Born and bred

David and I spent about four and a half hours with my grandmother today, talking and lunching and squishing that baby the whole time.  I miss her so much, and at 92 I know that logically I only have so long to miss her here before I'll be missing her a whole lot more.  I wish I knew for sure that she was a Christian, but I don't.  The last few months have been hard in that regard; accepting the fact that I can't force Christ on my loved ones. Sometimes I'll get so close to seeing them find Him only to have that gift yanked away from me at the last minute.  My sister asked me how to pray for God's presence in her life a few weeks ago, my agnostic, rough around the edges little sister, and when I told her she assured me that she was going to go home from work and pray.  I was so excited, friends.  I told David and I may have cried a bit as well; it's been lonely being the only Christian in my family and I couldn't wait for my sister to call me the next day and tell me all about it.  I even wrote her a congratulatory email, complete with information on free Christian education and a variety of churches she may want to check out.  But when I finally got ahold of her a few days later, she said she'd never prayed.  I was so sad.

Yesterday I managed to get my grandmother to agree to come to church with us on Easter Sunday, but today she told me she thought it would be 'too much' for her.  Which, physically, it probably would be, but I wanted her there.  I keep imagining how if she could just get there, if she could just hear a wonderful message on God's love and meet people who weren't pushy or crazy, then maybe she would see what I see and not through a glass darkly.

In many ways being alone in your faith helps you to rely on God's grace; He is my family, He is my father and mother and grandparents.  He is my brother who will never fail me.  And yet, it isn't quite the same, and it shouldn't be.  God 'set the lonely in families' but to the lonely already in families He said 'leave your mother and your father and follow me'.  When I was being wooed by a 2000 year old carpenter I did wonder about the rift it would cause in my family, but the rift doesn't look like what I thought it would.  For one thing, when you aren't a Christian, you really don't care about Christianity.  And when you are a Christian, you care immensely about Christianity, and so you end up with a lot of apathetic atheists surrounded by stressed out, intensely eager evangelists!  Not a good mix.  The rifts I found that happened in my family were not giant 'I'm disowning you' sort of problems, in fact the worst of the problems stemmed from the fact that suddenly this whole Christian thing was very VERY important to me, and no one else gave two shakes about it.

I'm still learning to accept the fact that God will bring these people to Him in His time, and that my role is just to be there, answering questions if they're asked, frequently offering opportunities to participate in a faithful life, and witnessing for Christ in how I live day-to-day.  But I still wish that I knew for sure that I would see them again, my loved ones.  I don't want to miss them forever.  And it would be wonderful to go to church with my family at least once.