Elizabeth’s 115th birthday
“But Ruth said, ‘Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’”—Ruth 1:16.
In August, we celebrated my mother-in-law’s 115th birthday. She was born in 1907 and died when she was 81. Our church tradition remembers people on the day of their death. However, our family still remembers those we love on their birthday. I think this is because we remember how we celebrated their birthdays, or maybe for some unknown reason, their love and presence seem closer on their birthday. My daughter and our youngest granddaughter are named after her. Elizabeth taught school, second grade, for over forty years. Her class was called Happy Town. I keep wondering if any of her thousands of students remember her. They do not know that August 30th is her birthday.
I tried to Google her to find out the exact day she died. But, unfortunately, I do not find her. There is no Google picture of her either. But my life was changed by knowing her, her acceptance of me from that first Christmas night, and her unconditional love for her grandchildren. There are so many saints like Elizabeth who changed people’s lives, many people’s lives, but are unknown to many. When Elizabeth died, I remember asking her in my prayers to watch over our children like a guardian angel, and I promised I would care for her husband she so loved, Bob, who was left behind. But, unfortunately, Elizabeth did a much better job watching over our children than I cared for her Bob.
Whenever our children were gone from home, I would pray to Elizabeth to be with them. I truly know she was, reminding them in some way that they were loved, keeping them out of harm’s way. I feel her presence today, telling me that all shall be well, all shall be well. I pray that others may remember and feel the Elizabeth who taught them about unconditional love in Happy Town.
Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/
Book Signing Today, St. Mark’s, Sunday, December 4th
After 8 and 10:30 service
Letters from my Grandfather: A History of Two Decades of Unconditional Love. by Joanna Seibert
A pediatric physician, an Episcopal deacon, a mother, grandmother, and author of ten other books on spirituality, shares letters from her grandfather after she left home. She responds to his letters in the present time, giving insight into two decades of unconditional love. $20 all proceeds go to Camp Mitchell.
Advance Praise. Letters from my Grandfather: A History of Two Decades of Unconditional Love.
I love this book, which began as a collection but became a correspondence. Dr. Joanna Seibert, a distinguished Professor (and practitioner) of Pediatric Radiology at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, had treasured a fourteen-year stream of letters from her grandfather and saved them all for more than sixty years. Lately, she decided to publish them, so that her own five grandchildren, among others, might someday enjoy and profit from them. Joanna’s re-reading of the letters now prompted fresh reflections, resulting in her writing a new reply for each epistle (there were sixty-six)! Both sets ––his to her back then, and hers to him this year–– are picturesque and full of detail in the lives that each of them has led. The yield to us is two biographies, his and hers: from one side, a World War I soldier, born in 1888, a Southern Baptist who made his living repairing watches in a one-man shop; and from the other, his beloved grandchild, a distinguished Arkansan on the leading cusp of the women’s movement, who taught and practiced medicine through a time of rapid change in that––and, it has often felt, in everything. He knew life in 1888, she in 2022. So here they are writing forth and back across that historical divide––and breathing gratitude and love on every page. Three times, Joanna says, in three different ways, “you saved my life.” But, above it all, “you taught me how to love.” She wants to pass it on.
The Rev. Dr. Christoph Keller, III