Voices of the Past

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother, Laura, recently (my father’s stepmother, but his mother died when he was fourteen, so Laura has always been my grandmother on that side of the family).  A few years ago, we came across her Bible, and I was surprised to see that on one of the opening pages, she’d written the Serenity Prayer:

“God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the ones that I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.”

I was puzzled. Why had these words meant so much to her?

My grandparents lived next door to us when I was growing up, and I saw Laura pray and read her Bible on a daily basis, but I’d never heard her mention the Serenity Prayer. Yet, there it was in the Bible she treasured. Why? I gave it a bit of thought and then forgot about it. But the words of the prayer have come to mind recently. I’ve been giving some thought to the realities of what I can control and what I cannot in my own life, and I started thinking about Laura’s Bible again and the prayer. What couldn’t she change but wanted to? It came to me that one issue that likely weighed heavily on her heart was that she never had any children. She’d grown up in a hollow in the back hills of Tennessee. She’d quit school when she was in eighth grade. She ended up working in a cotton mill until age thirty-three, when she met and married my grandfather, a widower. His sixteen-year-old son (my father), moved in with relatives next door, rather than live in the house with them. She never had “children” until she was in her early fifties, and my father and mother had me. My brother was born three years later.  We were the apples of her eye. And she lived her faith in front of us, praying, reading her Bible, and trusting the Lord.  The Bible was the standard; there was no other. And she loved her husband dearly for all of the days of her life.

But she must have missed somethings. The Serenity Prayer says so. She must have longed for children, maybe for an education, for her grandchildren to live closer when they’d grown up, and what else I do not know.  Or maybe she also struggled for the courage to change the things she could change. I’ll never have the full answer this side of heaven. But I will have her in mind as I, in a life much different than hers but still built on faith, struggle to accept what I cannot change, pray for the courage to change what I can, and for the wisdom to know the difference.

She lived a simple life, but what a great witness. She left a legacy of faith.