June 4

BEAUTY IS FLEETING

“Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.”

Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.

Proverbs 31:29-31

Paul Brand, a physician known worldwide for his medical breakthroughs for leprosy patients, paid high tribute to his mother and the formative influence she had on him. Who was this uncommon woman known by the people she served as “Granny” Brand? “I say it kindly and in love,” writes Paul, “but in old age my mother had little of physical beauty left in her. She had been a classic beauty as a young woman—I have photographs to prove it—but not in old age.

The rugged conditions in India, combined with crippling falls and her battles with typhoid, dysentery, and malaria had made her a thin, hunched-over old woman. Years of exposure to wind and sun had toughened her facial skin into leather and furrowed it with wrinkles as deep and extensive as any I have seen on a human face. She knew better than anyone that her physical appearance had long since failed her—for this reason she adamantly refused to keep a mirror in her house.”

When she was seventy-five, Granny fell and broke her hip. Workmen carried her on a stretcher down the mountain, after which she was taken over one hundred and fifty miles of bumpy roads by jeep to the nearest hospital. When Paul visited her some time later she was walking with two bamboo canes and managing to travel on horseback to outlying villages.

“I came with compelling arguments for her retirement,” writes Paul. “It was not safe for her to go on living alone in such a remote place . . . With her faulty sense of balance and paralyzed legs, she presented a constant medical hazard . . .

“Granny threw off my arguments like so much nonsense and shot back a reprimand. Who would continue the work? There was no one else in the entire mountain range to preach, to bind up wounds, and to pull teeth. ‘In any case,’ she concluded, ‘what is the use of preserving my old body if it is not going to be used where God needs me?’

“And so she stayed. Eighteen years later, at the age of ninety-three, she reluctantly gave up sitting on her pony because she was falling all too frequently. Devoted Indian villagers began bearing her on a hammock from town to town. After two more years of mission work, she finally died at age ninety-five. She was buried, at her request, in a simple, well-used sheet laid in the ground—no coffin . . .

“One of my last and strongest visual memories of my mother is set in a village in the mountains she loved . . . She is sitting on a low stone wall that circles the village, with people pressing in from all sides . . . They are looking at an old wrinkled face . . . To them she is beautiful.” ⁴