When I was twenty-five years old, my husband and I made the trip to Parsons, Kansas, to introduce our newly-born baby girl to my relatives. My grandfather was seventy-six at the time, and, to me, he seemed ancient. In fact, I thought it likely that he would die before I saw him again, and I spent as much time talking to him as possible.
My grandfather was born into a family of fourteen children, and he grew up in extreme poverty on a farm in Pleasanton, Kansas. He left only to fight in World War I and then returned to Kansas where he married my grandmother at age twenty-seven. For a time he supported his family by working as a barber, but he took a job with the Katy Railroad as soon as one became available, and he remained there until he retired.
My grandfather never had any money. He and my grandmother bought a small house on five acres of land at the edge of town, and they fed their six surviving children by raising a huge garden and milking their own cow. Their meat was provided by the chickens that they raised and the calf and pig that they butchered each year. Life was hard.
Yet, my grandfather never said anything to indicate that they were poor. During the depression, he instructed each of his six children to bring one child home from school each evening to have “supper” with them. This was a great treat for the children who lived in town and often went to bed hungry. His only stipulation was that they had to bring different children home each evening so that they could rotate those special meals among the children in their classes.
In spite of the obvious hardships that my grandfather had endured, he never talked about his unfulfilled dreams. I never heard him say, “I wish,” or “I wanted,” or “I could have.” He lived his life simply and honestly in a straight-forward manner, and he seemed to be at peace with himself and his neighbors.
Nevertheless, I felt certain that a man of his age must have some regrets, and so during that visit, I asked him if he could go back in time and change anything about his life what that change would be. I was certain that he would say that he would have liked to have been better educated, or he would have liked to have made more money, or he would have like to have traveled to distant parts of the world. Surely, by the time a man has lived seventy-six years, he must have something he would go back and change that would have, in turn, changed the outcome of the rest of his life.
I was very surprised, therefore, when he responded without the slightest hesitation, “I would only change one thing. I would have kept my baby from dying if I could have.” (This was a reference to the sixteen-month old baby girl who died of diphtheria).
What could possibly cause a man to be so content with a life that would appear to an observer to be completely unremarkable? I believe that the secret to my grandfather’s contentment was this: At the age of thirty-eight, he became a Christian. When he accepted Christ, he did so with his whole heart, and he never looked back. From that time on Christ was the reason for everything he did.
My grandfather had smoked a pipe since he was eleven or twelve years old, but when he became a Christian, he stopped smoking—not because anyone told him that he should not smoke—but because he believed that smoking did not honor Christ. He never smoked again, and he never talked about having quit; it was just no longer a part of who he was.
Everything that my grandfather did was a reflection of his relationship to Christ. I do not know what he did prior to his conversion, but during the forty years that I knew him, he never drank; he never swore; and he never told a lie that I was aware of.
I needn’t have worried about not seeing my grandfather again. He lived an additional fourteen years after that visit, dying less than three months before his ninetieth birthday. He is buried in a beautiful little country cemetery only a few feet from the grave of his baby girl whose death he always mourned.
A few years after my grandfather’s death my mother and stepfather visited my family, and my stepfather began talking about my grandfather. He said that he had noticed that during the last couple of years before my grandfather died, whenever he napped in his favorite chair, he would talk in his sleep. One day my stepfather decided that he wanted to find out what my grandfather was saying, and he walked to his chair and bent his head to catch his words.
“He was praying!” my stepfather exclaimed. “All that talking in his sleep was just praying.”My stepfather was disappointed that there were no deep dark secrets to be discovered, and he quickly lost interest in my grandfather’s sleeping habits.
I, however, am blessed beyond measure to know that my grandfather was a man who loved Jesus so much that he even talked to him in his sleep. That is the best legacy he could have left me, and I hope to follow his example so that when I am seventy-six years old I can look back on my life and say with honesty that my only regret is having lost my own baby girl. If I live to be old enough to spend much of the day napping in my chair, I hope that my thoughts will be so centered on Jesus that I will talk to Him even as I sleep.
My grandfather’s name is not known outside of that small area where he lived and died, but during his lifetime he had a reputation as an honest man who loved his family and helped his neighbor. He died without regrets, and when the end was near, he drew ever closer to his Savior. I don’t know how a life can be more successful than that.
For books by Joyce Swann, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/ or like her on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup
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