Virginia Joan Smith

Virginia Joan Smith passed away in the early morning of Monday, July 11 after several months of struggle with cancer. She was 76. Beginning in late May, when her cancer was diagnosed, through the time of her death, her immediate and extended family flew in from disparate parts of the US to care for her during this fast decline. She was preceded in death by her husband Lawrence Dennis Smith (2018). She is survived by her three children Martyn Dennis Smith, Angela Denise Bullard, Joanna Joy McFall and eight grandchildren, as well as by her sister Sylvia Jewell and Wesley Willmer. Remarkably, she is also survived by her mother Diantha Willmer, aged 102.

Virginia had lived in the Fort Worth area since 2007. She watched North Fort Worth grow by leaps and bounds and in her detailed journals constantly noted the economic and population growth of her new home. She embraced her new home and joined cultural institutions like the Kimbell Art Museum. She moved to Fort Worth upon the retirement of her husband Lawrence Dennis Smith from the pastorate in Redlands, California. Although they had come to Fort Worth to retire, they found themselves drawn back into ministry, this time for a small congregation that met in a retirement home.

Virginia was born May 2, 1946, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest, though her father had briefly taken positions in California and Colorado. In her journal she contemplates the question of what place she would consider her true home, and she decided on Seattle. In 1964 she chose to travel far from home to go to college at Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts college in Illinois. Her report card shows that she was a serious student with a keen interest in ancient art and archaeology. She studied for a term in Jerusalem, though this was interrupted by the political tensions that would erupt in the Six Day War of 1967. During this trip abroad she also experienced her first mental health episode, and she struggled with bipolar disorder her entire life.

In her final semester at Wheaton College, she met L. Dennis Smith, and they were married on December 6, 1969. As a newly married couple they threw themselves into becoming established in the ministry. They took up their first church in New Stanton, Pennsylvania, which is also where their son Martyn was born in 1973. After building a new church there, they moved west to be closer to Virginia’s family, and their daughter Angela was born in Everett, Washington in 1976. The family moved steadily down the West Coast, and while living in San Pablo, California, Joanna was born. In 1984 the family took one further step south and took up residence at Redlands, California. They stayed here, ministering at the Redlands Alliance Church, until retirement in 2006.

Redlands became her new home, and during her time here she took up painting. Her home in Fort Worth was decorated with scenes from her years in Southern California. She was especially taken by images of the mountains and orange trees. In Redlands she got her teaching credentials for California public schools and worked as a substitute teacher. She was actively engaged with the lives of her children and spent holidays with the families of her brother and sister who also lived in Southern California.

Her children remember Virginia as a private person with a steadfast Christian faith. She spent the years after the death of her husband working through the Bible. At different times she attended Fellowship of the Parks and Christ Chapel Bible Church in Fort Worth. She surprised everyone in the last year of her life by applying to attend Dallas Theological Seminary. She would not live long enough to make progress in this program, but it symbolized her spiritually questing nature. She also had a set of interests that fell outside religion. Like her mother she always maintained a garden. She loved to identify birds and take hikes. She hardly missed a major exhibition at a Fort Worth museum. She read works of literature, and at the end of each year she noted in her journals the books she had read. She loved to travel and would have loved to travel more.

Virginia was a person whose life was complex and difficult to capture in a few paragraphs, but she will live on in the hearts of the family and friends who knew her well.