Marta

“Pastor, I want to be baptized.”

I didn't think that was a good idea!

“Marta, Jesus knows the desires of your heart.  He knows that you want to be baptized.  He accepts that, and you don’t have to be baptized.  The thief on the cross beside Jesus would have been baptized if he could have, but he didn’t have the opportunity.  Jesus understood, and promised him a place in heaven.  Jesus reads your heart, too, Marta, and He will take you to heaven, even if you don’t get baptized.”

“Pastor,” Marta said to me with unusual power, “my faith is pushing me.  Please baptize me.” 

Marta had never attended our meetings, but she had heard every word I had said.  Her house was close to the field where we were holding the evangelistic series, and she could easily hear my preaching over the loudspeakers.  The students who were doing door-to-door visitation for the meetings had told me about her, and asked me to visit her when I could. 

As soon as I walked into the dark and smoky mud hut where Marta was living with her sister, I knew that she would not be recovering from this disease.  Marta was one of the millions in Africa who is infected with the AIDS virus.  She lay on the floor, separated from the hard clay by a thin layer of grass straw and a thin sheet.  She was covered with a blanket, but she looked cold and miserable.  At one time, as the coughing from her secondary illness racked her body, her involuntary thrashing pulled off her tattered blanket, and under it I saw a body like I had only seen in National Geographic articles about famine-stricken people.  At one point I saw her medical journal, in which some doctor had nearly-illegibly scribbled the letters H-I-V on the final page with writing.  After that, no medical personnel cared to help her, and she was left to her own.  She was a wasted and withered woman who teetered on the brink of the grave.  She couldn’t move without assistance, and sometimes I thought she might die while I was watching. 

But she didn’t die while I was there.  She didn’t die during the meetings, and after I had spoken about baptism, she sent for me.  She wanted to be baptized, and nothing could dissuade her.  I told her that the decision was not mine, since I was not really a pastor.  I would ask the real pastor about it when he came for the baptism.

As the pastor and I visited with Marta, he repeated what I had already told her.  He gently explained to this sick and dying woman that Jesus could see her heart, and in her case, baptism was not a requirement for salvation.  He talked about the thief on the cross, and told Marta that she was in a similar situation and would be accepted into heaven without being baptized.  But again, she could not be convinced.

“Pastor, my heart is made up.  I am ready.  Please baptize me.” 

With that, she started to pull back her blanket.  I feared seeing her emaciated body once again, and started to turn away when I saw that Marta was clothed in a beautiful red dress!  How could we refuse water, that she should be baptized?

We carried Marta to the car, and while the others walked to the river, we gently bumped along the dirt path.  We had to walk quite a ways past the furthest place we could get with the car to reach the river.  Beside where we stopped the car was a scum-covered pond.  It was decided to baptize Marta there!  I wanted to object, but knew that carrying her another kilometer to the river and then back again might be harder on her than the standing water would be, so I stayed silent. 

As a deacon went ahead to clear away the green, bubbly scum from the deepest part of the water hole, another deacon carried Marta into the water, with the pastor beside.  Two men held Marta and the pastor put his hands on her head as he pronounced the blessing over her. 

“Marta, because you have decided to follow Jesus with your whole heart, and because nothing could stop you from being baptized, I baptize you in the name....”

The deacons lowered her under the water.  We all knew that without their help to come up again, Marta would die in that water, unable to come to the surface on her own.

“Amen!,” yelled the onlooking group on the shore as she broke the surface in her dripping red dress.

We left Marta with a couple of friends beside the car while the rest of us went to the river.  There 11 more precious people signified their commitment to follow Jesus by entering into a watery grave.

We drove Marta back to her home, gave her a Bible after the final meeting, and fully expected to hear that she would be gone within a few days.  I was convinced that being in the cold, filthy water would hasten her death.  Well, I’ve been wrong before and since, that, too!

The next Sabbath, Marta walked to church on her own!  The distance was not long, but for a woman in her condition, it was a tremendous miracle!  The Lord granted her strength for a whole month, during which time she met each Sabbath with her new family in the humble little church that had been built during the evangelistic series. 

After that final month of greater strength and vitality, Marta’s condition rapidly deteriorated past what it had been before.  I visited her a few times in her last weeks of life.  I was sad to see her dying, but glad to know that she had found true life in Jesus, which nobody could take away from her. 

We buried Marta in a small casket.  I preached to those who gathered around the grave, pleading with them to make the same choice Marta had made.  She will rise again, to inherit a new body, healthy and incorruptible. 

Sometimes I wonder why we have chosen to be missionaries.  Why go to a foreign country, surrounded by darkness of every kind, battling sickness and poverty and ignorance, able to do so little in the face of overwhelming circumstances?  Then I remember Marta, and I stop wondering.  There are more like her, and by the grace of God, we will be channels through whom He can reach some of them.