c. 2000 Religion News Service
CLEVELAND _ Lilie Lee had been barren for seven years and had nearly given up hope of having a child when a Baptist pastor asked her to approach the altar and bring her dream before God.
She prayed with all her heart, and less than a year later, unto her a daughter, Linda, was born.
As the nurses at Mt. Sinai Medical Center handed her newborn to her, she lifted up the infant and said, “Take her, God, and do as you will.”
Fifty-one years later, in a modern-day re-enactment of the Abraham and Sarah story from Genesis, the memories of that day and its place in family lore came rushing back to Lilie Lee as her daughter, the Rev. Linda Lee, won election as a bishop in the United Methodist Church.
“It’s pretty awesome, the whole experience,” Linda Lee said earlier this week. “I was very clear that God was working in it.”
Lee was one of 13 clergy, including three black women, elected bishops in the United Methodist Church in a series of meetings that ended July 15. There are 50 active bishops serving the 8.4 million-member denomination. Lee, a Cleveland native, was appointed to serve the church in Michigan.
In the oft-told story from the Bible that has offered hope to generations of childless couples, God tells Sarah, by then 90, and the 99-year-old Abraham that they will have a son. “Is anything impossible for the Lord?” God says in the 18th chapter of Genesis.
Their son, Isaac, born the next year, would become a symbol of unquestioning faith when Abraham follows the Lord’s command to sacrifice his beloved child, only to have his hand stayed by an angel at the last moment. Isaac would go on to become the father of Jacob, whose 12 sons became the patriarchs of the 12 tribes of Israel.
Like Sarah, Lilie Lee had thought she would never bear a child. Married at 19, she was still childless at 27 and doctors had been unable to tell her why. One day, while visiting Bethany Baptist Church in Cleveland, she followed a minister’s call to lay her burden before God.
“Whatever you want, you come up and pray for it,” she recalled the minister telling her. “I’ve been doing it ever since.”
In the hospital the next year, after offering her daughter to God, the new mother then whispered to her child, “You are the answer to a prayer.”
Linda Lee was raised in the Presbyterian Church and active in the youth ministry at St. Mark Presbyterian while attending John Hay High School in Cleveland. Later in life, as she was searching for a church in which to raise her own children, she discovered Dixon United Methodist Church in Dayton, Ohio, where she heard God call her to the ministry.
It was as if she was prepared for that moment from the time her mother lifted her up to God at Mt. Sinai, according to Bishop Lee.
“I felt as if her giving me back to God was a part of my entering the ministry,” she said.
Bishop Lee received her doctor of ministry degree from United Theological Seminary in Dayton and served two churches in Detroit. Since 1995, she has been the superintendent of the Detroit East District.
Her election did not come easy. Winning candidates needed to receive 60 percent of the vote, and it was not until the 14th ballot that she received enough to win election from delegates to the North-Central Jurisdictional Conference meeting in Madison, Wis.
Back in Cleveland, the woman who prayed for a child she could give back to the Lord was again deep in conversation with God. As each ballot passed, Lilie Lee would pray a little more.
God was listening, Lilie and Linda Lee said yesterday.
“Ain’t nothing between me and God,” said Lilie Lee, now 78. “The reason I know he’s there is he’s answered me so many times.”
KRE END BRIGGS
