Betty E. Hair-Strickland; Meet My Mother

My mother is the best mom in the world, bar none. You may think you have the best, but you are mistaken. And I guess that's ok and understandable. Wrong, but understandable. You are entitled to your wrong opinion.

Mom graduated from highschool in Collinsville, Ok in the early 1950's. She was the youngest of 5 siblings and was very close to her father. Although he died before she married my dad, and had me, I felt like I knew him because of how mom talked of him and of what he thought and said.
Some of the things that she told about him that I can remember include:

• The first time a business sent a monthly statement of outstanding debt, he felt like they were treating him like a dead beat. He took it to them and told him that his word was all they would ever need to get paid. I think they took him off the mailing list.
• He loved to sing and passed that on to my mother. All the Hair kids could sing and read shape notes. All of the old campmeeting/hymn type song books were written with shape notes. Anyone who could read and sing shape notes, could sing four part harmony if you could establish a starting note (Do, Re, Mi...) He sang in quartets with men, and with couples in the church. He sang duets with my mother, all through her growing up years.
• He loved it when justice prevailed... in any situation of life. He believed in balance.
• His favorite verse in the Bible was Proverbs 14:34 "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."
• He was a man of faith.
• He was a man of prayer.
• He was a tither and he believed that God would supernaturally bless and preserve a tither, i.e., that God will keep His Word.
• He grieved over the way some of his girls' husbands treated them, and avoided them because he feared what he might do to them. (to someone not raised with a sense of justice, that may seem terrible to you. But it is simple and fair to me. Don't hurt my family!)
• He would sit with his family on the porch of their farmhouse after a hard days work and talk and sing with them. It was in these settings that he built his love for God and his love for righteousness into my mom's lfe.

My mother is a leader in almost any crowd, and could have succeded as a professional in any field. What she chose to do, was to invest in us kids and to back my father's dreams.

That choice also enabled her to pursue one other great love. She loved missions and missionaries. She loved them, she prayed for them, she supported them with her own money and prayed for more money to give to them. She wrote to them, and she taught us kids to do all of that, too.

This was something she picked up from her mother. Even though they were very poor, her mother would set aside a few pennies per week from her grocery money and after six months, put a five dollar bill and mail it to a minister in India that she felt was doing a good work. I believe we will see ways in heaven in which gifts like that are like the little boy's lunch that Jesus used to feed a multitude.

Mom became a leader of the women's ministry of the churches we were part of and helped raise thousands of dollars in the 1960's, ten thousand's of dollars in the seventies, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 80's and 90's, and on into the present, to support them as they take life changing, body-healing, drug and alcohol delivering, and eternal destiny changing gospel to the nations.

She knows much about where the gospel is advancing and where it is struggling under terrible attacks of persecution and discouragement. She has watched the impact of the gospel on nations and held on to the life lines and been as much a part of that advance as the people on the front lines. And she taught her kids and hundreds of other people to do that, too.

My mom and dad are well known in the Assemblies of God Missions movement in Springfield and across the country for their giving, praying, and love for missions. I am so proud of them. I am proud of my mom. I am so very thankful.