Women wield power with faith in God

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The voices rose as one even while deep Southern accents, mostly singing off-key, punctuated the chorus, with the ramshackle piano twanging along.

“Simple” people gathered that hot, sticky afternoon in the tiny country church to celebrate the life and legacy of a mighty woman.

Alice Jane Earnest Pitts was my great-grandmother and the most godly, faithful woman I ever knew. I still vividly remember her funeral, even though it was some 33 years ago when I drove down that dusty dirt road to attend the service.

What I recall most about that day are the women. Like my great-grandmother, they embodied strength and resolve while maintaining a demeanor of deference and service to others. They wore hand-sewn, nondescript, shapeless dresses and the ugliest shoes I ever saw. But they did not need fancy adornment — their deep abiding faith, which showed through in warm smiles and twinkling eyes, made them radiant and oh, so very beautiful.

My great-grandma Pitts, or “MawMaw” as we called her, was a powerful woman. Not because she held political office or was a CEO or a lawyer or a scientist, since she was none of those things. She was powerful because she had an unshakable faith in God, because she was a warrior of prayer, because she wielded the mighty sword of the Gospel of Christ.

Pronouncements that shook heaven and earth regularly fell from her lips in prayer and conversation. She spoke Scripture with ease, and her gentle smile and twinkling eyes — those ever-twinkling eyes — bathed the room in light even while she often sat silent in her older years.

MawMaw’s life was tough and largely one of extreme poverty. Born in 1895 in Gadsden County, Florida, still one of the poorest areas of the nation, her family lived crowded and hot in little more than a shack. When her mother was stricken with severe mental illness, little Alice Jane, at only 8 or 9 years old, took over as the primary caregiver to her seven siblings. She began managing the house, cleaning, washing, cooking and having to be grown-up while her dad worked long hours in the fields. She was so young and small that she had to stand on a chair beside the stove to stir the pot.

At age 16, she married and went from the frying pan into the fire. Her husband was an abusive, hateful, racist drunk who was proud that he was a thug and member of the KKK. Mercifully, he ran out on young Alice Jane, but not before she had several of her own little ones to care for.

I’m not sure how or where, but sometime during her early years MawMaw met Jesus. And in Him she found an abundance of strength.

Despite her continuous dismal earthly circumstances, she came to live regally in her spirit as a child of the King of Kings. Her 89 years of life remain a glowing testimony that the greatest influence and power come not through accomplishments but through faith, as evidenced in how she served and loved others. MawMaw demonstrated that there is no greater love or strength than that which comes through Christ.

After MawMaw’s inspiring funeral service, I returned to college with a renewed understanding of the power of faith and of pure love. My great-grandmother died with calluses on her bony knees, formed by nightly kneeling in prayer at her bedside on uneven, rough wooden floor planks.

In those dark years of her marriage, she prayed constantly for her husband. She saw those prayers answered as he one day returned and was miraculously transformed by the power of Christ into a kind, gentle man. MawMaw continued to pray each night and throughout the day for her children, then for her grandchildren, then for her great-grandchildren, and for the generations to come that she would never know.

As the branches of her family continue to spread out like a great oak tree, we each still carry with us the power of those prayers, even when we fail to remember them. Why? Because God remembers them. And the faith that MawMaw embodied continues to carry the generations like an invisible gale-force wind.

As we celebrate Women’s History Month, rightly heralding the many accomplished women who broke barriers in their fields and rose to the top, I am so very grateful for the modest woman who created the immovable foundation of faith upon which I stand.

Thank you, MawMaw. Thank you so very much.

• Rebecca Hagelin can be reached at rebecca@rebeccahagelin.com.