A Letter To Every Grandmother
I Spent 3 Nights In The Hospital Last Winter. At 2:40 In The Morning, I Realized What I'd Never Given My Grandchildren.
I'm fine now, thank God. But I want to tell you about that night, because it changed what I gave my grandchildren for Christmas, and I don't want you to need a hospital bed to figure it out.
Updated Oct 23, 2026 · 7 min read
It was 2:40 in the morning. I know because I watched every minute change on the clock above the door.
I'm 69. Last January, my heart decided to do something it wasn't supposed to do while I was carrying groceries in from the car. My neighbor called the ambulance. By that night I was in a hospital bed with wires on my chest and a monitor beeping next to my head, and a very kind young doctor telling me they'd know more in the morning.
My daughter had gone home to put her kids to bed. The nurse had dimmed the lights. And for the first time in my life, I was alone with the thought that I might not see another Christmas.
I wasn't scared of dying, exactly. I've walked with the Lord a long time. What scared me was something else.
I picked up my phone, and the lock screen was a photo of my 4 grandchildren from last summer. Mason, Ella, Lucas and little Ruby, all squinting into the sun at the lake.
And I started doing an inventory in my head. If I don't wake up tomorrow, what do they actually have from me?
The inventory
I went through it, gift by gift, in that dark room.
Mason's tablet, 2 Christmases ago. The sneakers Ella wanted so badly. Birthday cards with $50 in them, every single year. A trip to the aquarium. My chocolate chip cookie recipe, which my daughter swears she'll learn someday.
Photos. So many photos.
And not one thing that would help them on a night like the one I was having.
Because here's what I was doing at 2:40 in the morning. I was whispering a verse. Over and over, the way my own grandmother taught me when I was 7 years old and afraid of thunderstorms.
"What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee." Psalm 56:3.
62 years later, alone with that monitor beeping, it was the first thing that came to me. I didn't have to look it up. It was just there, built into me, waiting for the night I'd need it.
And lying there, I realized something that I still can't say without my throat getting tight. My grandchildren don't have a single verse like that. Not one.
Someday each of them will have their own 2:40 in the morning. A hospital room. A breakup. A phone call with bad news. A night when they're scared and alone and nobody is awake to call. And when that night comes, there will be nothing built into them to whisper.
I won't be there for most of those nights. That's just the math of being a grandmother.
I prayed the rest of that night. Not for me. For them. And I made God a promise: if You give me another Christmas, I'll do something about it.
Another Christmas
The tests came back better than anyone expected. I went home on the 3rd day with a bag of new pills and a list of rules. My daughter drove. I watched the snow out the window and thought about my promise.
My grandkids don't go to church. My daughter stopped taking them years ago, and my son's wife was raised without any faith at all. Every time I've tried to bring up God, I've watched their eyes politely glaze over. So I knew a lecture wasn't going to work, and neither was a Bible they'd never open.
I needed to understand how faith actually gets built into a child. So I did what I'd never done in my life. I started reading the research.
What I found
The biggest study ever done on where adult faith comes from was run by Harvard, Baylor and Gallup. 202,898 people in 22 countries. The single strongest pattern was whether faith was a regular, weekly part of someone's childhood. Those children were 2.56 times more likely to still be reading Scripture as adults.
Another survey found that 63% of Christians came to faith between the ages of 4 and 14. 3 of my 4 grandchildren are in that window right now. Ruby is about to enter it.
And Harvard's Center on the Developing Child explained exactly what had happened to me at 7 years old. A child's brain builds far more connections than it will ever keep, and it slowly prunes away the ones that don't get used. "Use it or lose it." What shows up again and again during those years gets built in for life.
That's why Psalm 56:3 was there for me at 69. My grandmother put it in front of me over and over when my brain was still deciding what to keep.
Lifeway Research found the strongest predictor of a healthy faith in young adults was reading the Bible regularly while growing up. Only 29% of kids ever did.
My grandchildren were going to be in the other 71%. Unless I did something.
A verse for every 2:40 in the morning
My sister in law sent me a picture of a jar she'd given her grandson. A glass jar with a cork lid, full of colored paper strips. 90 Bible verses, King James, sorted by feelings.
- 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 looked at that picture for a long time. Because that was it. That was exactly what I'd been missing in the hospital, except for them.
A child doesn't need to know where Psalms is. They just need to know how they feel. Scared? Reach for green. Alone? Light blue. And then they read what God says about it. And if they do it enough times, in enough ordinary moments, some of those verses will get built in. The way mine did.
So that one day, on their own 2:40 in the morning, there will be something there.
I ordered 4. One for each of them. Handmade, in a gift box.
See the jar Linda gave her grandchildren →What I said on Christmas morning
I almost didn't say anything. I didn't want to make Christmas heavy. But when I handed them out, it came out anyway.
"Last winter, I almost wasn't here for this. And in the hospital, the thing that got me through the night was a Bible verse my grandma taught me when I was little. I want you to have that. So when you're scared, or sad, or lonely, and I'm not there, you reach in here. God's Word will be there even when I'm not."
Nobody said anything for a second. Then Mason, who is 16 and doesn't hug anyone anymore, got up and hugged me for a very long time. He didn't say a word. He didn't have to.
What happened after
In March, Mason took his driving test. He failed it the first time and was terrified to take it again. The morning of his second try, my phone buzzed at 7:15.
It was a photo of a green strip of paper on his dashboard. Underneath it, he'd typed: "Psalm 56:3. Grandma, that's your verse, right?"
He'd pulled it by chance. Out of 90 verses, my verse. I sat down on the kitchen floor and cried. He passed, by the way.
Ella, 11, pulled a yellow one on her birthday and called me just to read it to me. Nobody asked her to. She just wanted to.
Lucas, 8, lost his dog Biscuit in the spring. My daughter told me he went to his room, and she found him sitting on the floor with his jar, holding a blue strip. She sat down with him and they read it together. "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart." My daughter said it was the first time she'd read a Bible verse out loud since she was a teenager.
And Ruby, 4, can't read yet. But every time we FaceTime, she holds the jar up to the camera and picks "a color for Grandma," and her mom reads it to us both.
Why it works. It doesn't wait for a crisis. It meets them in small, ordinary feelings, over and over, so the verses are already there when the big night comes. A UCLA brain study found that just putting a feeling into words calms the brain's alarm center. So a child reaching for green has already named their fear. Then God's Word answers it.
Researchers at University College London found it takes about 66 days of repeating 1 small thing for it to become automatic. There are 90 verses in every jar.
To the other grandmothers reading this
None of us knows how many Christmases we have left. We say it like a joke at family dinners. But I've sat in that room at 2:40 in the morning, and I promise you, it isn't a joke.
Please don't wait for your own hospital bed to have this thought. I'm giving you mine so you don't need it.
You can't make your children take them to church. You can't make a teenager listen to a sermon. But you can put God's Word within arm's reach of their bed, in a way they'll actually use. And you can tell them why it matters to you, while you're still here to tell them.
Because one day, on their own worst night, they're going to need something to whisper. Let it be something you gave them.
Please, one for each grandchild.
I thought about getting 1 jar for each family. I'm so glad I didn't.
Because every one of them will have their own 2:40 in the morning. Not together. Not in the same house. Not in the same year. Mason's might come in a college dorm. Ruby's might come 40 years from now, in a hospital bed of her own. A shared jar can't be on every nightstand at once.
Because I won't be there for most of those nights. That's the hardest truth of being a grandmother. I can't be in 4 rooms at 2:40 in the morning. But a jar can.
Because it has to be built in before it's needed. My verse was there at 69 because I met it at 7, over and over. Each child has to reach in themselves, in their own small moments, for it to become theirs. You can't build a habit with somebody else's jar.
And because none of them should be the one who didn't get one. I'd never forgive myself if one of my grandchildren had their worst night with nothing to reach for, just because I tried to save a little.
4 grandchildren. 4 jars. So that there is never a night when one of them has nothing.
I got another Christmas. I don't take that for granted anymore. If you're reading this and you have grandchildren you love more than your own life, don't wait for a sign. This might be it.
With love,
Linda
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Sources: Global Flourishing Study, Scientific Reports (2025). Lifeway Research (2017). Lieberman et al., Psychological Science (2007). Lally et al., European Journal of Social Psychology (2010). Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University.
Linda's letter is a dramatized story based on the experiences grandparents have shared with us. Names and details have been changed. Individual experiences vary. This product is not a substitute for medical care or professional support.
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