(Video above: The extraordinary story of Jesse Martin’s generosity)
When Jesse Martin came into the world in 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt (D-New York) was President of the United States, Yankees legend Lou Gehrig had just ended his now famous consecutive games played streak, and Batman had made his first appearance in a comic book earlier in the year.
He was born in the North Alabama town of Nauvoo, where the 1940 census found there to be 533 people.
He went on to graduate from Auburn University and worked at Southern Company Services as a manager and engineer for over 30 years before retiring. He was an ordained deacon and a Sunday School teacher, too.
On Dec. 31, 2015, Jesse Martin passed away at the age of 76.
But when people crowded into Shades Mountain Baptist Church in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, to celebrate his life earlier this month, it wasn’t because he was a great engineer, or even a great Sunday school teacher.
He was those things, of course, but the legacy Mr. Martin left behind will impact people for generations to come for a much deeper reason, which is summed up in the story of his relationship with a young man named Kevin Johnson.
“Our friendship began when I was around 16 years old,” Kevin explains. “At that time in my life I’d developed an interest in video editing and computers, and I was just learning the skill. Eventually the camera I had broke. I was 16-years-old, I had a job at Chick-fil-A, and I didn’t have the money to fix a camera that was worth thousands of dollars.”
For several weeks, Kevin went without a camera as he tried to figure out a plan to save up for a new one. Then his birthday came around.
“We were sitting around a table celebrating my birthday with my family and there was a knock on the back door,” Kevin recalls. “It was Mr. Jesse. He came into my house and sat down with my family and he walked in carrying in this big box wrapped in blue wrapping paper. He sat it down in front of me on the table and said, ‘Happy birthday!’ So I immediately borrowed my dad’s pocket knife and opened the top and I pulled out of this box a brand new Panasonic 100DVXB. It was, like, the top of the line video camera at the time!”
It was a thoughtful and generous gift from one of his mentors, and certainly one that Kevin would be able to put to good use. But that is not what Kevin remembers most about that birthday night.
“As he was leaving, he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got one more thing for you.’ And he took me out to his car and inside his car he had another box. And Mr. Jesse began to explain to me that he was giving me a second camera because he wanted me to experience what it was like to give generously. He knew that at the time I was working with one of my best friends, Ethan Milner, and he was just learning how to edit video and he had a dream to be a film director and that what he was giving me was an opportunity to give generously into someone else’s life.”
Ethan, who is now video director for Shades Mountain Baptist Church, will never forget it either.
“We walked out to the parking lot and I see Kevin sitting by his car. I walked over and he opened the door to his trunk and in it was a large box with blue wrapping paper. You have to understand 16-year-old me: I was obsessed with movies, obsessed with wanting to be a movie director. But I had no access, no ability to have a camera in the first place. So I went probably two-and-a-half years before finding out how that all happened, and then I heard the name Jesse Martin.”
“The awesome thing about Mr. Jesse and the reason we became close friends was not because he gave us expensive gifts,” added Kevin, “but because he began on that day an investment in us that never stopped.
“It’s really incredible to me to think about what he started with those two cameras. He helped continue to develop in me a heart to tell the story of the gospel of Jesus. And he was able to set Ethan up on a path that he’s still on today, at this church telling the story of the gospel of Jesus through film. The simple truth is that Mr. Jesse was generous because he was serving a generous God — that he really believed the story of Jesus is true — that God would be so generous that He would give himself up for a sinful people simply because he loved us. Mr. Jesse never got over that love.”
If Jesse Martin can use two cameras to have that kind of impact on the next generation, imagine what we all could do if we looked for opportunities to give generously and invest in other people’s lives?
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