On an evening at Hunter's Glen Baptist Church, friends, colleagues, and former staff gathered to honor a woman who once asked her board to deliver its reports in Dr. Seuss rhyme, and held one of those meetings on a retired school bus recently renovated and outfitted to be the “Change Bus,” sharing WorldCrafts® across Texas to help support artisans around the world.
Sandy Wisdom-Martin's retirement, WMU of Texas Executive Director Tamiko Jones said, is "not the closing of the book but rather a commencement."
The stories came quickly. Carolyn Porterfield, who has known Sandy since their days on the Arkansas staff, remembered a woman who married at a GA camp and nearly served Little Debbie cakes at the reception. She remembered Sandy's creative golf game (one club, the driver, for every shot) and a vision that got Texas women moving. That vision became the Women's Build, now in its sixteenth year, a rolling WorldCrafts store made from an old school bus, and Suds of Love, a mobile laundry ministry for disaster survivors.
Just as vivid was Sandy's care. Carolyn recalled Sandy arriving at her door with a fleece blanket before surgery, rallying the staff through every treatment, and appearing at her father's funeral. Liz Encina, now executive director of Kentucky WMU, told a similar story. Sandy once called her into the office and asked a simple question about her future that changed her path. When Liz's father died, "who was there? Sandy."
Carol Childress described a leader shaped for a season of disruptive change, one who chose to be "drawn into the future" by God's vision rather than driven by fear. Jackie Faughn summed up Sandy's career in four words, "Meeting needs to share Jesus," and offered an acrostic of her name: Storyteller, Authentic, Nurturer, Devoted, and Yare, meaning ready, nimble, and prepared.
Then Sandy took the microphone, with no manuscript. She spoke of growing up as the daughter of a coal miner and foundry worker, in a basement home at the end of a dirt road, with no indoor bathroom. No one at school mentioned college, so she joined the National Guard to find a way.
"The tables I've sat at are not for people like me," she said, "except for the grace of God."
She laughed about landing in Texas through a joke she made to Randel Everett, and about the reporter who admitted he hadn't believed her when she said a group of women would build a house in one week. She closed with a story of a young woman at her first missionary appointment service, hearing Dr. Keith Parks tell of a beggar who gave a king a single grain of corn and later found a grain of gold in his bag, wishing he had given his all.
"I haven't had much to give in my life," Sandy said, "but I wanted to give it all because of what the people in this room and elsewhere taught me."
Her Texas family sent her off with a Texas Rose charm in a James Avery box, and a prayer that this is "not the end, but the beginning of the next step."
Click HERE to view photo highlights from Sandy's Celebration.
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This article was drafted with assistance from Gemini, using the author's original transcript and notes, and then edited by our editorial team.