IT'S ALL ABOUT GRACE

Since we moved to a new state and a new community, we’ve met lots of new people from all over.  It has been fun to listen to their stories about growing up in various parts of the country.  I’ve never met so many people who grew up on farms! Sometimes it has taken a while to find others here who grew up in cities, on the outskirts of even bigger cities, like we did!  It has made for a bit of a disconnect at times.

A week ago our family lost a relative, the first of OUR generation, the “kids” of our parents’ generation.  It was so sad to hit this milestone and be brought face to face with the reality that now it's our generation’s turn to get old and die off.  Sorry for the morbidity!

My brother and I were discussing this recently as we talked about the death of our cousin.  One topic led to another and we found ourselves reminiscing about our own family growing up.  Having been exposed to so many nice farming family stories lately, of families who worked hard together and then ate huge wholesome farm food lunches cooked by grandmas, our own early history sounded like something out of Dickens, or the depression era!

George and I grew up in an urban town on the other side of the Hudson River from New York City.  We never thought of ourselves as living in an unhappy family – although our parents fought a lot, and especially when we were small, school aged children, our dad was physically and verbally abusive to our mom. We remembered the evening we both clung to Mom’s skirt, hysterically crying, while Dad threatened to hit her. 

We never thought of ourselves as having little – though when we were little, our parents lived in a $15 a month cold water flat with hot and cold running MICE.  The apartments after that one didn’t get a lot better and Mom had to work part time to help pay the rent.  It wasn’t until I was in sixth grade, that we found a 4 room apartment in a lovely two family house, that we felt we had arrived.

We never thought ourselves deprived – even when our dad didn’t see the need for either of us to get more than a high school education (he and mom went no farther than 7^th grade) – or when he said girls especially didn’t need a college education because they would just get married and have babies.  Mom, who valued education because she was deprived of it herself, convinced our reluctant dad to do whatever it took to enable us to go.  George and I were the first in our family to ever go to college, never mind finish.

Since this was all perfectly normal in our family, it’s only now, after hearing other people's stories and comparing them to mine, that I feel maybe my childhood didn’t have such an auspicious beginning! 

George and I talked a lot about these things and others, memories that caused us to marvel that we turned out the way we did.  Then we both said it at the same time, "but for the grace of God".  Exactly.   

"Not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to You be the glory for Your great love and faithfulness."  

Psalm 115:1