I started this blog over a year ago for a couple of reasons.

During the twenty-eight years I taught at Ozark Christian College, I often started class with a devotion I had written. I did this especially in my analytical grammar classes, which afforded me little opportunity, except in sentences I selected to diagram, to connect personally with my classes about the things of God.

I’m sorry or happy to say that the typical grammar student remembers my devotions far more than he or she remembers how to join subordinate clauses to main ones.

A former student and I attended a conference recently which featured a verse from Colossians that sent me into a grammar fit such as I have not had in years. I couldn’t rest until I had diagrammed the glorious monstrosity and began to discover at least some of its implications.

I was never quite gifted enough to help most of my students understand the value of such analysis. But many of them did grasp my passion for the things of God, and for this I am grateful.

Often they asked for copies of my material. I thought a blog on my website would be an excellent way to share some of my things with former students and with new readers alike.

Last week I introduced a series on grand parenting that I’ve been wanting to post. I will get back to that next week, but this week I want to pause and tell you about a passage of scripture I read earlier this week.

It seems like the right thing from God’s word comes along at the right time when you want God to lead and challenge and comfort.

Tony and I have close family members who are struggling with serious health issues. Sometimes I’m quite sad and frightened.

So it helped enormously to come across Psalm 63 in my reading. I haven’t diagrammed it, but I’ve memorized a group of verses from it, and they have become a prayer I whisper many times a day. I recast it a bit and pray it for those I love as well.

On my bed I remember you;
    I think of you through the watches of the night.
Because you are my help,
    I sing in the shadow of your wings.
My soul clings to you;
    Your right hand upholds me.

Whatever you’re facing this week, I hope you cling to him and know that he is upholding you in his right hand.

I answered the phone seventeen years ago and discovered that our older daughter Stacey was in no mood for pleasantries: “Mom, come over here and see if you think this test is positive.“

Stacey and her husband Steve had been married only four months and were going to think about having a baby after he graduated in two years and became established in a full-time youth ministry. They hadn’t been married long enough to know things don’t always go as planned.

I guess that’s why Tony and I found Steve sitting in the recliner and Stacey in the matching rocker staring at the floor in shock when we walked through the door to check the pregnancy test. Stacey took me over to her kitchen table where I looked down at the most obvious plus sign I had ever seen.

Tony and I couldn’t help but smile, and we’ve been smiling ever since. Even Stacey’s warning didn’t sober us. Pointing at us for emphasis, she said, “We’re not in this alone, you know.“

That was her way of sweetly inviting us in. Thus the era of grand parenting began.

No, my darling Stacey, you are not in this alone. Like so many other Christian grandparents, your father and I are pleased to do what God Himself exhorts us to do: “Do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children, and to their children after them” (Deut. 4:9).

I wrote a non-fiction book just over twenty years ago, called Framing a Rainbow, with the subtitle: Teaching your children they’re loved and teaching them to know and love God. If there’s anything we wanted our daughters to know it is these things.

Of course, the second part of that subtitle is too bold a claim for any book. But we thought we could help them at least glimpse their creator, sustainer, redeemer, and friend, and we believed that glimpse would draw them to him.

As mothers themselves now they’re dedicated to the same thing, believing as we did that showing their children how much they love them and teaching them what they know about God would equip them not only to cope with the world in which they live, but also to enjoy it, and even to bless it.

So, as grandparents, though we are not the primary care givers and responsibility is not as great, our goal is much the same. I can’t think of anything more important that loving our grandchildren and pointing them to the one who loves them most.

That is our two-fold job description, and I’ll elaborate on that description next week, and then in the weeks that follow tell you some of the ways we tried to accomplish the second of the two glorious “jobs.“

Let me begin with an apology. I’d like to blame what will soon follow on the snow storm that greeted the Joplin area on this the first day of spring. Better that than blaming myself for procrastinating the day away instead of conscientiously working on a blog entry. Better that than blaming friends who actually braved the elements this evening and came over to eat Tony’s stew and play cards till past our bedtimes.

(Ceri, dear former student, if this blog comes in four times like it did last week, no, it is not because you need to meditate on the message therein. In fact, I strongly suggest you delete this now before you read another word.)

The truth is I’m bummed. I can’t seem to make the third novel I’ve been working on into the story it needs to be. I’ve reconceived it three times, and still it has problems. Never mind the things that work in the story, too many things still don’t. It’s quite aggravating, among other more serious and blog-worthy adjectives.

So, in my frustration, I’ve been thinking about shelving the thing and turning my attention to something else.

But what?

I’m not the kind of writer who has stories waving their hands in the air begging to be told next. This makes me doubt my calling, but, thankfully, I once read about a successful writer who sits in his chair after sending off a novel and refuses to get up until he gets a new idea. How happy I was to know there’s another writer who doesn’t have to keep ideas at bay with a chair and a whip.

I’ve heard and read that a speaker has three seconds to capture the attention of an audience. I doubt an author has much more than that when readers open a novel. Thus, the first page, even a first line, is extremely important.

Years ago in a moment of frivolity, or folly, I made a list of first lines. They follow, and if by chance you’d like to vote on the one you would gladly pay good money for (with the story to follow, of course), just leave a note below with a key word from your favorite. (I realize it will be a hard decision.)

Ted dragged himself into the back yard and out to his postage stamp garden plot to work the soil with his trusty tiller; he hadn’t dreaded this kind of labor since he was eight and had to help pick up sticks from the back yard after high winds had unexpectedly hit Jasper Country.

Shonda sat in Dr. Shay’s waiting room, excited by the prospect of spilling out of her 36A.

I had thought this trip to the mall would be no different than any other.

“Ask not,“ Lou said earnestly, “for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for everyone—it’s an ice cream truck!“

I could think of only one thing—it repeated itself like the old song playing on the juke box in the bar next door to the motel room I slept in one night when I was a kid—“If only I could still wear leggings and four inch heels.“

I rued the day we bought those stupid bird dogs when the kids ran into the house shouting at the top of their lungs: “Gus and Mandy are stuck!“

I think that I shall never see the fog coming on little cat feet.

Her favorite bush grew lush and symbolic-like all over the side of the porch; thus she named me Lilac.

Susie’s cat hated going outside, and when Susie, who loved the cat as though he were her cat, tried to make him, he dug his claws into her chest and screeched like a mountain lion.  (Ironically, Susie’s cat was named Comfort.)

Last Tuesday night we had two couples over for dinner. We wanted to make sure this happened before we leave Joplin some time in the next few months. We’ve been meaning to get together with them for over thirty years or so. That’s how long it’s been since Tony coached with Sam and Craig at Parkwood High School in Joplin, Missouri.

Sam and Rita moved to Joplin about the same time we did and had their first child a few months after we had Stacey, our first. There are several things I remember about Sam and Rita, but two things stand out.

The fire is one of them.

Stacey was only a few months old when I tried to burn down our apartment. I wasn’t as dedicated to having a spotless kitchen in those days as I am now, and we had been in a terrible hurry the Wednesday night before the fire morning, trying to eat dinner and get to church with a new baby.

I left a pan of grease on the stove, and the next morning when I went to the frig to get a bottle of formula to warm for Stacey, who would be waking up soon, I realized there weren’t any and I would have to prepare bottles.

I put a pan of water on the stove to boil (yes, those were barbaric days), dropped in the bottles, flipped on the burner, and went into the living room to read the newspaper. It wasn’t long before I heard a popping sound and thought, “Dadgumit! A bottle must have broken.“ I put down my paper and rounded the corner of the living room to find the kitchen ablaze. I’d turned on the pan of grease instead of the pan of water.

Not good.

I stood in shock, looking at fire leaping around the kitchen, but I had the wherewithal to rush out of the apartment. Obviously I needed a phone, and ours was in the kitchen. I’m happy to say I hadn’t gone far when I remembered I had a baby inside and ran back in to snatch her out of her baby bed. We made it to a convenience store down the block, and the fire department was called, but we never found one of the little white booties Stacey’s Gran had knitted her (I was running pretty fast).

Except for the kitchen, the fire caused only smoke damage, but we did have to find someplace to live for a few weeks. Enter Sam and Rita with an offer to let us stay with them in their tiny two bedroom house. They gave us their bedroom and stayed in the smaller bedroom with only a twin bed if I recall, and if I recall, Rita was pregnant. I’m sure we thanked them, but I’m sure we did not thank them profusely enough.

I’m not sure what we would have done if they hadn’t opened their home to us. I doubt we could have afforded a motel for even one night, and we didn’t consider going home to our parents, two hours away, since Tony, who was still teaching at the time, needed to be in class. Their generous hospitality we will never forget.

A year later we added another baby girl to the family and during a summer break a few years after that, the girls spent a week with their grandparents and Tony and I decided to make a quick trip to see friends in St. Louis. We had travelled maybe three hours down I-44 when, clunk, the car just stopped.

We managed to get it to the side of the road, and to make a long story short, we would have been there until the kids were grown if Tony hadn’t been able to reach Sam Adams, who once again came to our rescue.

We thought he was just coming to get us, but instead he had called around and brought a makeshift part to fix the car, which enabled us to make it to St. Louis after all. That was six hours round-trip for Sam, and another generosity we will never forget.

I’ve been thinking this week that we forget so very much. It’s hard to conjure up all the moments that have produced a happy life. But it seems to me we remember remarkably well certain moments—moments of extreme joy, hilarity, terror, and shame.

And moments of extreme kindness.

The framing is almost done on the Branson house, and now that we’re back home in Joplin for a few days, we decided to go through boxes of pictures and try to toss, sort, and combine everything into one nice big plastic bin with a snap-on lid. We may have to go get a bigger one. I’m keeping more than I should.

I was snapping pictures long before digital cameras existed and scrapbooking made keeping a pictorial record fun and rewarding (and an incredible time-consuming labor of love).

No albums for me. Just envelopes of pictures, and I only began a sloppy form of putting dates on them sometime in the eighties. I have to line up the girls’ school pictures by teeth: baby teeth, missing teeth, growing teeth, complete set.

You don’t have to tell me how pitiful that is.

But I have to give myself credit: I took pictures. And I became an especially dedicated photographer (or record keeper) during the first twelve years the grandkids came along. I still snap pictures of them, but their parents have joined the fray, so I don’t have to be as vigilant as I once was, and of course, I’ve started forgetting things, including taking pictures, even though Tony has bought me a darling little camera which I keep in an inside pocket of my purse.

I’m happy to say I took a picture of my granddaughter Mariah last weekend with our framed house down the hill in the background.

Tony and I will have been married forty-four years this summer. We’ve been smiling at the camera for a long time now, and I’ve been going through pictures taken during those years. I’ve thrown out the really bad ones, which is a blog entry in itself, a classification and division essay. But there are so many pictures I kept: sweet ones, funny ones, interesting ones. That plastic container is a treasure chest.

It contains, in part, births, graduations, weddings, family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July, family vacations and reunions, visits and vacations with friends.

In so many of the pictures, someone is being hugged or held. What on this earth is nicer than that?

Six of us took a cruise a few weeks ago, and my friend Pam took a picture of me and Claudette, a friend I’ve had since college. It is taken from the back, and we are looking out across the ocean, our arms around each other’s shoulders. If I ever get a hard copy of it, it will be a keeper. (I’ll try to date it when I throw it into the box.)

I doubt I’ll ever get around to making albums. But it will be easier to look through my box now that things are sorted a bit. We might have a marathon picture viewing the next time the family gathers.

The grandkids hate for me to talk about passing from this life to the next (I call it passing from life to life), but when it happens, and both Tony and I are gone, I hope the kids and grandkids can take off a few days and sit around this plastic container, this treasure chest, and look at our lives together in pictures and take all the hugs and smiles they want. I hope they can feel the warmth of our love and thank God that we’re waiting for them in a place he’s prepared for those of us who believe.

But first—the new house and a family vacation on Dauphin Island!

Someone find my purse and hand me my camera. :-)