Marie Thurman

I was born on the 4th of July in 1891 in Boise, Idaho. As a baby, only one year old, I was brought to Hillsboro, Kansas. The circumstances are unknown to me. I did have two sisters, Helen and –. But from my earliest memory as a child I have lived in the orphanage at Gnadenau, southeast of Hillsboro. This three-story stone building was my childhood home. I went to school at the Gnadenau School. Here at Gnadenau I accepted Christ as my Savior from sin and was baptized. “In my early life I felt a great desire to work among the poor and needy.”

By the time I was 25 years old, in 1916, I was working in Wichita, Kansas. I saw so much suffering and need here that I despaired. W Everything looked so dark; it was overwhelming. I knelt and asked God to show me the way He wanted me to go. What direction did He want me to take?

The very next day I received a letter from the Salem Home, asking me to come and help there, because workers were needed desperately. Salem Home was the new name for the orphanage or the home for the homeless and friendless where I had been raised. I had many questions and doubts in my mind. Is this the right place? I asked God to show me. “The Lord gave me the assurance that where I had received help was the place where He wanted me to help others in need.”

I began my work at the Salem Home on February 25th, 1917. This was not easy, nor without trials or temptations. “I had to pray much for help and guidance from on high?”

The verse Matthew 9:62 became very precious to me: “Jesus said unto him, no man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God.” I knew then that God wanted me to look forward-press on in my desire to help those around me who were in need. So I heeded this call of God in my life and committed myself to caring for the poor, the helpless and the aged, both physically and Spiritually. I saw my purpose as simply, “I bring sunshine into the clouded evening of their life.” I was convinced that this type of mission work was just as important as mission work among the heathen overseas.

I was ordained as a deaconess on October 23, 1921. I was thirty years old. The deaconess order had been established in 1914, as a way of utilizing the energies of Krimmer Mennonite Brethren young women who were willing to dedicate themselves to the Lord in service to the poor and needy. Caring for the old and the weak required so much work. Some of the folks at the Salem Home needed medical help every day, some were entirely helpless, some were blind, some very discouraged and lonely, some had not found Christ yet as their Savior. One particular year in 1923, the deaconess staff at the Home was reduced to only two sisters-Sister Mary Ratzlaff and me-due to sickness among the rest of the nursing staff. Then the head sister Mary Ratzlaff became ill for three months, and I served as “Oberin” or head matron in her place. In the annual reports, D.E. Harder praised me for my courage and my confidence in God during the time, but it was the help of God that made it possible to continue.

After I had been working at the Home for nine years in 1926, the board of directors asked me to submit my philosophy of service to the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren conference for inclusion in the conference reports. I worked hard to verbalize my thoughts. “Diaconate means service, specifically, service out of love to the Lord, for the building up of His kingdom on earth… Work is the object of the deaconess house. A sisterhood of deaconesses is an association for a common work… The care of the sick… is one of the oldest branches of the work of love… It is a great privilege to nurse such who remain true and faithful until the end, while again on the other hand we must often witness how sad it is to see fathers and mothers depart from this life to the realm of the unknown, who have lived a life without Christ…”

I served here at the Salem Home and Hospital in the country for 14 years. Each Sunday we observed Sunday worship with a Sunday School lesson and a sermon. Every year each of us sisters received a two-week vacation. One year, 1928, I traveled to Oregon for my vacation.

In April of 1944 the Salem Home building burned to the ground. The building where I had been raised and where I had served was no more. Then I moved into the town of Hillsboro and worked in the Home for the Aged until my health became so bad that I was forced to retire from nursing in 1954. I was 63 years old. I made my home in a little house on South Washington.

Looking back, I must say that “without our daily prayers and communications with God, our work would be a failure.” How much I needed and appreciated our evening and morning devotions. They were of such a great help to me.

My heart was not too good. Dr. George Ens cared for me as my doctor. I collapsed near my home with congestive heart failure, and was taken by ambulance to the Hillsboro hospital, where on October 23, 1963, I went to be with the Lord Jesus. I reached the age of 72 years. My body was buried in the Gnadenau Cemetery.

Has my life mattered, you ask? “As for my work, I often feel that for the years I have served, I have accomplished so little. All I can say is that I have found life full of interest in an endeavor to do faithfully my small part in the great field of service for our Master.”