By Iona Kay Ellett Matson
In the summer of 2001 I began earnestly praying for God’s guidance in the care of my 84-year-old mother, Kathryn. She had been in declining health for a year, and in June had fallen and broken her hip.
I didn’t want her to move from her house of 31 years to enter a nursing care facility. This was her home, the place she had spent many happy years with my father, Lertis Ellett, a Christian minister and Army chaplain, before his untimely death some years before. Yet it was obvious some kind of around-the-clock care was needed.
I called my sister, and we decided to find someone to live with Mother as a full-time caregiver, but we knew finding the right person would be difficult.
A neighbor in a similar situation had hired a lovely Filipino woman named Emma. I told Emma about my mom, and she said she had a friend who might be able to help us. That is how Beth Jaro came into our lives.
AN ANSWER TO PRAYER
Beth was courteous, conscientious, and caring. We couldn’t have asked for a better caregiver—a real answer to prayer. In the fall, Beth’s daughter, Kristine, joined her from the Philippines, and together—with Mother—the three of them formed a family.
Beth and Kristine began attending the Lawndale Christian Church, which my father had served as minister for 23 years after his discharge from active military service. Kristine went to school while Beth and “Grandma” (as they both called her) played board games and worked crossword puzzles together. Beth would take my mother for walks and make sure she spent precious time at the piano—an instrument she had played and taught for most of her life. I thanked God for the music she was still able to enjoy.
I wrote a biography of my mom and dad and gave it to my mother for her birthday. The next day, as I was dropping my mother off at her home after an outing, Beth came running out of the house, beaming with joy. She told me she wanted to tell me the most wonderful of stories.
A BEAUTIFUL STORY
In the summer of 1945, Beth said her grandparents were among a group of Filipinos on the island of Leyte who had been brutally murdered by Japanese forces. When the U.S. Army heard of this, they sent a young chaplain to the survivors. He comforted them and conducted services for them. They called him “Father.”
He became very special to them and was remembered as a kind and humble man. The surname on his pocket was “Ellett” but he told them to call him “Lertis.” From then on they referred to him as “Father Lertis.” Beth’s father, a young man at the time, passed down this story to Beth and her siblings. Beth said whenever she and her brothers and sisters would ask about the events of the war, they would always hear about “Father Lertis” and the wonderful things he did for their family. Though Beth would not be born for four more years, she had heard about Father Lertis practically her whole life.
I have no doubt that “Father Lertis” was in fact my father, Lt. Col. Lertis Ross Ellett. When Beth started working for my mother, she noticed a picture of my father in his military uniform, with the name “Ellett” on his pocket. She thought to herself, Could this be the Father Lertis I had heard about from my father? Could this be the man who ministered to my family in their deepest hour of need?
She considered the possibility, but didn’t realize how unusual his name was. When she read the biography of my father and realized he was stationed in the South Pacific during the war, including a stint in the Philippines in 1945 on the island of Leyte, she finally connected the dots. This was the “Father Lertis” about whom she had heard all her life!
A CIRCLE COMPLETE
This wonderful story has taught me the circle of God’s love—how my father brought comfort and hope to Beth’s family and how Beth was now bringing comfort and hope to his. Coincidence? I think not. And now the seeds my father planted in the summer of 1945 are bearing fruit for eternal life.
When Beth recently requested to be baptized, I was thrilled when my son, David Lertis Matson, a minister and college professor at Hope International University, was able to perform the baptism. As Beth stood next to my son in the watery grave, I couldn’t help but think that my father was there in the water with her too, just as he had been with her family so many years before.
Iona Matson lives in Torrance, California.
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