. On occasional opportunities to come home, we stayed at Ruth’s house. Around the dinner table, where I was preoccupied with shoveling in gigantic amounts of the best cooking I’ve ever experienced, Ruth would find ways of nudging the conversation to spiritual topics.

She did this in a manner that avoided offending my sinful pride. Rather than hit me with Bible citations out of the blue, she’d simply ask me what I thought about this or that. Then she would sit there and patiently listen to me expound my ignorant theories until I was tapped out. She would finally ask, “Do you know what the Scripture says about that?”

Of course, I had no clue. But I had just spent long minutes acting like I was some fountain of insight, so what could it hurt me to hear what the Bible said? Well, as it turns out, it did more than hurt me. It killed me, crucified me with Christ. Then it raised me with him to new life.

It didn’t do this right away, or with trumpet blasts and heavenly fanfare. It happened after years, and many conversations at that dinner table.

I found out later that Ruth, sneaky evangelist that she was, would set books around her house, books with titles she thought I might find interesting. She had heard I was a reader, so she made her home a spiritual minefield in anticipation of our visits, praying that one of these books would explode in my hands and send me fleeing to Jesus for triage and healing.

God answered that prayer, honoring her guerrilla warfare tactic. One of those books, I still credit as the major spur that made me realize I had to quit playing, and get serious about my faith.

I hope you can take something away from the example of Ruth Martinez. You don’t have to be flashy. You don’t have to be Billy Graham, or some dynamic preacher. You just have to be faithful where you are, with what you have.

Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at:

[email protected]