"A Second Chance" -- by Eva Crain, My Mother

Pictured is Eva Crain, my beloved mother.
 

This article is condensed from a March 1975 account written by my mother, Eva Crain, a former Faith Temple Church (Taylors, S.C.) member who worked at Roger Huntington Nursing Center in Greer, S.C., for over 20 years and died in 1989 at age 67.  

As a child, I was carried to church. At age 12, after accepting Christ as my Savior, I was baptized in an outdoor pool close to Double Spring Baptist Church where we attended.

After high school (Mountain View High School, Taylors, S.C.), I failed to trust God to keep me after he had saved me. I let Satan make me doubt that I had ever been saved. Through the counseling of our pastor and Scriptures, peace and assurance flooded my soul at about 19 years of age.

The first desire of my life after finishing high school in 1938 (when there were only eleven grades) was to go to Winthrop College to be a home economics teacher. I (one of eight children) was reared on a farm. My father said he wasn’t financially able to send me to college but would let me commute to a junior college, if I could find someone to ride with. I decided I’d stop my education, since I couldn’t go to college and stay.

  

My father consented for me to work in a sewing room. I’d said I’d never marry, but a certain young man changed my mind…for which I’m very thankful. (Eva and J.B. Crain married after he completed U.S. Army basic training.) My husband spent 18 months in Germany. God answered prayers and brought him home safely. After three years of marriage, God blessed our home with a son and then three years later, a daughter.

I thought about being a registered nurse, but that plan did not materialize either.

For 18 years, I was content to be a housewife and mother, though after the children were in school, I worked in a sewing room for a while. When efficiency experts came to the plants, I wasn’t able to make the production they seemed to think I should be doing. I was also sick part of the time. The doctor couldn’t discover the cause for several years, so I just went on hurting and working.

The doctor treated me for gall bladder trouble, but my condition worsened. A specialist took x-rays and found a large ulcer. I really had a battle with Satan. He tormented me with the thought that I wouldn’t make it through surgery. After a few days of torment, I prayed and believed God would see me through. I accepted the words of Paul in Philippians: “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain . . . .” God had been with me through forty years, and if it was his will for me to go to heaven, it would be my gain. I feel God guided the surgeon’s hands, and my health has been better with a third of my stomach (left) than before.

After meditation and prayer, an inner Voice kept telling me there was something better in life. There was a new nursing center being built near our home in Greer, and the Voice kept telling me to apply for a job there. I went to work two weeks before the building was opened and worked two years as a nurses’ aide. One day I heard about a program for Practical Nursing. I investigated and found they would take women up to 45 years of age. I was nearing 45, so I knew if I was to fulfill a desire I had since school days, I’d better get busy.

I started to school a week or so before our son entered his first year of college. When it came time for my books to be thrown at me, I felt I just couldn’t start back to school, but my son said, “Mother, you wanted to do this course, and you’ve got to stay in.”

So, I buckled down to the fact that it was God’s will that I was in nursing school and by His grace and help, I’d do the best I could. It proves out one of my favorite verses of Scripture: “He will do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think . . . .” 

I don’t claim to be perfect, but I feel that by obeying God’s voice after asking His help to go into nursing, I have come the nearest to being in God’s perfect will than ever before in my life.