She taught me how to scrub clean with old toothbrushes the grimy places of farmhouse windowsills and doors whose crisscross panes carried dirt, manure and the sweat of five kids running back and forth between indoor play, feeding calves, milking cows and hayloft frolicking.
She also taught me how to pray without pretense or pause.
Her lessons span as wide as work thoroughly done or not at all and a God whose eye is on the sparrow and bids us ‘come’. One of her favorite phrases from her own mother was ‘you have to be a little crazy to stay sane.’ Her life sprinkled across mine is a lot like yeast that works through dough and gives rise to the kingdom of God.
She birthed eleven children whose raising began in the height of the Great Depression. Need was a gift that brought forth great inventions. So she sewed and taught her daughters the same. Her sons learned how to cook and each child knew that a morsel of bread should never be eaten without profound gratitude.
Her eleven children would rise to call her blessed and her husband too. So would forty-four grandchildren through six decades. And many of the hundred and more great grandchildren would learn at her knee or at those of who she gave herself for their bending.
…Please hop over to Abby’s place to finish the rest of her story – you will be glad you did, I promise! {I read this story aloud to members of the 50 Women class I recently taught at my church, and there were more than a few Kleenex used by the end}.
Abigail (Abby) is a math geek who loves the ordered rhyme. She is a mix of the odd and even living in Budapest, Hungary with her husband and three young children. She has spent twenty years in various forms of ministry as a youth leader, high school teacher, Spanish translator and, for the last nine years, with her husband as a missionary with CRU. Her story is finding her in the people and language of her new home. So she is sewing together her life through memoir beginning on a farm in Pennsylvania and threading through continents and languages into a city of millions. She has big dreams but rests all of her hopes on the Love that reaches down and draws her Home. She blogs regularly at Abigail Alleman and can be found on Facebook and Twitter.
This post is part of the My Faith Heroine Series in conjunction with the release of
50 Women Every Christian Should Know: Learning from Heroines of the Faith
