But for the Grace of God…

This is not the post I was going to write today.

Two years ago, when my readers were just 3 family members and 2 friends I wrote & published this memory from my childhood.

If you are one of the few who read it back then, I hope you will read it again.

I promise you there is nothing I could write that would be any better than this story during this season of gratitude.

Everything we encounter in our lives – good or bad, helps form who we become.

This is a true story of just that.

I grew up hearing this phrase ….

“But for the grace of God go I.”

Those words had a tremendous impact on my life.

Perhaps we listen more carefully to words that are muttered, and not spoken directly to us.

Words that are not meant for our ears but just an utterance seem to grab our attention.

My grandma and I would be driving down the street, singing along to the oldies and chomping on our juicy fruit gum and her singing would suddenly stop – her attention was directed toward our neighbors, and I would hear her solemnly speak these words,

“But for the grace of God go I”.

I would crane my neck to look out the car window to see what she had just seen. It would only take a glimpse and I would know exactly what my grandma meant by that phrase.

From an early age, I spent a great deal of time with my grandparents on their little farm in a very poor rural Missouri community.

Our closest neighbors lived across the street from our barn in a little tin shack.

Every Saturday morning, from the time I turned six, I would make a weekly trek up to this shack.

The sounds of the corrugated metal creaking and flapping in the wind would resonate in the silence of the snowfall. It was a patchwork of mismatched pieces of tin in various stages of rust.

The door would bounce against my knocking.

A weather-beaten mom and her 3 little children, 2 toddler girls and a baby boy lived inside.

I would hand her the basket my grandma had prepared for them.

As she would unload the basket of food, I would quietly soak in this family and their lives.

There were no interior walls, no windows, no electricity, and no furniture.

Just a pile of blankets in the corner where they all slept and a wood stove chugging warmth into their tiny space.

The same flapping, rusted pieces of metal that I saw from the outside were now visible on the inside.

Their floor was dirt. There was a glossy sheen to that dirt floor from being hard packed by tiny bare feet.

In the winter the 3 kids would be huddled under a heap of blankets in an effort to find warmth in each other.

There was a man, but in all my visits, I never saw him inside the shack. He was always outside, chopping wood in winter or using their mule to tend the garden in the warmer months.

When the contents of the basket were emptied onto her shelf, she would express her sincere gratitude and send me on my way back up the street toward my grandparent’s house.

During the summer, when my grandma and I would drive down the street and cross the creek – her singing would stop – I would look out the car window and Grandma and I would wave to the mom as she washed her families clothes in the creek while her little ones bathed.

I can still hear my grandma’s voice softly muttering:

“But for the grace of God go I”.

Hearing her words from an early age helped me learn to have empathy for others. When hearing this phrase, your mind takes you to that place of those who are afflicted, broken or less fortunate.

I would continue to visit this family in their little tin shack each week for the next 3 years.

Their lives are forever seared into my memory.

This Thanksgiving holiday – Take a moment to be grateful for all you have and remember those less fortunate.

Special thanks to my grandma for teaching me the meaning of