Dear brothers and
sisters, we can’t help but thank God for you, because your faith is
flourishing and your love for one another is growing.
So we keep on praying for you,
asking our God to enable you to live a life worthy of his call. May he give you the power to accomplish all
the good things your faith prompts you to do. Then the name of our Lord Jesus will be honored
because of the way you live, and you will be honored along with him. This is all made possible because of the grace
of our God and Lord, Jesus Christ. 2
Thessalonians 1:3, 11-12
Every November 11th I remember Juanita
“Granny” Parker. We weren’t related by
blood, but she was my sister in Christ.
This is her birthday. She was
born in 1911, which, numerically-expressed, is 11-11-11. Today she would have been 111 years
young. It’s been 111 years since
11-11-11.
I’ve written before about Granny[1] and how she was like Paul to me. Granny was the “praying-est” person I ever knew. She was intellectually-challenged, and raised on the same farm she lived her whole life. She was undereducated in many ways, but a PHD when it came to prayer. In that church it was customary for the pastor to call on a lay person to lead the final prayer. I would sometimes call on Granny to end our worship service. There was never a prayer she offered that didn’t convince me I was short-changed in the praying genes department. She could pray Heaven down like no other man, woman, child, or preacher. In many ways Juanita Parker was a mentor to me, of connecting with God on the simplest, and best level…honesty, compassion, and unselfishness.
I miss her to this
day.
In an honest look-back, I have to confess that my
pastoral visits to Granny (who lived next door to the church, because she’d
given the property to build it), were more likely beneficial to the pastor than
the parishoner. No matter what else was
going on in Granny’s life, children, grand-children, great-grands that were
living with her, and she was helping to raise…everything stopped when the
preacher arrived, and we’d “set-a-spell” on the front porch. We’d never sit on the back porch, because (I
suspect) it was the scene of too many gruesome encounters with that mean
rooster. (But that’s another story for
another day).
As a young-ish minister, with less than 3 years under my
belt as pastor, I was still too green to recognize the tower of strength
sitting nearby. As a depression-era
saint, who’d faced more physical, mental, financial, and relational challenges
than I’ve had to navigate, now in my fifth-decade of ministry, Granny was
tougher than Muhammed Ali in the boxing ring, Ghengis Kahn on the battlefield,
or a crazed rooster in her backyard. But
with God, she was a child, tender, dependent, soft, and faith-filled. It seemed she melted like heated plastic in a
mold…to the shape of the most faithful saint. No matter how I tried to steer a conversation
with Granny, or move us to prayer, she was always ahead of me, and she was the
one who took the initiative to end our times in prayer – for me! I always left her little house shining
brighter, and a lot stronger, than when I’d arrived.
For You Today
You chew on that as
you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!
There are about 2,000 devotional
posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions
library. To dig deeper on
today’s topic, explore some of these:
Images: Title
image Pixabay.com Images without citation are either personal
property of the author, or in public domain.
Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
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