Gems of Life: Minister's wife, 89, publishes inspirational book

When Martha Grace Green was a little girl, she liked to pretend that everything in her life was alive and could talk.

She loved going to church and felt bad that her play clothes didn't get to go with her. So, when she came home from church dressed in her Sunday best, she would have her dress-up clothes tell her play clothes all about what they had seen and heard that day.

After she was grown up, there was the time that her husband, the Rev. G. Carl Green, announced that he planned to buy a dairy cow so that their 4-month-old son, Stephen, would have plenty of milk.

After Green protested to no success, she prayed to God, asking Him to change her husband's mind. When he came home with a "loaner" cow, she thought that God was ignoring her prayer. But, when the three gallons of milk the cow produced a day soon filled every pot, pitcher, jar and bowl in the house and displaced everything else in the refrigerator, her husband decided to return the cow, and she realized that God had indeed answered her prayer, just not the way she expected.

For many years, she mined such gems from her life for a column that she wrote for the newsletter at Piedmont Bible College (now Piedmont Baptist College).

Green will celebrate her 90th birthday and 67th wedding anniversary next month. In 1970, the Rev. Charles Stevens, the founder of Piedmont, invited the Greens to become teachers at the school. Green taught speech, or "expression" as it was then called.

One day in 1976, she said, she was sitting in a faculty meeting when God -- to her great surprise -- spoke to her, telling her to start writing a column for women for Daybreak. Although she gave up writing the column in the late 1980s, she still writes, and, earlier this year, she decided to compile a number of her columns plus some of her more-recent writing into a book called Pockets for My Apron.

Karolyn Chapman -- who is married to the Rev. Gary Chapman, a minister at Calvary Baptist Church -- wrote the forward. In it, she wrote that, before taking Green's class, she couldn't imagine speaking in front of people. Since then, she has given hundreds of speeches to thousands of women.

"That would have never been possible had it not been for Martha Grace," Chapman wrote. "I know her heart, and I know it is her desire that these ‘writings' inspire and encourage the reader to apply truth to life, and thus experience the freedom to reach one's potential for Christ."

Green had the books printed in a spiral-bound format to make it easier for people to photocopy parts that they want to pass along to others.

"I want it to be used," she said.

From noon to 1 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, Green will sign copies of Pockets at the Golden Apple store in the Sherwood Plaza shopping center.

Green has also spoken in public a good deal over the years.

"I've been giving readings since I was 5 years old," she said.

She has done presentations at parties for children, at church get-togethers and at civic-group meetings. Although she still occasionally gives one, she has cut back in recent years.

"It is so nice to go places and not be on the program," she said.

An unwavering faith in God has been at the center of Green's life ever since she was a child.

"The Lord has always been very special to me," she said. "I always wanted to be what the Lord wanted me to be."

As she grew up, she wanted to find a husband as steadfast in the Lord as she was. She met her future husband when both were students at Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham, Ala., and he was studying to be a minister.

During college, they were officially just friends.

"He called me JAF -- just a friend," she said. "The last day of college, we were walking in the park, and I think we both realized we were more than just friends."

He proposed before the day was out, and they married in 1942.

The Greens had two sons. They lost their younger son, Stan, in 1968 when he was 21. He was serving in Vietnam as a door gunner on a helicopter. When his helicopter was shot down, he died trying to rescue the pilot.

As big a blow as their son's death was, it didn't shake their faith in God.

"We never doubted God," she said. "We know that God is in control."

■ Kim Underwood can be reached at 727-7389 or at kunderwood@wsjournal.com.