Anyone looking for total objectivity here should probably read something else. I cannot reflect on the life of my sister Nancie Wingo ’54, who died last Christmas Eve morning, without thinking she may have been the best example Baylor ever produced in the matter ofloving, respecting and appreciating the people of a currently much maligned faith: Muslims.
Yes, Muslims. They were her neighbors, co-workers, merchants, friends, and students for 30 years as an English teacher at Baptist mission schools in Beirut, Lebanon and Gaza City, Palestine. They were also the catalyst for her personal epiphany that God will have the last word on the full breadth of his grace long after every human voice on the subject is silenced.
Just to state the obvious, there are misguided extremists in every faith and ISIS demeans Islam today in the same way the Crusaders demeaned Christianity.
As ever, the bad guys always get the boldest headlines.
Living in a Muslim dominated world was not anything Nancie thought about as a child or even as a student at Baylor. She simply loved people – and challenging adventures. Straight out of Baylor she headed to the San Francisco Bay Area to teach because it struck her as an exciting place to live. Two years later she was off to the east coast to teach near New York City, and on both coasts she found herself thrust into the heart of vibrantly different American cultures, which cemented a passion for new and enriching encounters.
The true kickoff of her life-altering future began the day she enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to prepare for a life in foreign-mission service, a move combining her love of teaching with a love of God learned in a Baptist pastor’s family in Gonzales, Texas. She was the middle of three children and I know how much it pleased our parents to see at least one of them following in the family business.
But halfway around the world? Selfishly, we asked her why not play the ”America First” card, which got us nowhere because she was already convinced that the greatest challenge of all would be to dive into the religiously contentious hotbed of the Middle East, euphemistically known as The Holy Land, where she could test her strong sense that loving God meant loving all his creation.
To no one’s surprise who ever knew her, Nancie was at home the minute her ship docked in Beirut. On a slow day it took her about a New York nanosecond to find something to admire in virtually everyone she met, and most of the people she met were Muslims. Everywhere she turned she saw people who were different in dress, language, food taste and politics, to say nothing of religion. Nancie was a great movie buff all her life, and the first picture we saw together as small children was “The Wizard of Oz.” When she looked around at her strange new world,
I can imagine her paraphrasing the movie’s best line, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Waco anymore.” But she quickly fell in love with all of it, and its people.
Her devotion to her faith never wavered, even as her love for her Muslim friends and neighbors never faltered. She could easily tell them what love ofJesus meant to her, and it became increasingly easy for her to recognize God’s protecting hand in their lives. On multiple occasions during Lebanon’s 15-year civil war it was too dangerous for students to get safely from their homes to the school. When they did return, she marveled at how they spoke of God protecting them in their darkest moments. She once said, “I owe these students a great debt for showing me how God is at work to bring goodness into their lives. I felt a great gratitude for his love wherever I experienced it.”
I once asked Nancie how she managed to square her faith with the realization that most of her Muslim friends followed a distinctly different path to God. Her answer was quick, clear and unequivocal: “I have decided that it is my job to reflect God’s love and grace as I see it, and it is God’s job to dispense that love and grace as he will.” Clearly, Nancie understood that it is not necessary to know the mind of God – who does? – in order to reflect the love of God. It was as if He had at some point whispered in her ear, “I’ve got this. Now you get busy showing others my love.”
I cannot specify the date and time of this clarity in her heart, but after making her home in the company of so many Muslims for so many years, Nancie knew she could not continue to believe that, short of confess- ing Jesus as Lord, they were hopelessly beyond the reach of God’s providence. So Nancie made a faith-based calculation hat actually resulted in a deeper acceptance of God’s wisdom and grace on all matters clearly beyond any human’s pay grade. And, wonder of wonders, her wider sense of God’s capacities simultaneously empowered her to love her Muslim friends even more deeply. Nice.
Living in the Middle East exposed Nancie to a reality she had never considered as a child in our home, or at Baylor, nor even in seminary, which is that virtually all religious identity is an accident of birth. She understood that had she been born not in Texas, but in Tripoli, Tunisia or Tehran, she would most likely have been a Muslim. And to my mind she would have been just as kind a Muslim as she was a Christian, able to see God in the lives of all others who seek him.
Without reducing Middle East diplomacy to absurdity – it’s absurd enough already – I feel confident suggesting that the legacy of Nancie’s life was her uncanny ability to let God be God with no human veto allowed over just how it all plays out.
The days in both Beirut and Gaza frequently played out in moments of real danger, including one night in 1984 when a rocket hit her sixth floor balcony while she took shelter in the building’s basement. Three years later, as the war raged on, the U.S. Embassy ordered her evacuation on grounds they could no longer guarantee her safety. She was forced to flee overnight with one suitcase and a broken heart, unable even to say goodbye to her students and friends.
After her evacuation to Cyprus ,and in response to some U.S. congressmen who criticized her for being stubborn and selfish in wanting to remain in Beirut, Nancie wrote a first person account in People Week{y. She said, “I don’t understand why it is better to risk your life for a military or scientific cause than to risk your life to help people trying to maintain some goodness in a world caving in around them.”
Within a few weeks, she accepted a position teaching English at the Baptist hospital nursing school in Gaza City. Her arrival there barely predated the outbreak of the intifada hostilities between Palestinians and Israelis, which led, over the next nine years, to repeated temporary escapes to other countries for safety. Nancie was often in danger, but she was never afraid.
Many of the nursing students came from families in the largest United Nations refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, where more than 100,000 displaced Palestinians live in horrific and unsanitary conditions. Nancie often visited students at the camp and joined them for family meals. The bonds of love and respect forged there and in Beirut reached all the way to Fort Worth, where on multiple occasions former students made special trips to see her again and remind her of the great influence she had been in their lives.
With her trademark modesty I can hear Nancie telling me now to “cool it.” Well, that’s not happening because, for me, her exemplary life was a teachable moment. To that point it must be said that every effort by our current government to deny immigration to peace-loving Muslims is a sad misreading of the many evident virtues of Islam and a personal insult to the total witness of Nancie’s life. She believed in the power of love, from and to God, from and to her family and – may it never be forgotten – from and to the Muslim people in whom she saw the face of God. In her mind God was love, pure and simple.
If history is any guide, the Middle East will remain a cauldron of contention, based on differences over everything from land disputes to cultural mistrust to religious exceptionalism. And how has that worked out so far? Is it not even worth considering that Nancie actually proved how love and respect can be a successful nudge toward regional and religious harmony in that part of the world? The question is rhetorical because she did prove it.
At her service of remembrance in Fort Worth on Jan. 7, Nancie’s namesake, our daughter, Nancie Wingo ’81, spoke of times she spent with her aunt as a young child and mentioned a children’s chorus Nancie taught her. Changing only the pronoun in the words, she invited the congregation to join her in singing:
“She Went About Doing Good,
And Helping Where ‘Ere She Could.
Our Example is She, Like Her We Should Be, For She Went About Doing Good”
That simple lyric captures the complete essence and continuing gift of Nancie’s life, a life at every turn lived joyfully and wondrously for others.
Any person who believes in heaven has their own unique imagery of what it might actually look like. Nancie never gave me the details of her imagery, other than a belief that she would know and be known by those she loved in this life.
The one mental picture I can conjure from last Christmas Eve morning is that when Nancie appeared before God, he, with a proper sense of appreciation for the impeccable example of her 85 years, stood to greet her with a smile and declared in a voice loud enough for all eternity to hear, “Now that’s what I’m talking about.” Mere imagery? Yes, of course, but it’s the image I will hold happily in my heart. And it is enough.
