A Woman Who Waited for the Lord God
By Ralph Wood
[This is a eulogy written by Ralph Wood for his mother, Eunice Walker Wood, December 22, 1908-April 11, 1993. Dr. Wood is University Professor at Baylor.]
Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord!
Lord, hear my voice!
Let thy ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!
If thou, O Lord, shouldst mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen
for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is stedfast love,
and with him is plenteous redemption. (Psalm 130)
Eunice Walker Wood was a woman who waited for the Lord God, who cried out of the depths to Him, who received his plenteous redemption. From childhood to old age, she found her hope in the Christ who does not mark our iniquities, but who judges us with a love so steadfast that nothing, not even death, can separate us from it.
Early in her life Eunice Wood was singled out for a special destiny, even a holy calling. Ten-year old Eunice was attending the one-room, one-teacher Walker School hidden deep in the worn-out cotton fields of East Texas. Sarah Huggins, the teacher, asked Eunice to stay after books one day. Miss Huggins made a life-turning remark to her pupil: "Eunice," she said, "you are a good girl who earns good marks and who would make a good teacher." From that moment, Eunice confessed, she knew that she was called to make something good of her life-not to get pregnant, not to quit school, not to repeat the dreary pattern followed by many other farm girls. Eunice knew that she must be willing to wait for the better things that God wanted for her, even when there was little hope for better things.
The Walkers were sharecroppers. They moved from one small Cass County community to another in search of a more prosperous life: from Zion Hill to Lewis to O`Farrell,, back to Zion Hill, thence to New Colony and Lanier and Almira. Eunice faithfully attended the rural schools in all of these places. But they stayed in session only six months of the year, and they extended through only the seventh grade. How could she hope to become a teacher when her schooling was so limited?
A perceptive aunt spotted Eunice`s talent. She urged her niece to get an education, if only to provide for her parents when they grew old. Otherwise, the aunt said, they will be sent to the County Farm-to the poor house-to live with the other indigents. Thus did her aunt and uncle, Emma and Willard Walker, invite Eunice to live with them and their twin daughters, Irene and Alene, in the county seat town of Linden and to attend the Linden High School. There Eunice received three indispensable years of education. They enabled her to enter the sub-college at Commerce, to earn her high school degree, and thus to be issued a temporary teaching certificate.
As a raw youth of 18 Eunice began to realize her dream of becoming a teacher. Yet she never had the money to live in the dormitory as a long7term student at East Texas State Teachers College. Instead, she earned her degrees by attending summer sessions, at least a dozen of them, after teaching all year at rural schools in places like Almira and Bear Creek. Her grades were always excellent. In fact, someone teased her future husband, who was also teaching at Almira, that he was preparing to marry a woman who had never made a B. "So what," Cecil Wood replied, "neither have I!"
Early in life Eunice had heard the summons to excellence from her own parents. Her father, Jim Walker, wanted to be a preacher or a teacher rather than a farmer. Alas, he had little formal education. As a man who loved books and numbers far more than cotton and money, he raised little of the former and earned little of the latter. Instead, he spent much of his time reading the Bible. Often he would have his four daughters read it responsively with him. And then he would end with prayer. Though he was a passive man who let the world roll over him, Jim Walker made one firm act of protest against the hard life of an itinerant farmer: he refused to teach his daughters how to plow.
Virtually blind from a childhood illness, Eunice`s mother Maudie Lummus Walker was never sent to school. But she would ask her four daughters to read the Bible to her. She committed many Scripture verses to memory, and she could quote and comment wisely upon them even in her old age. Despite her near blindness, Maudie became an accomplished seamstress. Having learned by her mother`s example, Eunice spent most of her last years sewing. Perhaps Eunice was also remembering her own mother when, as an English teacher, she required her students to recite Milton`s sonnet on his blindness. She was especially moved by Milton`s declaration that "They also serve who only stand and wait."
It was not only at home but also at the Zion Hill Baptist Church that Eunice learned what it means to wait expectantly for the Lord God and to serve Him in both life-and death. Preachers named Hamilton and Chambers and Hollingsworth proclaimed to her the Gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. She heard and heeded this Word, and she was baptized in a nearby creek called Jim`s Bayou. Eunice lived out her Christian faith in deeds far more than words. She knew that she was not saved by her good works, but she knew most certainly that she was saved for good works.
Eunice was a mere teenager when she volunteered to nurse her Walker grandparents on their deathbeds during two terribly hot Augusts in 1924 and 1925. Three years later, as an unmarried schoolteacher barely twenty years old, she moved her parents into her house at Almira, stretching her slender salary to cover their rent and groceries. Decades later she was to show the same care for her dying mother-in-law, Donie Wood, and for her widowed sister Keron when her life took a downward turn. The countless Gospel songs and sermons that Eunice had heard in her youth thus bore rich fruit in her maturity. They taught her that to wait for the Lord God is to live generously: not to save but to lose her life, not to gain it but to give it gladly away for Christ and his Gospel.
Even in her marriage Eunice knew what it meant to wait. She ended an initial engagement in order to spend her life with a fiery fellow-teacher named Cecil Wood. His spirit was as wild and willful as hers was gentle and gracious. Thus did they complement each other`s gifts, as couples often do. To the surprise of almost everyone, Eunice even took up horseback-riding in her fifties to accommodate her husband`s love of the outdoor life. Yet photographs reveal that she made a rather unconvincing equestrian. Cecil and Eunice found their true common life, instead, as a splendid team of teachers who shaped their students ever so greatly for the good.
From 1947 until 1959, Eunice Wood was the sole English teacher for grades 7 through 12 at the tiny Kildare School eight miles southeast of Linden. Beyond her teaching duties, she also made annual trips with the senior class, got out the school yearbook, and directed the annual queen`s coronation: a pomp-filled pageant that enabled country folk to strut like royalty for an evening. During these dozen years her life was deeply intertwined with students named Holland and Heard, Dooley and Cromer, Wiggins and Whatley, Echols and Rosser and Mott.
These Kildare youths were tough. To the end of her life Eunice vividly recalled the day when the school principal attempted to call down a ruffian who had been misbehaving. This young thug grabbed the man by his shirt collar and twisted it tightly. Getting right in the terrified principal`s face, he declared: "Don`t you ever again raise your voice to me, cowboy!" The poor man resigned after one year at Kildare, as did many others. Eunice Wood never faced such threats. Even the students who despised her strict discipline respected her sterling integrity. They knew that she stood for excellence and uprightness. One of them conveyed this truth to me only recently. Eunice had reprimanded him for his bad conduct. Walking off nonchalantly as if nothing serious had happened, he looked back to discover that his teacher was weeping. Now a 60year old man, he confessed that this event was a major turning point in his life. There he saw that he had injured an innocent soul, that he had breached a moral boundary, and that he would never violate such sacred limits again.
Eunice Wood inspired a similar reverence in her son. His mother was a woman of such stedfast character, such moral and spiritual excellence, that he sought to honor her in his own living. It was sheer respect for his mother and father–not any dubious goodness of his own–that enabled him to avoid many of the troubles that plague young people. His parents taught him the Good News that we are not our own maker, that we have been bought at the high cost of the Cross, that we are both created and redeemed to live in gratitude to God and in service of others. The son thus gladly confesses that his calling to Christian ministry was enabled to no small extent by his mother`s gracious life.
It was a calling to style no less than to substance. Eunice Wood would never let her son say "had took" or "it don`t" or "we was." For while she taught Longfellow and Dickens and Edna St. Vincent Millay, her first love was for English grammar. Even in her addled state during her last weeks, you could not pass her muster if you said that you were going to lay down. Chickens lay eggs, she liked to say, but people lie down for a nap today, even as they lay down for one yesterday. It pained her that even college professors can be heard to say, "Just between you and I." Eunice knew that to honor Him who is the Word made flesh is to use English words rightly and well.
Her pilgrim journey through the highways and hedges of the world took a stark turn when she lost her dear Cecil to a sudden stroke in 1960. When her mother died the following year, Eunice faced the darkest days of her life. Widowed and alone at age 53, she cried with the Psalmist "out of the depths." She pled for God to give her a new life, a real reason to live. The Lord heard her supplication. He gave her a plenteous redemption-not in some surprising new place, but in a renewed conviction that she belonged exactly where she was: in the classroom and in the church. Her students were her lifeline.
After forty years of teaching English, Eunice Wood answered yet another call. She went back to school to learn the so-called new math and to prepare for teaching algebra and geometry at the recently consolidated Linden-Kildare High School. The last half-dozen years in the math classroom were among the happiest of her career. Her algebra students won academic prizes–and not only because she was a good teacher, but also because she did not suffer fools gladly. One day she spied a distracted student staring out the window. Eunice announced to the class that one thing only would justify such gazing through the glass: only if there were pink elephants turning backward somersaults on the lawn. She also liked to joke with her geometry students that if pr2 then surely cornbread are round.
Eunice`s generosity was manifest yet again when W. A. Parker, her school superintendent, called her out of retirement. He asked her to teach a final term in the local Negro school after integration had been mandated by the federal courts. Mr. Parker knew that Eunice Wood was no racist, that she would treat her black students fairly, and that she would thus work at a school which other white teachers had declined to enter. It was one of the most difficult years of her life. Yet she refused to believe that true education is "For Whites Only," as the courthouse restrooms and drinking fountains once said.
When she quit the classroom for the final time in 1974, Eunice confessed that there was one thing she never missed: the burdensome task of grading exams. Her dozen years of retirement in Linden were happy days indeed. She was able to spend time with her dear sisters Jewel and Keron and Oleta, as well as her dear sisters-in-law Nora Dudley and Polly Schiemann. And how dearly she loved her Linden friends who belonged to her Sunday School class, who shared her taste for fried catfish, and who joined her in playing "42"–the Texas domino game whose pleasures the great world has yet to learn.
The winding road of Eunice Wood`s life rounded its last bend in 1985. Leaving behind her home of 41 years plus a lifetime accumulation of friends, she moved a thousand miles away to North Carolina. Though she could have pitied herself at so great a loss, she did not. She was willing to walk with patience and cheer this final lap of her life. In Winston-Salem she made many new friends but no enemies at all. She drew close to her family, especially her grandchildren. And she taught us all the meaning of prayer. At the end, when her hands were finally stilled from sewing and her eyes too blind to read, she kept alive the most important thing: she held us up hourly to the mercy of God.
Eunice Wood was prepared to meet the Author and Finisher of her faith. Though she did not want to die alone, she had no fear of death. She had put her trust in the Christ who has robbed death of its sting and the grave of its victory. This deep belief made her a teacher to the very end. Her last lesson was perhaps the best of all: she taught us how to grow old generously and how to die graciously. The way she ended her life summed up the whole of it. Its meaning is figured nicely in the last stanza of her favorite poem:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
About the roads that diverge into final destinies, Eunice Wood knew even more than Robert Frost. She lived and died in the hope, not that she would sigh away the ages in a vague "somewhere," but that she would forever sing the wondrous Story and shout the victory of God`s glory. She began her journey to this Paradise of praise and thanksgiving 84 years ago in the piney woods of East Texas. There the paths of her life soon diverged. God called her to wait for Him, to take the road less traveled, to follow the Way that makes all the difference. Her earthly pilgrimage ended at the hour of Christ`s own triumph, at the dawning of Easter 1993, when she crossed over death`s deep river into Campground. Now her traveling days are over. Now she`s Home. Amen.
