My grandfather, my mom's dad, was born in 1910 in a small, unincorporated, community in the southern Arkansas delta. As I understand, or poorly remember, he dropped out of middle school or high school. My grandmother was born nearby in 1914. They married in 1930. Granddad's very slender and tall build contrasted with his being a man of quiet strength, and Grandmom was just as tough and she was gentle.
Over the course of his life, Granddad made his way as a teenaged moonshiner's smuggler (a fact I learned later in my life!), a logger, a sharecropper, and a warehouse worker. Some of his jobs, like the logging industry, kept him from home for long periods of time. Between times of returning home, he would send money back to my grandmother who was raising my mother, her four brothers, and my grandmother's young cousin.
In later years, my sisters have memories from their childhood of sleeping over at my grandparents' house. The floor slats had gaps through which they could peer down into the crawlspace below where the chickens roosted at night.
Theirs was a different world. It was a different time. It was a harder time.
Harder still was the Great Depression that turned the world upside down from 1929 to 1941. My mother was born in the early years of that period, and her brothers followed every few years after. In an already poor environment, the Great Depression took poverty to new levels in America. People learned to make do with less, to stretch what they had, and to make use of everything they could.
If you, like me, are a child of a Depression era parent, some of those traits probably passed to you. One solid sign is when you are reluctant to throw things out that could have an alternate purpose some day in the future. I have a vague memories of a glass jar full of buttons of different designs, sizes, and colors at the ready when a shirt or coat lost one. When was one needed, it wouldn't be a perfect match, but function won over aesthetics in their world. When you lived during the Great Depression, repurposing items was an absolute necessity - not a trendy endeavor for artistic sake.
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Now to the point of that mini-history recap and this article. I recall the most favorite, tangible, gift I have ever received in my many decades of living thus far, and apart from the greatest gift of salvation through Christ Jesus, I doubt I will ever receive a gift anywhere near what this one was.
I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I was in my mid to late teens. I do not remember whether it was my birthday or Christmas. The timing surrounding this singular event was absolutely inconsequential because of the impact of the gift itself.
At that age, I had to have either been out with friends or working and returned home later in the evening. My mom had already gone to bed. I went to my room to sleep for the night, and I saw a plastic grocery bag loosely tied sitting in the middle of the bed. I opened it and looked inside.
There was a handwritten note, a banana, an apple, an orange, and a handful of butterscotch candies. Confused, I pulled out the note and read it.
In this note that my mother had written in blue ink, she told me about her childhood growing up. Common things that we today take and dismiss without much thought, including food, were rare and precious in the world she had grown up in. Things like store-bought toys were a very rare treat. Holding onto and handing down frequently mended clothing was a normal lifestyle because money was in short supply. She also wrote that, as she could, Grandmother would hold back a few cents from each paycheck that Granddad would send home. The cents would accumulate, and when it came time for a birthday or Christmas, Grandmother would "splurge" and purchase rare treats as gifts for my mother and her siblings. These extraordinary treats would be their absolute delight.
These gifts would be in the nature of a fresh fruit (an apple, a banana, or an orange) and a few pieces candy (peppermints or butterscotch candies) wrapped together in a cloth or piece of burlap with a ribbon tied around its top to hold the contents.
When I finished reading, I could barely see the fruit and candies I had dumped out on my bed through the tears that welled up. The gift turned out to be much more than those tangible treats lying there.
If you've read my story, then you know that at this time period, I was going through some things in my life: my parents' divorce, my issue of rage, and my addiction.
My mother showed her deep love for me in wanting me to connect with her and aspects of her life that I would have never known and never experienced for myself; to understand her life for what she had lived through differently than what I had seen of it in her role as my mother; to take lessons from her life; to understand what it was to properly value things, to endure hardship, to make do or do without, and to sacrifice with love.
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God, wants to connect with us too. He reached out to us in the person of Jesus Christ - God who took on flesh and became a man. Jesus laid aside His divine prerogatives to become like me....like you.
Jesus endured the hardships we encounter. He endured the hunger and thirst we face. He experienced the joy and endured the heartache we feel. He experienced friendship and betrayal like we encounter. He experienced pains and agony as we do, and He experienced the physical death we will.
Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
- Philippians 2:5-11
Like my mother's display of love for me and her desire for me to know her better when I was still a mess, God is not waiting for us to clean our lives up before we connect with Him. We can't clean our lives up enough to be acceptable to Him. Only He can do that for us. We just have to respond to Him and accept His gift.
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
- Ephesians 2:8-9
Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.”
- Romans 10:9-11
God shows His deep love for us in wanting us to connect with Him and to know Him in a deeper and truer sense. Jesus showed us how to live and how to love, and knowing our sinfulness would prevent us from connecting, He sacrificed Himself and He sends the Holy Spirit to abide in each person that accepts the gift Jesus offers - the gift of eternal life through His sacrificial death for sin and His resurrection to life in victory over both sin and death.
God offers that absolutely free gift to us all. It's done, bundled, and wrapped just waiting to be accepted.
If you haven't already accepted it, I urge you to do so. The infinite Creator of all things desires to connect with you and you with Him. There is no other gift anywhere near its value or its reward.
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