Mary Phipps Memorial

Mary's Daughter Mimi is in my Sunday School Class. Having an opportunity to meet her mother before she died was a blessing to me. This tribute by her son and son-in-law is a wonderful testimony to a Christian Lady.

Mary Frances Bailey was born in Waxahachie, Texas, on October 19, 1918 and was raised in Dallas except for a short time in Oklahoma City. Waxahachie was the ancestral home of her heart throughout her life because on her mother’s side her great grandparents bought farmland there. Her parents were introduced to each other on the square in Waxahachie. Many generations of the family rest in the Waxahachie cemetery where she will be buried today next to her husband.

She grew up in Oak Cliff as a middle child with an older brother and a younger sister. As a child she was always reading things like the Tarzan books, the Oz books, and magazines, so that it became a habit of her life. She eventually read hundreds of books on English history, the American civil war, all of Isak Dinesen, all of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Amy Carmical, C. S. Lewis, the Christian psychiatrist Paul Tournier, the Christian anthropologist Arthur Custance, and all the Scottish and English divines from Lancelot Andrews and Samuel Rutherford to Andrew Bonar. How often she spoke to others about what she had "just read."

She not only read countless Bible commentaries, but always loved fiction writers like Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Dick Frances, and Jan Karon. Books shelved three deep, stacked in the heater closet, books read and reread, dog-eared, underlined and annotated, books cherished, Bibles read into disintegration—that was the mark and essence of Mary, a true original.

Throughout her life she not only read a lot, but she wrote a lot. Starting in 1938 she kept a journal. She wrote down memorable things she read on whatever was handy. For her Sunday school teaching, she wrote her thoughts and quotations on the Bible passage on 5x7 index cards that weighed altogether about 50 lbs. at the time she suffered her stroke on May 10 of 2005. She probably taught every book of the Bible at least once. Not only did she teach, but she loved to hear good Bible teachers like Mrs. W. E. Hawkins, wife of the founder of Radio Revival.

She also talked a lot, but never nonsense and usually listened as much as she talked. Although she loved her Lord the most and time alone with Him, she also loved her family and friends, whom she often referred to as her "own." In fact, in her mind she imagined that many of her family and friends were with her in Nashville, making her feel more at home there. Her intelligence, kindness, sense of humor, and love for people as well as for ideas caused her to be a favorite at the extended care facility where she’s been living. After her recent decline, the workers asked us please not to move her down to a Comfort Care area because they wanted to continue helping us care for her until her death.

Her story as she told it was that as a teenager she was all wrapped up in movie magazines that glorified the likes of Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, and Clara Bow. Her father counseled her in earnest about the importance of the Christian faith, and at 15 she was wonderfully converted. A few years later after her father’s death, she wrote in her journal, "I’m glad I don’t have to think of that dear person as dead and buried, for I know better. ‘Absent from the body, at home with the Lord.’ I don’t imagine anyone was happier than Dad when he looked for the first time on the face of the One who loved him and gave Himself for him. How glad all these years to be like Him. ‘I shall be glad when I wake in Thy likeness.’ I remember hearing Mrs. Roper [her pastor’s wife] say the Lord never took anyone or anything away from us that He didn’t send someone or something to take the vacant place. And so then I asked Him to send someone to help fill the void left by Daddy’s absence. And it was the Lord Himself who did it. For He gave me such good times with Himself through His Word, teaching me to trust Him who never faileth and depend on Him in a way I’d never known before, telling me through the Bible that I had a heavenly Father who would care for me, for He cares for the widows and the fatherless. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Lord. And I’ll be glad when I see Him too, and we all stand together again and sing the song of the redeemed."

After high school Mary attended the Bible Institute of Los Angeles for one year, followed by jobs with Southwestern Life Insurance and the Dallas Morning News. There she met her husband Bill, recently home from the war. She set out deliberately to live as a Christian, to be a good wife and mother and to serve Christ with her life. Mary fell prey to sin like everyone else, but those times drove her to depend on God’s grace. Her consuming passion became the Bible and the Christian life. Her family and friends counted on her to pray for them every day, and she faithfully and joyfully took that business seriously. Now that her life’s work has ended, we know she would want her death to be the occasion for those of us still living to set the same course to follow Christ with our lives since she found such richness and joy in her daily relationship with the Lord.

After Mom’s stroke, she repeatedly instructed us that she wanted the hymn, The Sands of Time are Sinking, to be read at her funeral. She hounded us until we found the words for her. It expresses well the thought she often stated during the difficult days after her strokes that “if this is what the Lord has for me now, it’s ok with me.”