The Faith That Lived in Your Grandmother

She describes herself as a first-generation Christian and she has said it so often that it has become a fact.

It is not quite one.

There was a grandmother. Her father's mother, dead nineteen years, who lived in a small house at the end of a lane and who was, by every account anybody in that family gives, an entirely ordinary woman with no particular gift for anything.

She prayed. Everybody knew she prayed. It was mentioned the way you mention that somebody kept bees: a mild eccentricity, not embarrassing exactly, faintly out of step with the rest of them.

Nobody ever asked her about it. Nobody in that family went to church and nobody minded that she did. When she died there was a short service and somebody said she had been very devout, which was a way of finishing the subject.

The granddaughter came to faith at twenty-nine, on her own, in a city three hundred miles from that lane, and has always described it as starting from nothing.

And there is a photograph on her shelf of an old woman at a gate, and she looks at it most days, and it has genuinely never once occurred to her that she is not the beginning of anything.

Paul counts backwards for a young man

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also (2 Timothy 1:5).

That is Paul writing to a young man about his own faith, and look at what he does with it.

He does not start with Timothy. He counts backwards. Grandmother first, then mother, then Timothy, and the phrase he uses is that it dwelt first in her.

Dwelt. Lived in. Had an address in that woman before it had one in him.

And notice that Paul thinks this is worth writing down. He is not making a point about family sentiment; he is telling a young man in a hard season where the thing he is standing on actually came from, because knowing that steadies a person.

You have something that lived in somebody before it lived in you. That is what the word says about how faith traveled in that family, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old woman's prayers a real foundation rather than a nice thought, because Scripture says the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous person avails much, and availing is a word about effect.

An ordinary woman at the end of a lane

Now let me say something about your grandmother, because your family's word for her was devout and that word has done her a disservice.

Devout is a word people use to close a subject. It sounds respectful and it means: she was religious, and that was her thing, and it does not concern the rest of us.

But look at what she actually did for however many decades: she prayed for a family that did not pray, on her own, with no support, with nobody asking about it, and with no visible result during her entire lifetime.

She died nineteen years before you came to faith. She never saw it. Whatever she asked for, she asked for it into an apparent silence for the whole of her life, and then she died, and then it happened three hundred miles away in a city she never visited.

You are standing on prayers that were prayed by somebody who never saw the answer. The word says the prayers of the saints are kept before God (Revelation 5:8), which is an image of prayers being stored rather than expiring, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who moves on people at a distance and long after, because He is not bound to a room or to a decade.

What this does and does not change

I want to be careful, because there is a sentimental version of this article and it would be worthless to you.

Nothing about your coming to faith at twenty-nine is diminished by this. It was real, it was yours, and you did it in a city on your own, and nobody handed it to you at a family table.

What changes is only this: you are not the beginning. You are the continuation of something that had an address in a small house at the end of a lane, and the difference between those two is the difference between building on bare ground and finding out there was already a foundation under you.

You are a continuation and not a beginning, and that is the more solid of the two. Scripture says a threefold cord is not quickly broken (Ecclesiastes 4:12), and a line with somebody praying at the far end of it is not a line starting from nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been running that cord down two generations while nobody in the family noticed.

And I will keep it honest. Nothing here says the rest of your family follows, and I have no word about your father or your brothers. What is settled is that the thing you carry had an address before you, and a woman who knows that is not building on bare ground.