On inheritance.

Last Saturday morning I received a text message I had been expecting for a month: my grandmother in Guatemala had passed away in the night.  When I first read it through, I didn't immediately feel my feelings. I ached for my mom, my aunts and cousins, and the pain I knew they were in.  As I got ready to leave for Dalton though, it started to hit me.  The finality of it.

For the first ten minutes of my drive I wished I had windshield wipers for my eyes. I can't really write what it all was that I was feeling. Sometimes I think language doesn't have that capacity. Or maybe I just am not very good at knowing what I'm feeling.  But I know that those first ten minutes were painful.

Then it hit me. I was wrong.  Because instead of finality, there was mercy and grace and eternity.

If you had met my grandmother in her youth, I am told that you would come away terrified, angry, and hurt. She had a tact for physical and emotional abuse, and a knack for bitterness. And she justified it because she had had a hard life.

She worked washing dishes for four cents a week from the time she was four, was pregnant by the time she was 16, and had seven kids in quick succession with a loving father and husband who also happened to be unfaithful and an alcoholic. Their love was complicated, and full of them trying to outdo each other in how much they could hurt one another.

Eventually though, my grandfather stopped drinking and he always came home. Just as things started to settle, a drunk truck driver ran him off the road and into a mile-long ditch, leaving her a widow at the age of forty.

Somehow, through her stubbornness and her ability to sell you anything, she made it through with her seven kids in a war-torn Guatemala. She couldn't read or write and had never been to school, but she could smell a liar from a mile away, and count her money with the accuracy of a bank teller.

I cannot tell you the many times I've heard of how strict she was with her kids, and how mean she could be, and how many bitter memories so many of my family members harbored towards her from her years of brokenness, loneliness, and bitterness.

And I cannot tell you that I knew her like that, because by the time I came around she had turned into the Guatemalan grandmother that you would expect: loving, spoiling, and very sassy.

Somewhere in her brokenness, she found Jesus and came to life. She learned to read and write and turned her outspokenness from winning arguments (which she still did till her dying day) to professing Jesus.

She reconciled with her children, she praised God for her hardship, and she made it a point to serve you  with every ounce of her being.

As I drove home thinking through her life again, I cried my eyes dry. But this time out of joy.  Because such a wretched sinner was redeemed and completely transformed by God.  And she rejoiced in her pain.  She clung to Christ with the same ferocity that she had previously clung to her bitterness.

In the weeks before her death I remember praying for mercy, and for God to take her so that she wouldn't suffer any more. She was in and out of consciousness, in and out of the hospital, and in consistent pain.  And He did, He took her mercifully.

She was home and had just worshipped with the elders from her church.  The two hymns she loved the most were Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus and a spanish hymn called God is Here. How beautiful to know that God was there that night, and as her eyes closed for the last time in her sick body she had assurance that the next thing she would see would be Jesus.  That she would be restored to health, and could eat all the sweets her diabetic diet had kept from her for years.

My mom and I were talking about all of these things a couple of days ago.  I made the joke that she had left several generations of sassy Guatemalan women, but no inheritance. But she did, she left an inheritance that is genetically inscribed in all of us.

She left an overwhelming amount of stubbornness, the fiercest loyalty you've ever encountered, and an undying desire to feed anyone within a fifty foot radius. She left a family that otherwise would be divided, united and more tightly knit than the most resistant of fabrics. She left her recipes. She gave us all the ability to silence a room with a very well-timed raised eyebrow.
She left us a perfect example of a sinner redeemed from death. Of a very, very big loss on Satan's part. Because in spite of the mixture of pain and loss and bitterness that ruled her early life, Christ restored it all and she counted it as a blessing for her testimony to be a part of His.

It makes me think of Micah 7:18-19

"Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity
    and passing over transgression
    for the remnant of his inheritance?
He does not retain his anger forever,
    because he delights in steadfast love.
¹⁹ He will again have compassion on us;
    he will tread our iniquities underfoot.
You will cast all our sins
    into the depths of the sea."

How beautiful to think that in my sin, Christ still chooses me as part of His inheritance. That He longs to restore me.  That He restored my grandmother. Remembering His love for us; choosing to forget our sins against Him. 
Into the depths of the sea.