Over the River and Through the Woods...

I know I'm not the first to say such a thing, but my grandmother is one of the most wonderful saints I've ever known. Now 88, she continues to amaze me with her warmth, her faith, and her love.

Can't you see those things in her smile?

She's generous and kind, understanding and wise, tender and encouraging. I'm so thankful my son, her only great-grandchild despite six children and 11 grandchildren, gets to know her. He adores her, as well he should.

My grandmother went to college, Meredith College in Raleigh, NC, before most women took that step to higher education. She became a teacher. One summer day, she met my biological grandfather, who was studying at Duke University's Divinity School to be a Methodist preacher, while on family vacation on Portsmouth Island, adjacent to Okracoke Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. He was there for his summer ministry internship.

They were married, and she began the life of a preacher's wife in the Holston Conference of the Methodist Church. She supported him as he made visits to mothers in the coal mining community he served during World War II, delivering the worst news any parent could imagine. She made visits with him to ill parishioners. She cooked wonderful meals for the presiding elders when they came for visits to his churches. She bore him four children, the second of whom is my father. When she moved with him in 1949 to a new church named St. Paul Methodist in Fountain City (now part of Knoxville), where he would be the second pastor ever, she did not know that she would not move with him again.

Early in his sixth year of appointment to St. Paul, when he was just 41 years old, my grandfather died suddenly and unexpectedly, early on a Sunday morning. My grandmother was left with the four children, ages 13 years to six weeks, in a parsonage in which she could not stay. Strangely, none of those four children followed in their father's footsteps by going into the ordained ministry. I am the only child or grandchild who has so far done so. Six decades after my grandfather, I, too, went to Duke Divinity School and became ordained. I remember how proud and happy my grandmother was at my ordination. Seeing her joy was one of my greatest joys.

I believe that if the Methodist Church had been actively ordaining women at the time my grandfather died, my grandmother could easily have been encouraged to enter the process. In fact, my grandfather died in 1955, and the General Conference of 1956 granted full clergy rights to women, but my grandmother found her calling, and her means to support her family, in becoming a lay minister of visitation at Church Street Methodist Church in downtown Knoxville. She talks about the time following my grandfather's death as a time of deep grief, yet a time in which she learned the provision of God through the dear and generous community of the church, who built a home for her, and whose monetary gifts would show up anonymously in her mailbox, exactly when she needed them most.

It was serving and worshipping at Church Street United Methodist Church that afforded her the opportunity to meet her second husband, the man I called "Granddaddy" until his death one year and four months ago. She knew him with his first wife and cared for both of them as she died of cancer, leaving two children alone with their father. A year later, love surfaced between my grandmother and "Granddaddy", and she took his children as her own. They married two years before I was born and lived together for 35 years.

Now she has a new community; she chose this past summer to move into a small apartment in a retirement community where some of her friends, also widows, reside. My husband, son, and I spent the last couple of days in Knoxville, dining out with her, going to Target, talking, enjoying the antics of a three-year-old. She let him grab her arm in affection. She bought him gifts. She held her forhead to his and smiled. She forgave his misbehavior. She read him books. She asked about the people in my churches. She overlooked our tardiness in arriving. She asked my husband about his mother, who is battling Multiple Myeloma. It was precious time. It is never long enough.

I dread the day (hopefully quite a few years from now) on which I will keep the promise I made to my grandmother: to conduct her funeral service beside my biological grandfather's grave in a little mountain town in Virginia, where he was born. My joy on that day will be to know that she's receiving the reward of her Master. Until then, it is my joy to spend any time I can with her, and to watch her love all of us in her family (especially her great-grandson) with the purest kind of love there is--God's love flowing through her.