my grandma

If there was ever a time that crying "didn't make sense," it was when Jesus knew that He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. But the Scriptures tell us "he wept" and that as he approached the tomb he bellowed in his sorrow. Even though he knew he was about to bring him back to life. What a Savior!

As we drove into the parking lot of church today I received a text from my daddy:

My grandma died this morning.

I barely knew my grandma (and pappy) while growing up--they lived in North Carolina and we lived in Pennsylvania. They had somewhere around 25 grandchildren so it wasn't like we had the corner market on their time when they visited, either. They had a lot of special people.

But it wasn't just their physical distance that made me know them less. The stories we heard of them were intimidating: home late for curfew meant walking up and down the stairs 100 times; another punishment was picking up clothespins around the yard with your teeth. I think of those stories with laughter and a glimmer in my eye now--knowing their great love and affection for their kids-- but growing up those stories made me nervous. 

But then I went to college in North Carolina and all that changed. They lived 45 minutes from me at Wake Forest so I had the opportunity to visit quite often. I remember the first time I went to their house for dinner; I was shocked at how yummy everything tasted--biscuits, fried chicken, mashed potatoes! I didn't realize that when my dad told me Grandma wasn't the best cook, some of that was because yummier foods were more expensive than they could manage when he was growing up. Devastatingly, my dad's mama died when he was 10 and when Pappy remarried my Grandma, together they raised 12 kids. It's tough to serve biscuits, fried chicken and creamy mashed potatoes when you're just trying to make it.

My Grandma loved kids. She raised a dozen of 'em and then opened her own childcare center. And then at points she brought more kids home with her who needed extra love and attention. She had a marked patience and slowness with which she responded to the chaos I felt all around me. She managed to live with tenderness when life didn't offer her circumstances that would easily produce that fruit. She knew hard work. She held the loving gaze of her husband who adored her. She softened him when she was in a room and he often told me of how "she saved him." She was really, really proud of my dad and told me about it regularly. I was always a welcomed visitor in their home, whether I brought 10 of my girlfriends or showed up alone at 11 pm. My grandma always made time for me. 

Her love for me wasn't because I was special, it was because she was special. She wasn't impressed with wealth, education or fame, she was a servant of whoever walked into her home. I was the beneficiary of that love for a time, but there are many others who know her routine, whom she showered with attention, quiet space, meals, baby snuggles, and a listening ear.

My grandparents didn't live grandiose lives. Their names won't be written in history books for the things they accomplished. But they were earnest, steady, God-fearing and God-adoring, firm in their convictions, tender in their relationships, servants of all. I'm proud of who they were and I will continue to miss their presence in my life. 

The more I've studied what Jesus was like when he came, the more I've noticed and appreciated the kind of love and humility my grandparents had. And in light of advent and my grandma's death it feels appropriate to dwell on Him. **

My grandma wasn't perfect, but like Jesus she loved people whether they were shepherd-like or king-like; like Jesus she didn't demand a beautiful place to lay her head or for people to make a fuss about her, instead she served; like Jesus she consistently loved and welcomed broken people (including me); like Jesus she didn't wait for people to earn her love before she offered it--she went after the ones who would never show as much kindness to her as she showed them (including me). Like Jesus' love, you were never too poor or messed up for my grandma (maybe that's why my mom liked her so much. she's like that too). Like Jesus she welcomed little children and delighted in who they were. 

My heart is broken and my tears steady today because she is gone and because I didn't say goodbye.

This advent:

• I worship a Savior who (from a worldly perspective) irrationally wept because someone he loved died. Yes my grandma got to live many years, but that doesn't offer me consolation in light of her death. Jesus' tears comfort and compel me.
• I worship a Savior who surprised us all with his humble lifestyle; who surprised us with whom he pursued and identified, whom he served and protected. I'm thankful for a grandma who modeled that kind of love.
• I worship a Savior who paid for my sin and my shame because I did not love my grandma as I should have. I'm sorry, Pappy that I didn't love and honor her the way I should have. Please forgive me. 
• I worship a Savior who forgives her, because she, too, sinned and hurt people and wasn't a perfect mom, step-mom, grandma, friend. 
• I worship a Savior who died lonely--rejected and denied by many to whom He gave himself. My grandma was not loved by me the way she deserved but I hope she somehow felt companionship with her Savior in that loneliness or rejection. Lord forgive me.  
• I worship a Savior who promised to wipe away every tear from our eyes.

There's no other Savior for me. 

I love you grandma, I'm sorry I wasn't there to hold your hand and to whisper my and His love. I wish I had been. Give Pappy a kiss on the cheek for me and ask him to please not to wear an NC State sweatshirt to greet me one day.  

****
Here's one of the texts I try to read each advent, and one that I read this morning as I thought of Him and of them. It is from Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew:

I remember sitting one Christmas season in a beautiful auditorium in London listening to Handel’s Messiah, with a full chorus singing about the day when “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.” I had spent the morning in museums viewing remnants of England’s glory—the crown jewels, a solid gold ruler’s mace, the Lord Mayor’s gilded carriage—and it occurred to me that just such images of wealth and power must have filled the minds of Isaiah’s contemporaries who first heard that promise. When the Jews read Isaiah’s words, no doubt they thought back with sharp nostalgia to the glory days of Solomon, when “the king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones.”

                The Messiah who showed up, however, wore a different kind of glory, the glory of humility. “God is great’, the cry of the Moslems, is a truth which needed no supernatural being to teach men, writes Father Neville Figgis. “That God is little, that is the truth which Jesus taught man.” The God who roared, who could order armies and empires about like pawns on a chessboard, this God emerged in Palestine as a baby who could not speak or eat solid food or control his bladder, who depended on a teenager for shelter, food, and love.

                In London, looking toward the auditoriums’s royal box where the queen and her family sat, I caught glimpses of the more typical way rulers stride through the world: with bodyguards, and a trumpet fanfare, and a flourish of bright clothes and flashing jewelry. Queen Elizabeth II had recently visited the United States, and reporters delighted in spelling out the logistics involved: her four thousand pounds of luggage included two outfits for every occasion, a mourning outfit in case someone died, forty pints of plasma, and white kid leather toilet seat covers. She brought along her own hairdresser, two valets, and a host of other attendants. A brief visit of royalty to a foreign country can easily cost twenty million dollars.

                In meek contrast, God’s visit to earth took place in an animal shelter with no attendants present and nowhere to lay the newborn king but a feed trough. Indeed, the event that divided history, and even our calendars, into two parts may have had more animal than human witnesses. A mule could have stepped on him. “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.
                For just an instant the sky grew luminous with angels, yet who saw that spectacle? Illiterate hirelings who watched the flocks of others, “nobodies” who failed to leave their names. Shepherds had such a randy reputation that proper Jews lumped them together with the “godless,” restricting them to the outer courtyards of the temple. Fittingly, it was they whom God selected to help celebrate the birth of one who would be known as the friend of sinners.”