A Letter To Every Grandmother

My Mother Left Me Her Bible. Every Verse That Saved Her Was Underlined. My Grandchildren Won't Even Know Which Ones Saved Me.

For 4 generations, the women in my family handed God's Word down, hand to hand. I'm 73. And I realized last year that the chain is going to break with me.

The week after my mother's funeral, my brother handed me a grocery bag with her Bible in it.

I knew that Bible my whole life. Black leather, cracked at the spine, held together with a rubber band for the last 20 years. But I had never actually looked inside it.

That night I sat at her kitchen table and opened it, and I could not stop crying.

Every page was written on. Underlines in pencil, then in pen when the pencil faded. Little notes in the margins in her small, slanted handwriting.

Next to Psalm 34:18, "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart," she had written: "Oct 1962. Daddy in the hospital. Read this every night."

Next to Isaiah 41:10, "Fear thou not; for I am with thee," it said: "Dorothy born early. 4 lbs. Lord, keep her."

That was me. I was the 4 pound baby. I was 52 years old, sitting in her kitchen, and I was reading my own mother's prayer for my life, written the week I was born.

Next to Lamentations 3:23, "They are new every morning," just 1 word: "Widowed." And a date.

I kept that Bible on my nightstand for the next 21 years. When my husband got sick, I read the verses she'd underlined. When I buried him, I read the ones she'd read when she buried my father. I found my way through my worst years by following her handwriting.

And her mother, my grandmother Ada, had done the same for her. Ada raised 6 children on a farm with no electricity, and she read Scripture out loud every single night by a kerosene lamp. My mother told me that story a hundred times.

Ada to my mother. My mother to me. Me to my daughter.

And then, I'm afraid, nothing.

The afternoon I understood

I have 5 grandchildren. Ben is 16, Chloe is 12, Ava is 10, Noah is 7 and Grace is 5.

I love them more than my own breath. And not one of them has ever opened a Bible on their own.

My daughter drifted from church in her twenties, the way so many do. She's a wonderful mother. But Sunday mornings in her house are soccer and pancakes, and God just isn't something they talk about. My son's family never went at all.

Last spring, Chloe was staying with me for the weekend. She found my mother's Bible on my nightstand and picked it up, curious. She flipped through it for maybe a minute. All that handwriting.

"Grandma, what is all this?"

I started to explain. And then she said, very kindly, the way 12 year olds say things, "It's kind of hard to read." And she put it back down.

That was all. It wasn't rude. She went off to watch something on her phone.

But I sat on the edge of that bed for a long time. Because I suddenly saw the future very clearly.

One day I'll be gone, and someone will hand my daughter a grocery bag with my Bible in it. Maybe she'll keep it. Maybe one of the grandkids will get it. And it will sit on a shelf. Nobody will open it. Nobody will know which verse got me through the night their grandfather died.

A Bible on a shelf isn't an inheritance. It's just furniture.

What I learned when I went looking

I'm not a researcher. I'm a retired school secretary. But I couldn't let it go, so I started reading.

The largest study ever done on where adult faith comes from, from Harvard, Baylor and Gallup, followed up on 202,898 people in 22 countries. The thing that most predicted whether someone still read Scripture as an adult was whether faith was a regular, weekly part of their childhood. Those children were 2.56 times more likely to still be reading God's Word as grown ups.

Then I read that 63% of Christians came to faith between the ages of 4 and 14. 4 of my 5 grandchildren are inside that window right now.

And Harvard's Center on the Developing Child explains why it matters so much. A child's brain builds far more connections than it keeps, and it slowly clears away the ones that don't get used. "Use it or lose it." What shows up over and over gets built in.

That's when I finally understood my grandmother Ada. She wasn't just reading to her children by that kerosene lamp. She was building something into them, night after night, while they were small enough to keep it.

My grandchildren weren't growing up without faith because they rejected it. They were growing up without it because nobody was putting it in front of them on a normal Tuesday night. Lifeway Research found that reading the Bible regularly as a kid was the strongest predictor of a healthy faith as a young adult. Only 29% of kids ever did it.

My mother's margins, in a glass jar

A friend from church showed me a jar she'd given her granddaughter. A glass jar with a cork lid, filled with little paper strips. 90 Bible verses, King James, and they're sorted by feelings, by color.

• Yellow for when you're happy
• Coral for when you're thankful
• Magenta for when you're angry
• Green for when you're anxious
• Light blue for when you're lonely
• Blue for when you're sad

I held it in my hands and I thought: this is what my mother did.

She never organized her Bible by book and chapter. She organized it by life. Scared. Grieving. Grateful. Alone. That's exactly what this jar does. A 10 year old doesn't know where Lamentations is. But she knows when she's sad. She can reach in, pull a blue strip, and read what God says about it. No flipping through tissue thin pages. No "it's kind of hard to read."

It was my mother's margins, in a form a child would actually reach for.

I ordered 5 that night. One for each of them.

3 evenings at the kitchen table

Before I wrapped them, I did one more thing.

I sat at my kitchen table for 3 evenings with my mother's Bible open next to me, and I wrote little notes on index cards. One small stack for each grandchild, tucked inside their jar.

I wrote down which verses had carried me, and when, the way she had.

"Psalm 34:18. I read this every night the winter your grandpa died. Your great grandmother read it when her daddy was sick. Now it's yours."

"Joshua 1:9. I read this in the hospital parking lot before your mom's surgery. She was 6. She's fine. God was there."

"Isaiah 41:10. My mother prayed this over me the week I was born. I'm praying it over you."

It took me 3 evenings because I kept having to stop and wipe my glasses.

Christmas, and what happened after

When I handed them out, I brought my mother's Bible to the table too. I told them about Ada and the kerosene lamp. I told them about the 4 pound baby. I didn't preach. I just said:

"Your great great grandmother handed this down to her kids. My mother handed it to me. I wanted to hand it to you, in a way you'd actually use. When you're scared, or sad, or happy, reach in. And look for my notes."

The room was very quiet. Ben, my 16 year old, who rolls his eyes at nearly everything, asked if he could see my mother's Bible. He turned the pages for a long time.

Then he asked me, "What happened in 1962?"

We talked for an hour. About my grandfather, and my mother, and what she believed and why. He had never once asked me a question about my faith in 16 years. He asked me 20 that night.

In February, Chloe called me. Some girls at school had made a group chat and left her out of it, and she'd cried in her room. She said she remembered what I told her, and she pulled a light blue one, for lonely.

"Grandma, it was Psalm 34:18. And your card was behind it. The one about Grandpa."

She was quiet for a second, and then she said, "I didn't know you were sad like that too."

That's the moment I knew. The chain hadn't broken. It had just been waiting for a new way to be handed down.

Noah, who is 7, now asks his mother to read "Grandma's jar" with him at bedtime. Which means my daughter is reading Scripture out loud to her son every night. Last month she called me in tears. She'd pulled Joshua 1:9 and found my card about her surgery.

"Mom, I didn't know you were in the parking lot praying. I didn't know."

I hadn't told her in 30 years. I'd never found the right moment. The jar found it for me.

To the other grandmothers reading this

Somebody handed you your faith. Think about who it was. A mother, a grandmother, a Sunday school teacher with a felt board. Somebody sat with you when you were small and put God's Word in front of you, over and over, until it became part of you.

You are a link in that chain. And right now, you might be the last link before it breaks.

You can't make your children take your grandchildren to church. You can't force a teenager to open a Bible. I tried both. But you can hand it down the way your grandmother did, in a form they'll actually reach for. And you can tell them, in your own handwriting, which verses carried you.

Because one day, maybe years after you're gone, one of them will be sitting on the edge of a bed on the worst night of their life. They'll reach into that jar. And they'll find your handwriting right next to God's Word.

That's what my mother gave me. It's the only inheritance I've ever actually used.

If something in you is aching right now, I think you already know. Don't let the chain stop with you. Order one for each of them, sit down at your kitchen table, and write down which verses carried you. Then hand it down, while you're still here to tell them the story.

With love,
Dorothy

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Tip from Dorothy: order a few extra days early so you have time to write your notes.