March 27, 2000

95-year-old finds new
ministry in cyberspace
___By Dan Martin
___Texas Baptist Communications
___WACO--Jo Beckham admits she was "stubborn" when her grandson Blake gave her a computer for grandmother's day.
___"I did not want the computer," the 95-year-old Austin woman admitted during the

JO BECKHAM

Senior Adult Summit at the Waco Convention Center last week.
___"I had no desire to have a computer. What would a cotton farmer's wife from West Texas do with a computer? I wouldn't know the first thing about how to run it. Anyway, I got plenty of cards and letters from my family, and we talk often on the phone.
___"They come to see me fairly often. I don't need a computer."
___And besides, she admitted, she "dreaded having to learn all that new stuff. I doubted I could learn all the new information it would require."
___The trouble with senior adults like her, she said, "is they don't ever want to be a beginner again."
___But her grandson, a Dallas attorney, "turned on that smooth legal persuasion" and bought the computer. "He told me he knew I was smart enough to run it."
___He also made arrangements for a tutor to come to her home at Buckner Villa in Austin four mornings a week for an hour to teach the one-time newspaper reporter how to use the new machine.
___After about 12 weeks, the tutor said she didn't need any more lessons.
___"I told the Lord that if he wanted me to learn this, I would try," she explained. "So I dedicated each part of the computer to his glory and told him I would trust him to help me learn."
___Not only did she learn how to use the computer; she had the seed for a new ministry.
___The ministry grew out of her initial efforts to keep in touch with her grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren. She began e-mailing them and other friends, gathering information and passing it on.
___Beckham knew how to gather information accurately. She worked eight years on the society desk of the Wichita Falls Record News years ago.
___It wasn't long until her married granddaughters began sending messages about her great-grandchildren of elementary school age who were becoming Christians, being baptized and joining the church.
___Beckham, who also goes by the name MeeMaw, began sending a regular Wednesday e-mail to her great-grandchildren. She called it "Footprints of Jesus."
___The name was taken from an old hymn of the same title, but it also is a reminder of the poem by the same name, she said.
___Her weekly e-mail consisted of a short devotional based on an item of interest with a Scripture verse to match.
___Soon other family members wanted to get "Footprints of Jesus." Then friends asked. By mid-March--a few weeks past her 95th birthday--she was sending her e-mail devotional to 81 people.
___In addition to keeping in touch with family and friends, Beckham shared hints of how she uses her computer to print out interesting items to distribute to children at church. One illustration she recounted was rewriting the words of an old folk song. "Jesus Has a Home On The Range" was handed out to children at Vacation Bible School at her church, Walnut Creek Baptist Church in Austin.
___She also communicates with her granddaughter, Camille Beckham, who is a missionary to the deaf and until recently served in Romania. She has now moved on to Hungary.
___"Her letters were so wonderful, and through her, I was able to hear from other missionaries and receive their prayer reports and requests to share with praying friends here," she said.
___Beckham thrilled participants in the Senior Adult Summit as she told stories of how she has reached out around the world from her apartment in North Austin with her grandson's gift and her determination to use it for God's glory.
___She told of her communication with Meredith Ailen, a University of Texas student doing a mission project in Quito, Ecuador, who e-mailed a prayer request when things began to go badly there.
___She told of Vesta and Mark Sauter, missionaries in the Czech Republic, working with the deaf. "They have asked us to pray for 50,000 deaf who live in their area," Beckham said, adding the Sauters also have asked for prayer for 200,000 Ukrainians who live in the Czech Republic.
___She told of Steve Hyde, who works in Cambodia. He e-mailed Beckham March 3, telling how a former Khmer Rouge commander made a profession of faith in Christ at a Bible seminar.
___She told of Bill Clemmer, a medical doctor who works in Vanga Evangelical Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
___And she recounted a message from her granddaughter, Camille, which told how Tutsi soldiers broke down the door of a young pastor's home in Congo.
___As the soldiers prepared to kill the family, the pastor asked to be allowed to pray.
___"As the soldiers watched, the African couple and their young children soberly knelt arm-in-arm in a circle on the floor and prayed to God for mercy," Beckham reported. But when they stood, they discovered the soldiers had left not only the house but the village as well.
___Only later, at a meeting in another town, did they hear the rest of the story. One of the soldiers said he lined the children up in his rifle sights as they knelt and prayed. But then, a "wall of fire, fierce and enormous, jumped up and surrounded the lot of you," he explained.
___"Now I have realized this was a fire sent by God," he continued. "If this is how your God responds to prayer, I want to know him too."
___Beckham said she spends about an hour a day--off and on--in her ministry of e-mail to family, friends and missionaries.
___Sitting in her apartment in Austin, using a wheelchair and oxygen, she remains connected--to God, to her church, to her family, friends and missionaries around the world.
___

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