Two Grandmothers Who Rescued My Daughter

In the same way, older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not slaves to excessive drinking. They are to teach what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands and to love their children,"

Titus 2:3-4

People say that children are resilient, that they handle change better than those of us who are older. They say children adapt and bounce back. My daughter was four when we moved to another state to serve the Lord in the church and community where we raised her and her brother. It was quite a move for us - over 450 miles from home, another state, far from friends and family. While the move was exciting and we knew we were doing what God wanted, it was hard for us all. It was especially hard for our daughter.

She had never been physically far away from her grandmother. In her brief life, there had been few weeks when she didn't spend face-to-face time with her Mimi. We thought we were prepared for the adjustments we would all make as we left one community and became part of another. We were not prepared for the sadness that our precious four year old daughter would experience. She didn't just adjust and bounce back. Our excitement in following the Lord was blunted by our deep concern for her. 

We shared our concerns with people in our church, asking them to pray. Our Calvary family has always been so good to us, and they were all supportive and prayerful. Two of them, however, did more than pray. They chose to demonstrate Christ's love to us by adopting our sad little girl as their own granddaughter. They didn't try to take the place of her Mimi. They simply loved her, served her, cared for her just as they did their own grandchildren. Jesus, through Marylene and Aloyesse, rescued our daughter from sadness and helped her four year old broken heart heal. Through their love, expressed in real, practical, self-sacrificial ways, they taught her the nature of Christ's love and they taught her to love others in the same, real, practical way.

The picture above is my precious little girl on her wedding day standing with the two grandmothers who rescued her twenty years before. There is someone in your life who needs the love of Christ desperately. They will see Him when you love them in real, practical, self-sacrificial ways.