Stella Garsee: Faith stretches beyond what the eye can see

Published 10:48 am Saturday, November 12, 2022

 The older I become, the harder it is when my routine has to change. It’s more comfortable and less stressful on the brain to do what I have always done.  Have I been too busy trying to please ‘self’ when I should be dealing with these changes?

So begins one of Stella Garsee’s brief social media posts. Most are based on the simplest of thoughts. She has started posts by writing about electrical appliances…good walking shoes…vitamins. She ties it altogether in the way only a woman of faith whose mind is stayed on Jesus could do.

Faith, she believes, stretches beyond what the eye can see.

Most posts include a Bible verse. The verse for this post is Romans 12:2 – “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God‘s good, pleasing and perfect will is” – and the realization that this is a scripture for the ages for all ages, one that prompts her to remember that none are too young or too old to examine their hearts and minds in light of God’s word.

Garsee, age 95, was reluctant about making her first post. She started to quit, assuming people were tired of hearing from her. She doesn’t do it to impress, teach or preach. She does it as a way of relating the sweet experience, the joy of feeling his presence and recalling His word.

“I started keeping notebooks, and when I would write in my notebooks and get to the punchline, let’s call it, the end of whatever I was writing, it was like an anointing, like a soothing oil being poured over me, just something I needed for that day.”

The associations, she said, are from years and years of reading the Bible, listening to sermons, and talking about the Lord among family and friends.

This isn’t Garsee’s first foray into writing. In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, she was the publisher of The Pentecocostal Church of DeQuincy’s newsletter, The Gleaners. It was mimeographed on an 8 ½” x 11-inch sheet of paper.

She’s kept notes, articles and other clippings in a folder, fodder for her musings.

She remembers the day she became spirit-filled. She was 12 and her mother, Doris Martin, made it clear that she would not be able to ride her “apron strings” to heaven.

“People in the church used to call mother ‘Sister True Blue,’ Garsee said. “When we had a testimony service, she might not say but a few words, but those few words packed a punch. When she told me that, I felt naked.”

That night, she couldn’t wait to get to the altar, and she had never been to the altar before.

“I never knew anything but a Christian home and I wasn’t about to go to the altar,” she said. “I was good.”

She didn’t do it to please her mother, but she was drawn to receive something she realized she needed, a covering, the spirit-filled Christian’s covenant relationship with God through Christ Jesus.

She has had times of doubt and disappointment. A niece died at a young age. She thought that God should have taken her and let her husband live a longer life, as he was “doing” for others, being the hands and feet of God.

Her vision is not what it once was. She dictates her posts. However, her writing might help to improve her hearing.

“One day it occurred to me that the trumpet blast mentioned in the Bible may not sound like a trumpet at all, not the trumpet sound we’re familiar with here on earth, but a sound I will need to recognize, a sound I won’t recognize unless my heart is tuned to God.”