Spiritual Growth

My Grandma Springs was sassy. And funny. And mischievous. And the godliest person I have ever known to walk around in flesh and bones. She met Him later in life and spent all of her remaining days trying to make up for lost time – and, boy, did she ever! I teased her that she might live to be 900 years old because she was allowing God to accomplish so much through her. I wish she had…

• It’s a little crazy to think that she was about 37 when I was born (both she and my mom were young brides). That’s only two years older than I am now.
• She would take Hershey’s cocoa (powder in a can), mix it with sugar and water, boil it just right, and make the best chocolate syrup I have ever tasted. I wonder how many chocolate-saturated slices of bread I have eaten over the course of three and a half decades. A few loaves at least…
• She also baked the best sweet potato pies; she would bake 15 or 16 at a time. They would be covered in brown sugar, so they would kinda be black on top – yummy. Makes my heart hungry…
• She called me the morning of the Ocean Isle Beach house fire last October where seven college students died so we could pray together for the families and the survivors.
• She was an ordained minister in her church.
• She smiled and laughed a lot, but she would not smile in pictures.
• She was married to my Papa for 55 years.
• She came to spend the weekend with me in my apartment in Anderson well over a decade ago. So thankful for those memories…
• She loved the mountains. And staying in her camper in the mountains. And the lake. And staying in her camper at the lake.
• She was phenomenal at sending cards on birthdays. And we have a big family. She and Papa had six children, ten grandchildren, and about a dozen great-grandchildren (love to you, Beck! Thanks for reading).
• She was just love. She wasn’t self righteous or abrasive in her faith. The love of a Savior just shone through her care, her concern, her deeds, her prayers, her smile, her humor, her meals, her words.

She passed away Saturday morning. Rather unexpectedly. I miss her.

But there’s this paradox between celebration and sadness at the death of one of His. We celebrate for her and we celebrate all that her life was and the scores she touched, but we are sad for ourselves.

Her send-off was perfect. There are few things in life that I would call perfect, but the celebration of her was perfect! As strange as it sounds, it was a great weekend of celebrating and mourning her. We stood under the tent at her graveside singing praises to our God (Psalm 116:15– love that verse!) as a gentle breeze blew across us. Perfect! It was a weekend of worshiping Him for His goodness and His grace and His mercy.

I do have regrets. I regret that I had not seen her since Mother’s Day. I regret that I didn’t call more often or send cards more often. I regret that I allow the tasks of life to eclipse the value of relationships…

And I want to say, in her memory, that He changes lives in a way that is better than anything we can imagine. He did hers. He did mine. At the occasion of death, we focus of Jesus’ ability to change our eternity, but He wants to change our now.

I praise Him. I celebrate her.

Continued…

So that spark of hope came in a conversation in a friend’s living room on November 20, 2006 (if my memory serves me correctly). It was the first real live conversation about being part of a new church in Florence; Chris and I did not initiate that conversation, but I was coming out of my skin with excitement by its conclusion (Chris, on the other hand, was a little (okay, a lot) more reticent). We began to pray about whether this could be what God had for us. It became clear pretty quickly that it was.

And let me be very quick to say that it wasn’t because we couldn’t find a church we “liked”; we hadn’t even visited all the churches we had planned to visit. It had everything to do with finding where God’s peace rested for us, and it was in this endeavor that we found it. And it was often a torturous process. Here we were, two lay couples believing we were suppose to be part of a church start. How dumb does that sound? People thought we were idiots. If you knew about it, you thought we were idiots. That’s not fun. No pastor in sight. There were certainly times I begged, in tears, to be released from the task, but it was never an option. I prayed for that option, but (thankfully) it was never granted. Trying to bale would have been like waking in the midst of surgery and saying, “I’m done” and bolting.

We never had any idea what this thing might look like in reality, so we did all we knew to do. We met together to pray, to study Scripture, to dream, to pray, to worship together, etc… We read books, listened to podcasts, read blogs, took road trips. All the while, God was doing more in each of us individually than we were ever accomplishing together. That time was a period of refining our faith – believing Him when what He was saying seemed illogical and impossible (anybody relating out there?).

So, once again God does what He says He will do. In March of this year (two days before we were to attend a church conference at NewSpring in Anderson) we learned that NewSpring is launching a Florence campus later this year. We had taken road trips to NS; we read Perry’s blog and listened to his podcasts, and we could have never, ever in a gazillion decades imagined this ending. Ephesians 3:20 in full effect, baby!

And so it was that I found myself on a charter bus two Sundays ago, Upstate bound…

After reading this, this, and this, a friend commented that I wasn’t finished. She had been anticipating Part IV. I’m really not trying to make my life into this dramatic mini-series, but I realized that she was right. We were having this conversation on a charter bus headed toward the NewSpring Anderson campus, and my narrative did fail to relay how it was that I found myself occupying that seat.

My tale kinda concluded with me discovering my passion in the midst of a nurturing and supportive church family. Well, September 10, 2006, rolled around – Black Sunday as I call it. As churches sometimes do, our church exploded and our church family was destroyed. Our church family had become as vital to our lives as our biological families – perhaps even to a fault (finding security and purpose in the church and not truly in Him). To some of you this may sound melodramatic, but it was devastating. There were many, many people there who had loved on our girls literally from the days they were born. They had rocked them and changed them and fed them and sang to them and taught them Bible stories, and we had shared hundreds of meals and shed gallons of tears together through the years. Approximately two hundred people displaced in a day. An entire staff of families without jobs. A mass of brokenhearted people wandering. Some are still wandering. Some are still hurting. Some are still angry. Some still carry their tears very close to the surface, and they spill over easily. And this is two years later…

I remember getting into bed after church that afternoon and sobbing over the loss of relationships. No matter what happened or how this thing worked out, it would never be the same. And I was right; it never will be. A very real time of mourning began. Foolishly we attended another church the following Sunday, and I wept through the entire service – not quietly. The kind of crying where you can barely breathe and you kinda shake like you’re having a seizure. Chris sat there stewing and steaming; he was so angry I thought he was going to deck the offering guy. I can honestly say the churches in this area are phenomenal; they rushed to wrap their arms around us, but that was the last thing we wanted. We didn’t want to be loved by their church; we just wanted our own church back.

And to this day, it is an absolute treat to run into someone from that time. To those of you who are reading, you must know that I love you as much today as I ever did and I miss you!!!

So we began the daunting prospect of visiting churches. We learned that Florence is blessed with some fantastic churches who are pastored by awesome men of God and comprised of godly men and women. We prayed each Sunday, with each new church, that we would find a home. We were desperate for something to feel right; we were desperate to feel like God was showing us something – desperate for a spark of hope. Nothing! Nothing Sunday after Sunday… Why was He being silent? Why couldn’t He just give us something to grab on to?

He was up to something new, and He just needed us to simmer in our desperation for Him for a while…

To be continued (where I’ll really wrap it up this time)…