A Girl Called Betty

“These words shall be in your heart. Teach them to your children, when you sit in your house and when you walk along the way.” — from Deuteronomy 6

On 21 December 1926, a baby girl was born in Brussels, the capital of Belgium. Her name was Elisabeth Howard, but her family called her Betty. Her mother and father were Americans. They had gone to Belgium as missionaries, to tell people there about Jesus.

When Betty was still a tiny baby, the family went home to America. Her father went to work on a Christian paper in Philadelphia called the Sunday School Times, and in time he became its editor. The family lived in Germantown, an old part of the city. When Betty was nine, they moved to a bigger house in Moorestown, New Jersey.

There were six children in the family: four boys and two girls. Betty was the second. Money was never plentiful, so nothing was wasted, and everyone had jobs to do.

Every single day, twice a day, the Howards sat down together to worship God. In the morning after breakfast, and again in the evening, they sang a hymn, all the verses. Their father read from the Bible and prayed for each child by name, and for missionaries all over the world. Many of those missionaries came to stay in the Howard house and told stories of faraway lands. The children learned lots of Bible verses and hymns by heart.

Betty was a tall, quiet, shy girl who loved to read. Every summer the family went to the mountains of New Hampshire, to a village called Franconia. There Betty climbed hills, picked berries, swam in cold water and learned the names of trees, flowers and birds. She loved it more than anywhere else in the world.

Betty’s mother and father could not make her love God. But they gave her God’s words every day, and those words stayed in her heart all her life. The Bible verses you learn now can stay with you, too.

Dear God, thank you for the people who teach me about you. Please put your words deep in my heart, so that I remember them all my life. Amen.