“I was born November 20, 1913, with a high-plains blizzard raging outside. It was the first of many dangers I would face with my family during our life on the high prairie.”
These are the opening lines from Lillie’s Story. Lillie was my paternal grandmother, and not too long ago, I finished compiling her autobiography. A simple farming lady, she and my grandfather gave 50 years to a small farm in the rugged flint hills of northwestern Arkansas.
Things didn’t grow well. They endured dust, tornadoes, droughts, floods, and continuous financial setbacks. Over her lifetime, she survived Spanish flu, measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, and cadmium poisoning from a tainted cistern. Once, when my grandfather was ill, she broker her leg while hitching up the wagon and lay outside in the snow all night before a neighbor came looking for her. It was a hard life.
Despite the difficulties, Lillie loved the Lord and was determined to pass along her faith. Over months, years, and decades, Grandma jotted her life down on old bills of lading, the backs of Post™ cereal boxes, vegetable cartons, or whatever else she found at hand. After her death, I discovered dozens of shoeboxes filled with these snapshots of her life. (It took me eight years to sort them!) I soon discovered Grandma’s story recounted much more than hardship and endurance. She constantly described her faith, and even more importantly, God’s faithfulness.
As I read about her life, I often thought of Hezekiah, the faithful king of Israel, to whom God granted 15 “extra” years, healing him from a terminal illness. Isaiah 38 shares Hezekiah’s glowing testimony of gratitude, along with his challenge to parents to share their own stories of God’s faithfulness to their children.
Grandma Lillie certainly did that, and she didn’t mince words. In her final entry, written not long before her passing, she wrote, “I sincerely hope all my family, or others who read these simple stories of my life, come to trust in the Lord with all their heart. If they do, they will have His strength to sustain them….What could be more encouraging to know our Savior laid down His life for us, and then gave us the Holy Spirit to comfort us?”
Do you know what those simple words do for me? They strengthen me, ground me, remind me my grandmother lived out her faith to the end, and I can do it too! Grandma did two simple things as she wrote:
She made her faith the central theme. She wrote openly about her conversion, church experience, the faithful example of her own parents. She recounted important faith milestones, and she deliberately worked in the gospel again and again.
She told the whole story. The whole truth — good, bad, redeemed. She was open about sin and struggles, noting, “I will try my best to live for Him and to ask His forgiveness when I do wrong.”
May I challenge you to record your own story of faith for the next generation? Like King Hezekiah observed, you can only tell of God’s faithfulness now, while you are living. So, will you write an autobiography? A few key memories? A single moment that changed your life forever? The story of your childhood? It really doesn’t matter. It’s your story. Tell it however you want. But tell it! It could make an eternal difference for those you love.
About the Columnist: Eric K. Thomsen has been the managing editor of ONE Magazine since 2005. He is the worship leader at Bethel FWB Church near Ashland City, Tennessee, where he and his wife Jennifer also teach a college and young career Sunday School class.
