A Lesson from Great-Grandma

    Several weeks ago, we had a couple visit our church for the first time. I greeted them, and we exchanged pleasantries for a few moments before the service began.

   Later that same week, I dropped by their house and paid them a visit. We each spoke of our lives and our backgrounds and what brought us to where we are today. Then the wife mentioned that she grew up in Carrier Mills, IL, a town not too far from where I now live. Not thinking too much into it, I told her that I had a great-grandmother who lived in that same town when I was growing up. She immediately asked me her name. I told her. And with surprise in her voice she said, “She was my Sunday-school teacher when I was a little girl. She lived right across the street from the church, didn’t she?” Visions of her little grey shingle-sided house with the big enclosed front porch that I used to sit and talk with her on sprang back into my mind. I said, “Yes, that was her.”

    Grandma Emma, as we referred to her, used to bring out albums and show us pictures of her as a baby next to a log cabin. She had one picture of her grandfather who fought in the Civil War. She was born in 1893 and lived until 1985. She saw world wars and recessions. She witnessed the automobile’s birth and the beginning of air-travel. I also remembered how she used to have a cookie jar full of peanut butter cookies that she would save for us when we came to visit. They were stale, but I never told her. I was just happy she gave us something sweet.

   What a small world? What’s the chance of running in to someone who was a student of my great-grandmother? I thought to myself for a moment and then stated, “Wait a minute; she used to teach Sunday school?” I never knew that about her. Her son, my grandfather was a minister, but I never knew that about his mother. My parents, to my knowledge, never spoke of her teaching. My heart began to warm as I thought back to what God was doing in my ancestor’s life even before I was born.

   Many people would ‘chalk up’ this encounter as mere happenstance, but I considered it a ‘divine appointment,’ a meeting set up by God to teach someone that God is intricately involved in the lives of His people.

   I always considered that I was a pastor in part because of the choices that my grandpa, her son, had made. But until this moment, I didn’t give much thought that his mom taught him first the things of God. Actually, all of us who follow after Christ have the generations that came before us to thank for their faithfulness to Him.

   After the Israelites received the 10 Commandments, there is a section in Deuteronomy 6 called the Mishnah which charges them and all the other generations afterward to teach their children these laws of God. We are blessed today because someone chose to build in to our lives the love of God.

   I recently found and visited my great-grandparents grave, and I took my sons to witness the event. With God’s guidance, I plan on carrying this legacy that was given to me on to them. Thank you mom, dad, grandparents, great-grandparents, & ancestors further down the line for teaching the truths of God to your children and your children’s children and so on…may we not break our link in the chain!