Great-Grandpa and the Bible

A few weeks ago I was visiting my parents when my mom found an old Bible. After a few minutes of searching through the well worn pages that were full of notes she discovered the name on the front cover. Lawrence. My great-grandpa.

I never got to meet him but I've heard about great-grandpa my whole life. Mom let me borrow his Bible so I could look through it. Getting to read the notes that he wrote in his Bible, notes about his faith and the lessons he learned, notes from classes he taught and sermons he gave. Notes about God's faithfulness and the hard times that the Lord carried him through, including the death of his third son.

It's an amazing treasure to read all these notes and learn from his legacy of faith so many years after he's gone home to heaven. And that's really what it is. A legacy. Great-Grandpa was a carpenter and although some would look at the houses he built and point to those as his legacy I would argue that his faith was his real legacy.

Of course sometimes it takes me a little while to try read what Grandpa wrote. He had a tendency to misspell things (Mom I come by it naturally!) and he wrote in all caps, funny thing is, my grandpa, Great-Grandpa's son, writes like that too. Plus all of the typed notes stuck in the Bible were written on a typewriter so there's random spaces in the wrong place and things couldn't be corrected if they were typed wrong. (I've never been so grateful for my backspace button!)

Anyways today I just want to give you a peek into the legacy of my great-grandpa and share a couple of stories about this amazing man and the legacy he's passed on, through his children and grandchildren and through this Bible he faithfully read and notated.

Great-Grandpa Lawrence always said that he wasn't a preacher. He insisted on it. But in his Bible I've found notes from classes he's taught, there's probably notes from sermons he gave too. Because here's the thing- this man who 'wasn't a preacher' preached at a church for over twenty years every Sunday because they couldn't afford to hire a pastor.
I don't know the details of how it all happened but I guess there was this little church around 25 miles from where Grandpa lived. They didn't have enough money so they asked Grandpa to 'fill in'. They gave him enough money to drive back and forth each Sunday. He worked his regular job Monday- Friday, was raising a whole houseful of little ones and drove all that way every week to preach at this church.
But don't mistake him for a pastor.
I'd have loved to see the look on his face when Jesus gave him his heavenly reward for that service and explained that he had indeed been a preacher.

One of my other all time favorite stories about Great-Grandpa is from the Great Depression. My great-grandparents had four little ones at this time I believe. They ended up on the welfare list, a list everyone wanted on because the government would give you some money in a time when there wasn't any. One day they welfare lady came to give them their money and Grandpa said to her something along the lines of, "Well, Helen and I have prayed about it and we've decided we want you to take us off this list. You can put someone else on it who needs it. God's going to take care of us."
Let me put this in perspective. They had four kids at home! It was the Great Depression! And someone was offering them money but they turned it down! Can you imagine? That's a lot of faith to trust that the Lord will provide not just for you, not for your spouse but also for your children. During a time when the whole country was out of work, out of food and couldn't even pay the most basic bills.

As a side note of the six kids that my great-grandparents had one died young, two sons became pastors and their two daughters married pastors. The other one has faithfully served the church and helped others for many, many years.

You set a great example Great-Grandpa. You definitely raised up your children in the way they should go and now that they're old they haven't departed from it.

Somehow it seems fitting that my last story wouldn't be one that was told to me but one that I found in Grandpa's Bible. Stuck in the pages of Exodus there's some notes from what looks to be a Sunday School class Grandpa was teaching. At least I'm assuming it was a Sunday School class but it may have been a sermon, I'm not sure.

The verse is Exodus 33:14 "And he said, 'My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.'" Somehow in the class that led them to talk about clinging to the past. Be it a past memory, or experience or tradition. The notes point out that history is to be taken seriously, we all feel the need to have roots and we can all be 'helped by precedents and patterns that are headed down to us from the yesterdays'. And after all those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

But then the notes go on to explain that although the answer is yes it's only to a point. 'To observe the past is wisdom. To be obsessed by it is folly.'

So there it is, my Great-Grandpa, the legacy he left that we can learn from, but not be obsessed by and the Bible that I'm getting to study from someone else's perspective. Thank you for your faith Grandpa, thank you for the example you left, thank you for showing me how to keep living for the Lord when things get difficult.