Luke 3:7-10
Crowds of people came out to be baptized, but John said to them, "You bunch of snakes! Who warned you to run from the coming judgment? Do something to show that you really have given up your sins. Don't start saying that you belong to Abraham's family. God can turn these stones into children for Abraham. An ax is ready to cut the trees down at their roots. Any tree that doesn't produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into a fire." The crowds asked John, "What should we do?"John told them, "If you have two coats, give one to someone who doesn't have any. If you have food, share it with someone else."
Scripture taken from the Contemporary English Version © 1991,1992, 1995 by American Bible Society, Used by Permission.
Now that my grandmother has moved to an Assisted Living Facility, we are cleaning out her house and going through the things she did not take with her to the new apartment. I recently found a spiral notebook that my mother had given to my grandmother, in hopes that she would write down some information about her life – and maybe begin a journal. There are lots of gaps… and the “journal” stops abruptly right after the death of my brother… but my grandmother did indeed write a lot about her childhood experiences and the early years of her adult life.
She talks about her marriage to my grandfather in 1932, and how they had a three-room house – and that was too much space for the sparse furniture they had. She said they made up for furnishings with love and happiness. She also talks of the kindness and generosity of a German immigrant who hired my grandfather to work his fields and gave them a two-room “house” to inhabit. My grandmother says the house was in awful shape, but she worked and scrubbed and cleaned to make it better… and “Papa Stecker,” as she called him, was very generous to her. He supplied her with everything from a roof over her head to his fertilizer and chicken feed sacks for making her clothing, underwear, bed linens, curtains and more, to helping my grandparents later in life when their crops failed and a mortgage payment was due at the bank.
My grandmother talks a lot about the love and kindness of Papa Stecker – and others. She tells of countless times spent with neighbors and friends, sharing what they had… canning and drying food, making cotton mattresses to replace their straw and feather predecessors, and “sleeping four or more to a bed” in order to visit relatives and friends and attend church revival services and catch up on each others’ lives. She related that once when the families gathered, her uncle brought his cow so the family would have enough milk while they visited.
Truly, my grandmother and her circle of family and friends practiced sharing the love of Christ through sharing what they had. Today, many in her shoes would not even think of sharing an extra can of food, much less clothing or a milk cow! But there is something even more remarkable about this journal. On countless pages, in between the stories of hardship and back-breaking work and struggle, my grandmother says, “We had such fun,” or “Those were good times.” She also talks repeatedly about how “the Lord” saw her through… and truly, her faith has been the cornerstone of her existence.
On the first page of this “journal,” my grandmother wrote about her mother. She said that her family didn’t have much to do for entertainment or recreation, and when her mother had a free moment, she sat down and reached for her Bible. My great-grandmother read her Bible daily until pretty much the day she died. She instilled in her children the value of “producing good fruit” and she taught them about the things that truly bring happiness… family, friends, honesty, generosity, and a genuine relationship with Jesus Christ, whom they almost always refer to as “the Lord.” Truly He was – and is – the Lord of their lives.
If we had to endure some of the things today that my grandmother has endured in her lifetime, we might very possibly collapse in a heap and concede defeat. But clearly, we have examples – from the time of the Bible on through history – of how God can strengthen His followers… give us deep roots and help us to produce good fruit. We have the models in place for how to do this. The question becomes… “Are we paying attention?”
©2011 Debbie Robus
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