The Journey: September 2024

Dear friends on the journey,

December 19 a year ago was a milestone for Jeanie and me on our life journey . . . the 70th anniversary of our wedding.

It should’ve been a day of joy with words and notes of congratulations coming from all over. Instead for me it was a very sad day. Jeanie was in medical care after serious pneumonia and other ailments. We actually thought she might leave us that day. And I could not feel the celebration.

At the end of the year, she had a stroke and lost forty percent of her vision. She made valiant efforts to keep going, but two months later on February 29 — of leap year — she had a second stroke. As I held her hand, she took a few short breaths and was gone.

“Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other,

even at the cost of pain. The dearer and richer our memories, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy. The beauties of the past are borne, not as a thorn in the flesh, but as a precious gift in themselves.”

– DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

 

I was bereft. For me that was a huge loss after seventy years of companionship. It still is strange to come home to an empty house — a single man for the first time in many years.

Magnify the Lord

Jeanie was my best friend, my greatest encourager, and my most loving critic. When I was writing something, I gave it to her to read and tell me what she thought. She’d almost invariably say, “Way too long!”

She wanted her memorial service to be simple and short and to lift high the cross. At the celebration of her life in our church, where she had worshiped for many years, I read the life verse we chose when we married. “Oh magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name together” (Psalm 34:3 KJV).

To magnify something is to make it legible, open, and larger. And Jeanie did that in so many ways, large and small in her life.

Her faith formed in her family on the dairy farm where her dad never took a day off. As Billy said, when she asked him what he remembers about their daddy, “I would rather hear him pray than any man on earth.” Her mother was a dedicated Bible student and teacher, and Jeanie learned to love the Bible in that home.

I still have her red Bible from when we first married. Every night before I go to sleep, I kneel at her bed and read one verse from the psalms that she marked in red and commit her afresh into the hands of the Lord. She adored her big brother Billy Frank and was so proud of his ministry. She was also such a vital part of my own.

Partners in Ministry

After thirty years of evangelism around the world, we were seeking to discern a new phase in our ministry. She had a dream that I would help identify and develop young leaders around the world. She even flew to Montreal, Canada, where I was preaching to share that vision with me. So, she was one who foresaw the future Leighton Ford Ministries!

Though not an evangelist herself, whenever we worked with these young leaders, she would say, “Don’t forget the evangelists!” She also had her own way of ministry which grew in part out of her first year at Wheaton College. Deeply moved by a series of chapel messages on the Holy Spirit, she developed a yearning and sense that the Spirit would come and live in her heart and speak through her voice.

For thirty years, she taught a Bible class for women meeting in the home of a doctor friend. This left a deep mark in many of their lives to this day.

She also magnified the Lord by her love in action. Jeanie often quoted Mother Teresa, whom she greatly admired: “We cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” And our children and grandchildren could testify to that.

“I always felt I’ve been seen.”

Life was not easy physically. At twelve years of age, she contracted polio, leaving weakness in her voice and difficulty swallowing. She chewed every bite about thirty or forty times. For years she received shots every ten weeks for a problem that made her eyelids shut. And in later years her hearing grew worse.

But as one of her friends said, because her voice was weak it made you want to listen. While her hearing was not good and talking, difficult, she became a great listener. Her vision was a challenge, but she could see people. Really see people. As one of our young leaders shared, “When I was with Jeanie. I always felt I’ve been seen.”

In her room I found a little card in her Bible with the words, “0 Jesus, I have promised to serve Thee to the end.” And she did.

The day of her stroke, she lunched with Kevin and enjoyed a conversation with Debbie. She told one of our mentoring leaders who came to visit, “I’m not hopeless. I think I’m making progress.” And she was trying hard. Our family found it difficult to see her trying to move around the house with her walker and find a path without bumping into things and trying to read all she could with her limited vision.

That night after dinner she got ready for bed and was sitting in her favorite chair in her lovely red robe when the second stroke came.

The next morning in the neurosurgery section of the hospital, I held her hand and watched as she took her final breaths. I closed her eyes with my hand and kissed her gently on her forehead. As one of the family said, on leap year, on leap day, she leaped into God’s presence.

In the words of Amy Carmichael, whose writings she so admired, she now is walking in the land of the living. She’s singing in the courts of God’s house. She’s serving in the fullness of joy. She’s rejoicing in the fullness of strength. She is serving without the distraction of the flesh in the freedom of the beauty of holiness. She has seen Him whom her soul loves. She is satisfied.

How magnificent. How magnificent.

And how thankful I am to have shared my life with this magnificent partner for seventy years.

“Will you consider helping kingdom leaders have deep relationships?”

• “Praying” daily for this ministry and the lives it reaches

• “Sharing” $100/month to help support our ongoing mentoring groups around the world

• “Investing” $2,000 to train and equip a leader for one of these mentoring groups

• “Giving” $5,000 to cover the first year of a new mentoring group

• “Providing” $15,000 for the three-year launch of a new group

• “Offering” $30,000 to cover the costs of a three-year church cohort for church planters, small churches, and churches in communities of color