Moments in Grace

“You read me my Bible, Mommy?”   He asks this same question every single day sometimes several times a day, this three year old voice chirps like a baby bird hungering for more.   He carries his Bible everywhere and during morning family devotions he sits with his Bible storybook trying to follow along with the others. Each time I ask a question about any passage in the Bible that we have just read he says, “I know, I know!   Jesus die on the cross?” Yes, I say, Jesus did die on the cross for our sins. But this day as we are sitting in the afternoon sunlight, he asks for the story in his Bible storybook with the picture of the cave with the stone that is rolled away. First, we have to read the story of the cross, I say. So we do.   When we get to the picture of the cross, he knows this one by heart. “Jesus die on cross!   Jesus die on cross!   For us! See, see!” “Yes,” I say with a smile, “he did, but that is not the en...

When I met her for the first time, she looked ordinary to me, unassuming, like any grandmother, anywhere, with salt and pepper hair and a soft, generous smile.   How could I have known that I had met a hero?   On that very first mission trip, into the high Mexican desert, up the winding dirt roads to land of cactus and cattle and smiling children living in structures made of sticks tied together with twine, how could I have known that there was a gem buried in those desert mountains?   That there was a gem of a woman tucked away in the sparsely dotted folds of those mountains, a hero of a woman with a name like a gemstone.   Her name was Garnet. And this gem of a grandmother, she led our team up these winding mountain roads and we bounced and jarred over rocks and packed dirt in a white twelve-passenger van, she told us her stories. The stories of a life lived full out for Jesus. She told us that she had come to this desert land when she w...

On the morning that the snow was coming down all sleet and icy in gray October sky, she came.   She knocked on my front door, and we asked her in.   We asked her to sit down and would she join us for a moment? Join these six kids of mine and a friend and I, all sitting around the kitchen table having hot chocolate, and tea and coffee.   We were reading John chapter 3 while some kids were hanging upside down from couches. Some were wildly running.   And some were finding wool hats to put on so that the moment I said that we were finished they could run out into the snow/sleet whirl and enjoy a taste of the first glimpse of winter.   When she arrived we were almost done.   Almost done for the day with our Bible study time, and here she was, like she had been invited to the party. Like she had heard some unseen voice whispering to come in.   So, she knocked and she came. I don’t really know her.   I don’t really know her sto...