Faith in Action: Remembering Ms. Mattie Terry
Obituary | Mattie G. Terry | Roberts Funeral Service
A celebration of life service will be held Sunday at Friendship Baptist Church, with family visitation beginning at 2:00 p.m. and the funeral service following at 2:30 p.m. Burial will follow at South Lexington City Cemetery.
Faith in Action: Remembering Ms. Mattie Terry
Some people live their faith loudly.
Others live it so quietly that you only recognize it years later, when you realize how much it carried you.
Ms. Mattie Terry lived her faith in action.
Born April 3, 1932, in Davidson County to Robert Glenn and Fannie Lopp Glenn, she spent her life serving others with a steadiness that never asked for attention. Long before I understood her decades of work with Lexington City Schools, Tiny Tot Day Care, Community Action, or her more than 20 years as a volunteer at Lexington Memorial—now Atrium Health—I knew her first as a child who was hungry.
I was a picky eater.
The kind of picky that made adults sigh and siblings tease. In those days, you ate what was on your plate or you didn’t eat at all. Hunger wasn’t dramatic. It was something you learned to live with quietly.
At Pickett Elementary, I often slipped through the cracks.
But Ms. Mattie heard me.
She heard it when my stomach growled in a kindergarten classroom. She didn’t call attention to it. She didn’t embarrass me. She simply invited me outside the classroom and asked, softly, what the last thing I had eaten was. I don’t remember my answer—only that it was probably something odd, something my family later joked about.
She didn’t play.
Instead, Ms. Mattie took me to the cafeteria and told me I could choose whatever I wanted. That freedom felt enormous. I chose sweet, buttery crackers and peanut butter—simple, warm, and enough.
Before backpack programs and organized food assistance, she slipped a few extra crackers into my hand, quietly, “just in case.” She promised not to tell the other kids. Somehow, she already knew I would be embarrassed. She gave me a secret code—if I was ever hungry again, all I had to do was tug on her skirt.
Sometimes I tugged because I was hungry.
Sometimes I tugged because I needed her contagious smile.
Sometimes because I needed the warmth of her embrace and the reassurance that someone saw me.
Years later, when my mom found out, she couldn’t believe it. Ms. Mattie and I laughed about it, and she leaned in again—just like she had when I was little—and whispered that if I ever needed anything, I could always do the same.
She often said, “We’re proud,” or gave a disapproving look that carried the weight of a community.
Only as an adult do I fully understand how many times she must have said those words—to children at Tiny Tot Day Care, to students in Lexington City Schools, to families served through Community Action, to patients she greeted as a hospital volunteer, and to neighbors she stood beside through her work with the NAACP, Eastern Star and the Senior Citizens of Lexington.
Her faith guided every step. From Friendship Baptist Church to Ezekiel AME and Faith Forward Baptist Church, Ms. Mattie didn’t just belong to congregations—she served them, cooking, singing, organizing, and showing up in the ways that matter most.
When Ms. Mattie Terry peacefully transitioned on January 9, 2026, she left behind generations of family—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren—and a community shaped by her care. As tributes pour in, I imagine the hundreds of children whose hunger she heard, whose dignity she protected, whose lives she quietly steadied.
Her legacy isn’t only found in titles or years of service.
It lives in our secret codes.
In extra crackers slipped into small hands.
In skirts gently tugged.
In children who learned early that faith doesn’t always preach—it feeds, it notices, it protects.
Ms. Mattie Terry showed us what faith in action looks like.
And may that legacy and memory extend far and wide as her hugs.
