100 Years

Hello everyone.  Praise the Lord!

After two weeks away from volunteering at our hospice because of the Christmas holiday, it felt good to be back volunteering.  I made some coffee in the break room and checked-in with the nurses.

I visited with an elderly African-American lady who was battling throat cancer!  She could not speak, but we smiled at each other.  Sometimes words are not necessary.  She was watching television, and so I just sat down next to her and watched with her for about thirty minutes.  She seemed very happy that I was with her.  I stayed until she received some visitors, then I politely excused myself.

I then went to another room and sat with a lady that was one-hundred-year-old!  Her name was Sally and she was a very sweet lady.  She had been suffering from dementia, but it was off and on again.  Today it was off and she was very sharp.  

I asked her about her childhood and up bring.  She said that she was born in the year nineteen-eleven in Sioux City, Iowa.  The airplane had just been invented four years prior!  She had seen a lot of history in her life!

She was a young sixteen-year-old girl and the oldest of seven children when her father was killed in a farming accident.  With her mother becoming a widow and having seven children to raise, she moved the whole family to Los Angeles, California.  It was a big move to make, especially back in those days, but she had family there who could help her.

The family was very poor and her mother worked long hours in a factory, and would come home and take care of her children.  Sally was sixteen and she also worked a job after school to help her mother. 

Because they were poor, they never had anything.  On Christmas holiday there was never any gifts.  They would just be together and have a nice meal.  All of the money went for room and board, and food and clothes.

One Christmas evening after the kids were put to bed, her mother was sitting knitting socks.  Sally had just cleaned up the kitchen.  Her mother looked up and with tears in her eye’s apologized for not supplying gifts for her. 

Sally, heart-struck, told her mother that it was okay.  I told my mother that the family was all together for Christmas, and that was the greatest gift!  I told my mother that every day that she went to work, that was the daily gift to our family!  They both hugged each other and had a good cry together!

A few years later, Sally fell in love with a young butcher.  They moved to Houston, Texas to open their own butcher shop.  Sally lived there the rest of her life.  But she never forgot that one Christmas evening with her mother! 

Do you know of someone who is a hundred years old or more?  Can you tell me about it in the comments section?

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Brother Roop
Dec 31, 2011

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www.billroopministries.com

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Apostolic Theological Seminary
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