Appalachian Disciple

I had a grandmother and great-aunts who prayed for me.  I know because I never saw my Great Aunt Bootsie but that she told me so, and Great Aunt Janie the same.  I took this totally for granted.  Shaking hands or giving hugs after church, hearing, “I’m praying for you!” from them and other elderly women who were church family, if not blood family — that’s just what all old ladies say, I thought in my teens.

Except it’s not.  I am now thoroughly middle-aged, raising my own teens, and my 88 year-old mother-in-law lives in my house.  As far as I know, she does not know the Lord.  And so as far as I know, she doesn’t speak to Him, not for me or anyone else. 

When my children hit their early teenage years, my walk with God was rocked in a very specific way.  Up until that point, I had a gnawing sense that I should depend upon God more in prayer, that I should demonstrate trust in Him by praying more.  It was on the list of things I should do, like working out or putting my kids on a chore rotation.  Good things, to be sure, when time could be found for them.  But then I hit upon walls in my children’s hearts that I couldn’t breach.  Despite all of my carefully orchestrated planning and teaching over the years, there it was, and I could do nothing about it.  Who could?  Only God.  And for the first time, I really believed that.  It was that glimpse of reality, that for all the power I thought I had, the far and away greatest was my audience with actual Power, with Love.  Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, because He ripped in half the dividing curtain and strode right into the heavenly sanctuary and sat down at the right hand of God “to appear for us in God’s presence,” I can be heard by God — the only one who can change hearts.

So I still teach my kids and feed my kids and listen to them and enforce bedtime and make sure they have clothes that fit, but more than any of that, and without the effort that it used to take, I pray for them.  Actually, that’s not true — it is a lot of effort; it is still time that has to be fought for, and diving deep into warfare through prayer can be physically exhausting.  But I no longer have to work to drum up the desire.  I know that I need it.  I know that they need it.  I know that God hears me.

Against that backdrop, I have a much, much greater appreciation for the ladies who prayed over me in my youth.  I cannot begin to understand how different life may have gone for me without their intervention.  Their lives were not standout or remarkable in any worldly way.  Only after Aunt Bootsie died did I discover that she had “a past.”  She had a difficult younger life, distant from an otherwise close family, divorced at time when it just wasn’t done, then married again to a drunk and abuser. All this was a shock to me.  I only knew a devoted, elderly woman who taught Sunday School for decades, who spent hours in prayer, and who told me in her 90’s that she would just keep visiting her neighbors until God took her home.  How God redeems a life!  It encourages me even right now that all those years I didn’t pray so much can be followed by all the ones I did, and in the end maybe that’s all that matters.

So I live in a world of people who pray.  I work with them, worship with them, and are related to many of them.  When all threatens to fall apart, there are people I can reach out to, who can appeal to God with me, to keep it together.  Living with a non-praying elderly person, then, has been eye-opening.  I don’t mean any rudeness to my mother-in-law.  She also had a rough early adult life and did a fine job raising my husband.  She has dementia and other ailments, so just living is a challenge.  Even so, there is no God-ward orientation or relationship that I can see.

When my daughter was finishing Army Basic Training, sick and hurt, facing the final challenges and really not sure how it would go, I would read the letters to Grandma.  “That’s unfortunate,” she would say, or “It’s a worry.”  Silence where the “I will pray for her” would go.  Because not everyone has an audience with God.  Stop a minute and think about that.

Instead my mother-in-law reads and watches the news every waking hour.  She drinks in the “breaking news,” of this world that she’s soon to leave, reads and rereads articles about politics, and frets over her appearance.  Watching this has been a lesson in life goals for me. 

May God grant that if I live to be 88, I will drink in His Word the way she drinks in the newspaper.  May I let my body go back to the ground from which it was taken, while I am renewed inwardly day by day.  May I  pray stronger and longer than ever; even if I forget what I just prayed five minutes ago and repeat it again and again.  May I never stop using my audience with God to intervene for a world that mocks the very notion of prayer, mocks everything it can’t understand.  These are my earnest desires, but I would be foolish to believe I’m strong enough to bring them to pass.  Only the Spirit in me.  Amen.  And let’s give honor where it is due; here’s to the praying grandmas!  We need you now more than ever.