A Special Relationship - GGG & G

She always treated him like a grandson. He always loved her like a grandmother.

Maybe it's easier when you aren't related by blood and there's so much history there. Or maybe - most likely - they just really enjoyed each other.

I'm not sure if she ever figured out what he did in ministry, but she was sure proud of him, and of us. I'm not sure what she thought about his bandana and weird t-shirts but it never seemed to bother her. And she was someone who cared a lot about appearances. A lot. But not his.

She loved him. She loved me. She loved P.

I've been remembering today the day that we were at my parents house in 2008. She had broken her hip the winter before and we visited her on New Years Eve 2007. But now it was summer, we were building our ministry partner team and we were at the house.

She was reading a little book called, "If No One is Perfect, How Good is Good Enough" by Andy Stanley. A simple book that flipped her faith on its head. She was raised to be good. To go to confession when she wasn't. To say a certain number of certain prayers to try to earn God's favor. And in this little book she learned something that changed everything. We came inside and she summoned us over to herself and said with wonder in her voice, "It's not good people who go to Heaven, it's forgiven people who go to Heaven." She then showed us a prayer that she had written down - the prayer that she had just prayed asking Jesus into her life - confessing her sin, her need to be forgiven.

That's one of my sweetest memories of her and G because he was so overjoyed. Beyond overjoyed.

He always held on to what was most important and that was faith in Christ. The good news of forgiveness for us, not the need to be good enough.

Many, many years later - probably in 2018 or 2019, she had another epiphany. Again she was at my parents house - living there part time. She'd been part of Bible studies with my mother for years and had recently been in a Romans Bible study. We were walking through the dining room and she said to us, "Did you know that the whole Bible is about God?". It was hilarious and precious and wonderful all at the same time. That a woman who had grown up in Catholicism her whole life would come to find in her late 90s that the Bible is about God.

I am as confident as I can be that she is with Jesus and with G too. Not because of who she was but because she had come to know who Jesus was.

G would always tease her that she would outlive him. And she did. And when she died, I loved to imagine how he might have greeted her - with an excited and surprised exclamation of "GRANDMA!" and a huge bear hug.