Spring 2024 - When Matt Bristol met his first wife, the late Betty Hess Bristol, he knew he had found someone special. She was a Baylor University freshman in the process of joining a sorority, and he was a junior. Their paths crossed at a pledge dance.

A little more than two years later, while both were still in school, they married and began creating their future as a couple.

For Betty — who graduated with a degree in nursing in 1968 and had long sensed God's call to be a missionary nurse — this initially meant leading the staff at a small hospital in northeast Arkansas as chief of in-service education and in opening a coronary unit. "I can still picture her

climbing up on a gurney and pounding on the chest of a heart patient," Matt said. "She was always quick thinking."

Such decisiveness also ran through Matt's career. After earning undergraduate and law degrees from Baylor, he wasted no time in joining the U.S. Air Force, eventually rising to the rank of Colonel. "The law school prepared me as a confident trial advocate and gave me a strong sense of duty to the law profession and the public we serve," he said. "This complemented my deep sense of duty to our country and my desire to serve in the military."

TOUCHING LIVES

The Bristols formed a dynamic pair for decades, often working side by side. During her husband's Air Force career, Betty was a nurse in both the

U.S. and Europe and earned a master's degree in community health nursing from the Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., in 1978.

Following Matt's retirement from the military, Betty's long-deferred desire to serve in

international missions came to fruition when she and Matt were commissioned in 1998 by the International Mission Board to serve in former Soviet Central Asia. Setting up her own medical clinic in a remote city at high altitude not far from the Chinese border, she led medical mission teams to unreached villages where churches were later planted.

For Matt and his wife Mary Lou Bristol, who reside in North Chesterfield, Virginia, establishing the Betty Hess Bristol Endowed Scholarship in Nursing serves as a means of honoring his late wife's spiritual legacy, which touched thousands of lives across three continents before her death from sarcoma in 2012. Matt and Betty's two children, Matt and Allison, are proud to support this initiative to honor their mother.

"My wife and I strongly believe we should give generously from the resources God has placed under our stewardship while we are still on this side of eternity," said Matt, who with Mary Lou has taken steps to enhance the scholarship's resources with bequests through their estate plan. "There is truly no greater joy than when exercising the privilege of giving to a Christian organization whose goals are congruent with our own."

ADVANCING THE GOSPEL

Today, Matt and Mary Lou live what he describes as a simple life.

"We both volunteer our time several days a week and ask God to give us daily opportunities to bless others," he said. "We are both in our ninth decade and yet still serving the Lord through our ministries."

The Bristols hope the resources with which they have been blessed will make a profound difference in the lives of future generations of nursing students at Baylor. "We pray that Betty's example of using her nursing skills and experience to advance the Gospel will motivate nursing students to surrender control of their lives and professional careers to God, so they can then experience the joy of being carried along on eagles' wings to the heights of the Kingdom of God," Matt said.