Sunday, 07 September 2008

• My Grandmother's Life of Grace

  by miss poppy
  

  
  

  
  Tonight I hugged my grandmother, her wizened little body practically disappearing into my robust embrace.
  
  Time is fluid for her now, her mind flitting from year to year, memory to memory. She tells me of her mother, who divorced her alcoholic, abusive father and married again when such things were Not Done. She laughs at the memory of my sister as a toddler, begging my counseling department-head grandfather, "Counsel me, Poppy!" She recalls my mother's black-and-white preteen conscience, unwilling to leave without putting money into an already-paid parking meter.
  
  I look at her and marvel at eighty-six years, standing right in front of me.
  
  She grew up in Nowhere. Felda, Florida. It was Nowhere then, and eighty-four years later, it's still Nowhere. But her mother, Mildred, didn't care about Nowhere. She knew business, and she was a success, amassing property and comfortable wealth, holding public office, and finally building a mansion in Nowhere. And so my grandmother learned that where doesn't matter. Who is what matters.
  
  She had curly hair and a flirtatious personality. The boys liked her. And she was popular. For high school graduation in 1939, she took her entire class to see that new, technicolor movie Gone With the Wind in theaters.
  
  And then the war came. She delayed going to college and worked as a stenographer on a military base. She once mentioned off-hand the name of someone to whom she'd typed a letter. Turned out he was a five-star general.
  
  She was a Christian, the kind that went to church, at least, so she headed off with her little sister to a private Wesleyan-Holiness college called Asbury. What she didn't foresee was meeting a crazy, class-clown future minister with bright red hair. He proposed to her in a graveyard on their second date. She said no, but a year later, she changed her mind. They were married in 1945. His passion for God would help ignite hers.
  
  The first years were lean. She laughs now as she recalls the days when all they could afford was bread to make sandwiches out of the fresh onions their neighbors gave them. When I was little I always wondered why she served so much food at every meal. Now I know.
  
  My mother and my aunt came along, blond-haired companions on the road to church planting and home missions. Along the way, my grandmother and grandfather found their niche: family counseling. They both acquired Master's Degrees, and my grandfather went on to earn his PhD and author a book on child-rearing.
  
  My grandmother spent hours and years as a co-teacher and co-counselor, listening to needs and providing help, often listening to the same people and the same problems over and over. She was still the belle of the ball, always perfectly coiffed and tastefully dressed, capable in the kitchen and the office and the classroom. She loved library sciences, and many of her years were spent as a college librarian, mentoring student workers and supervising the homeschooling of my mother before anyone Did That.
  
  Retirement was anything but relaxing for her. She and my grandfather traveled and taught seminars while enjoying the childhoods of five grandchildren. They moved home to the mansion in Nowhere, simultaneously running a small farm and their counseling ministry. Despite their schedules, they made time to play games of croquet and take us on "safaris" into the Florida wilderness.
  
  Finally, my grandmother made the biggest sacrifice of all, one that still staggers me when I think of it. She sold the mansion in Nowhere, the mansion that had meant status and prestige in her youth and security as she aged. She sold it for love of the red-haired man with fiery eyes who had always wanted to travel. She bought him a home-sized RV, one that would last them forever. For their forever, that is.
  
  They lived together in their house with wheels for seven years, traveling all over America and Canada, giving their grandchildren many, many once-in-a-lifetime experiences, sparing no expense. I will never forget walking through L.M. Montgomery's house in Prince Edward Island or watching the tidal bore in Nova Scotia. My grandmother was determined that I should see these things, that my young life should be filled with things she had never seen in her youth. And even though she hated the lack of space, they were happy together, she and her man. I remember once, when they were in their mid-seventies, we were all at an event together, and she walked away to go and get something from the car. His eyes followed her, marveling as she walked. My taciturn grandfather quietly said, "Look at that woman!" He was so proud of her.
  
  And then he died. Slightly ill health for a few months, nothing alarming. But then a diagnosis. Lung cancer, and three weeks later he was gone. My grandmother's fiery boy was gone. And she sagged. But she never gave up, and her faith remained.
  
  She surprised us all when she married again, quietly. To a man totally different, talkative and outdoorsy, a former missionary to Native Americans. We couldn't help but learn to like him. He had such an open heart.
  
  But my grandmother was leaving us, and we knew it. The twilight of my grandfather's life was also the beginning of the twilight of hers, in a way. You couldn't call it Alzheimer's, just the years. Perhaps she started to get used to the idea that she didn't belong here any more, because the things that stayed with her were the God things, the real things. Heaven's bonds started to get tighter than earth's. But her sweet, new, twilight-man took care of her while she slipped away.
  
  And then we got a call a few weeks ago, not that she had left us, though we know that is always a possibility, but that he was lying in a hospital bed, suffering the aftermath of a stroke. His rehab brought him to our town, and my grandmother came to our home once again.
  
  And Again, despite her frailty and fading memory, she coped. I see her coping every day. She lives for her man and for God, and she asks over and over what her grandchildren are doing with their lives, deriving joy every time we re-tell her of our successes.
  
  Both of her daughters and sons-in-law are active Christians. All five of her grandchildren are also active Christians. One is in music ministry and another is studying for counseling ministry. Four are college graduates (I'm the holdout-just starting my senior year). Two have graduate degrees, with another on the way. She also has two great-grandchildren.
  
  Proverbs 31:28-31:
  
  Her children arise and call her blessed;
         her husband also, and he praises her:
  
  "Many women do noble things,
         but you surpass them all."
  
   Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;
         but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.
  
   Give her the reward she has earned,
         and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.
  
  Proverbs 22:6  Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.
  
  My grandmother is not perfect, but she is inspiring. She's tiny, but her influence is enormous. She's not loud, but her example shouts from the housetops.
  
  She's a testimony to grace, the grace that took a girl from Nowhere and brought her home to God's house. She is a testimony to perseverance, the perseverance that stuck with her man and her faith through thick and thin. She is a testimony to wisdom, the wisdom that pursued every opportunity for self-betterment and offered those same opportunities to her children. And she is a testimony to Jesus, the One who never stops doing His good work until it is completed.
  
  Every day I see my grandmother's tread on this earth grow lighter and lighter, until her feet hardly brush the ground of the things we see and touch. But her grasp grows ever firmer on her eternal home, the place that will soon claim her, when she's ready to fly away.
  
  It's grace to see her, grace to be with her, grace to touch her, grace to know her. Grace to know that we don't have to be perfect to succeed, that God will use us if we give ourselves to Him. When I look at her life, I have hope. I know that it doesn't matter what we come out of or what we bring; if we give it to God, it will be more than enough.
  
  Grace means that our efforts become God's successes. That is my grandmother's life.
  
  Do you have a family member that you look up to spiritually? How have they influenced your walk with Christ?
  

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