Gospel Mission (in St. Louis) down to the Enna Jetick factory. Our feet were measured and we were given shoes. I don’t remember choosing them, we would have been too embarrassed to say what we liked. “When I worked at the Washington University library, I only owned one dress. It was brown serge. When it was dirty I washed it by hand at night and pressed it in the morning. A lady there gave me two dresses in a bag and said maybe I knew somebody who could use them. I gave them to my sister Pearl, because I didn’t think they were for me.” As I listen to my mother’s stories, I think about the way God crafted her life. She is cut from cloth that isn’t available anymore. She made choices about humility, patience and faith when circumstances were almost unbearable. Listening to her, I don’t think she is aware of the courage and spirit she showed to overcome attitudes of despair, anger, depression,or lethargy that might have given her an entirely different character. She could have accepted an attitude of fatalism, waiting on fate or others
to alleviate her distress. At the other extreme, she could have had confidence in her own abilities and character to seek success on her own. But she is “Grace”. And it was her acceptance of God’s grace that nurtured those qualities of the Spirit that we see in her these days. It was a life-long process of accepting her circumstances as God’s schooling, believing that He is good. She looked beyond her reality to an eternal destination, and chose to follow God. She hopes and prays that we have done the same. My Dad used to say he was obviously not a proud man. How did we know that? “Because God gives grace to the humble!”, he would laugh, quoting the verse from James. The grace bestowed upon Grace’s humble life is so evident now, as she is given honor by those who know her, love by those who have been nurtured by her, and respect from many, something she never would have imagined as a girl wearing ill-fitting, clunky brogans. And heaven is still ahead! 45