This week I was able to spend a little time with my 82-year-old grandfather who lives in West Virginia. I can’t tell you what a joy it is that my children get to know their great-grandfather…a man who has shaped me in many ways including giving me a love for the outdoors. Fishing, hunting, honey bees, mushrooms…he instilled in me an appreciation about where our food comes from and how we get it.
During this last visit I hopped in his truck to go help him rob one of his bee hives. This career military veteran lacks the strength and stability of his younger years. It’s one of the most cruel ways time robs masculinity. Men relish being able to be the only one to open a jar of pickles.
When I hopped in the passenger side I saw his well-worn Bible on the console—a sight that took me by surprise. I rarely go anywhere these days and see a Bible in a car. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the Bible app and it’s my own primary Bible now. But the sight took me back to another time and place when things were much different. I remember growing up and my grandfather not going to church. I vividly remember being 6 and asking him why he wasn’t going to church with me and Granny. His answer was, “It wasn’t for him.”
Fast forward a few decades and he now has perfect attendance (I didn’t know churches gave out awards for such a thing) and is a pillar in his church. A man of deep faith.
Seeing his Bible reminded me that everyone and anyone can change. What was once normal and commonplace can become radically different.
What makes the difference? In my years as a pastor the one common denominator in most dramatic changes is usually crisis. It’s easy to believe whatever you want when flowers are blooming, love is the air, and you’re flush with cash. When everything falls apart is the true test of what you say you believe.
Your worldview is abandoned or deepened when your spouse says they want a divorce, you hear the dreaded “C” word (cancer), your child is struggling, or you come face to face with death. Your worldview and all its blindspots come clearly into focus.
For my grandfather it was his wife getting colon cancer at age 47. She was in the hospital recovering from surgery and he went home to take care of the grass on the farm. While alone with his thoughts and the uncertainty of the future it occurred to him how he couldn’t do a thing to help his wife. He couldn’t even pray for her because he didn’t know who he was praying to. So he said, “Jesus if you are real and there, forgive me of my sins and help my wife.”
On this trip I asked him about this experience and he said “I can take you to the exact spot in my yard where I gave the mower a shove and fell on my knees and prayed to God for the first time. Things have never been the same since.”
My grandmother had prayed faithfully for 30 years for my grandfather. She told me her prayer was, “God do whatever it takes to reach my husband.” She said she never thought cancer would be part of God’s plan, but she would willingly go through it again if it meant the change she has seen in my grandfather.
My grandfather was 54 when he finally decided that Jesus was who he said he was (John 14:6). All things became new. The Bible on the console of his truck represented a man making up for lost time with a second half filled with years of reading and living the words of Jesus as best he understood it.
Question: When have you seen a crisis bring about lasting change? Share your answer on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
