Seen any saints lately? You'll know them by their deeds
I have two theories about saints: that they are so rare as to be invisible, and that even if they were as common as Lincoln pennies, no one would notice them. When’s the last time you bent down to pick up a penny? Saints are so rare, in fact, we might not realize we’ve seen one until years later, too late to face the man or woman or child and mumble our thanks or admiration. This was my experience.
I once knew a saint, but at the time I had no clue, so I never stopped to thank her. If you’re of a certain age and you grew up in Montgomery in the '50s and '60s, you might have known her, too.
Martha Crystal Myers was a friend of mine in junior high and high school, and then I lost touch with her for nearly 40 years. On the last day of 2002, I woke up to the news that she had been murdered — martyred, really — in Yemen where she had been an obstetrician-gynecologist for more than 25 years. As I watched television news, I learned that the day before, Dec. 30, a local man had walked into Yemen’s Jibla Baptist Hospital cradling a handgun wrapped in a shawl as if it were a baby. This was the man who killed Martha, along with two other hospital administrators, and wounded another. He was angry. His wife had told him that she preferred the compassionate care of Dr. Myers to her native doctors.
During the time I knew Martha, at Dalraida Baptist Church, at Goodwyn Junior High, and at Robert E. Lee High where she and I were members of the Class of 1963, she was just a slim, brown-haired girl of medium height. As for her eyes, I’d have to plead the fifth like Elton John when he sang, “I’ve forgotten if they’re green or they’re blue.” They might even have been brown.
Unlike me, the mothers of Yemen seemed to have recognized Martha’s saintly qualities very quickly. They loved her for examining them and providing medical treatment when male doctors could not or would not. They told of the times she slept under the bed of an ill child rather than leave the child without medical care. Dr. Martha treated young girls whose families had shunned them after they were “bought” as brides. Once when she stopped to buy gas for the Land Cruiser that took her out to the rural poor to whom she dispensed medications and gave immunizations, she was kidnapped. She managed to escape and later visited her kidnappers in prison, telling them God loved them. Not long before her death, Martha asked her father to send her the last money from her savings account because she knew a young man in need of funds for a kidney transplant.
Martha did not give me lifesaving medical care or deliver my babies, but she was one of the strongest influences in my life. When I first met Martha at church, she and I were around 10 years old, and I would bet she made the introductions because I was a shy mouse of a girl then. Maybe she noticed my childish soprano when we sang hymns or that I had a knack for memorization. She was the one who encouraged me to join the choir and Girls Auxiliary, or GAs, as the Southern Baptist Convention called their Bible-study club for middle school and high school girls. One day at Goodwyn Junior High when we were all passing around report cards, Martha studied mine and said, “You know, Linda, with just a little more work, you could make the Honor Roll.” I’d never thought of trying for honor roll before, and no one else had ever told me that I could do it, but I decided to try. Before too long, I did make Honor Roll, and I went on to college. If saints excel in giving encouragement, then Martha was a saint.
Martha influenced my behavior toward others, too. In the late 1950s in my group of friends in east Montgomery, cutting each other was in vogue, but not with knives or razors. This kind of cutting used words. Sarcasm has probably always been the first resort of the marginalized — and who feels more unfairly left out in the margins than teenagers? I remember the rush that came with hurling the perfect barb at someone, and the sting when barbs came back at me. I was in the early stages of wondering if the rush was worth the sting when Martha approached me and said something like, “Isn’t it better to be kind to someone than to tear them down?” I took her words to heart. Over the years, Martha’s call for me to react with kindness has helped save — and even improved — many of my personal relationships.
I wish — oh, Lord, I wish — I could say that I reached out to Martha at some point since high school — by phone, by mail, by email — to thank her for caring enough to influence me. If this were a movie script, the confession would make a good ending. But it didn’t happen that way. Yet hardly a week goes by that Martha doesn’t come to my mind. If Martha had lived past the age of 57, who knows how many more babies she could have delivered or how many more lives she could have saved? I can’t deliver babies or save anyone’s life, but I can offer encouragement and kindness and love. Martha showed me how.
Linda Fisher, a resident of Prattville, is a novelist, a retired public-school teacher, and the former owner of a small business, Chocodelphia.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Seen any saints lately? You'll know them by their deeds
