Ultimately, missionary Wenona Jennings MBE may have lost her legs due to fragile health; but she never lost her bountiful soul — friends and family reflected during her funeral yesterday.

Ms Jennings died last week at the age of 85. Born in Government Gate, Pembroke, she went to Africa as a missionary soon after graduating from the Ontario Bible College in Canada around 1956.

Even though she escaped from Liberia in the midst of their civil war in 1991 with nothing more than the clothes on her back, the devoted Christian still yearned for Liberia, the place she called home for more than 30 years.

Nearly 300 people packed the St. Paul's AME church on Court Street yesterday to begin the process of laying her to rest.

But amid the poignant tributes by those close to her, above all, Ms Jennings was branded "one of God's soldiers".

With his voice consumed with emotion, nephew Leon Jennings reflected: "When she talked to her 'family' in Africa, she told them about her family in Bermuda and vice versa.

"This week as I was meditating I heard something that stopped to my spirit that reminded me, 'the physical is what we are but your soul is who you are. And aunt Wenona always knew who she was.

"And that's why it never stopped her from leaving these shores and going all the way to Africa after her vision as a young girl."

Speaking on his aunt's unbending belief in God and her obedience wherein, he highlighted: "I believe that even when her Majesty the Queen awarded her an MBE, her recognition was a good accomplishment but I'm glad that she knew that it didn't depend on an Earthly Queen, but it was a Heavenly king that she served."

Ms Jennings had a leg amputated in 1999 stemming from a fall at a bus stop. She later had the other removed due to sickness.

However, the physical setback ultimately halted her plans to immediately return to Liberia to continue her work.

Her nephew added: "She served her God right up until the end. She may have lost her legs but she never lost her faith. She was a phenomenal woman."

Ms Jennings lived her final years at the Matilda Smith Williams residence for Seniors. In an interview with The Royal Gazette in 2001, she said of her time in Africa: "I was stationed at the mission run by the Afro American Missionary Crusade.

"I went alone, but met some Americans there. I didn't know any of them. The programme was for three years and in my first three years there I took sick and after an operation in Philadelphia I came back here for nine months."

Ironically, her job during those nine months back in Bermuda was at the Matilda Smith Williams home where she worked for seven months under the then patron Cora Trott.

It was in her early 20s when Ms Jennings visited Liberia for the first time, alone in a country thousands of miles from home.

"I felt like Abraham when God told him to leave his kindred and go and he didn't know where he was going," she reflected.

"I didn't really know where I was going, but as the board sent me they had a place for me." She described the orphanage she opened: "I had a desire to open up an orphanage and most of the children were from women who died in childbirth.

"I brought them right up and was both mother and father to them."

But Ms Jennings didn't leave Liberia voluntarily, even in the face of the violence and civil unrest that erupted there in the early 1990s.

As the true missionary she was, Liberian authorities forced her out of the country for her own safety because she refused to leave her work and family there.

She had revealed about the gloomy period: "I was 100 miles out from the city, there was no transportation and they put me in a hospital (after becoming ill) where all the doctors had left.

"They sent air planes and boats to take the foreigners out and they sent word to one of the children who I brought up and he came in an old broken down taxi and took me down to a Catholic hospital where I stayed for about ten days."

After her hospital stay, she was forced to board a plane bound for the US, then to Bermuda.