Thanksgiving was way more than a holiday for me this year. It was also a heart attitude and intense emotion as I was blessed to have all my grandchildren within snuggling distance for six whole days. It’s not something I take for granted since one of my sons and his family currently live in California.
I found myself constantly trying to inhale all the love and cuteness in our house, hoping that breath might be enough to sustain me until the next visit.
Oh, my goodness, I do love being “Gram.” I love being queen of the “Land of Yes” and feeling free to giggle when my grandkids say or do funny things a mom would feel obligated to correct.
But I must confess there’s one small thing about this grandparenting gig I’m neither crazy about nor good at: playing “make-believe” with my granddaughters. I can do sports, video games, race cars, coloring books, Legos, card games, and Play-Doh all day long, but the minute my granddaughters get out dolls and say, “Now, you be this and I’ll be this, and you say this and I’ll say this … ,” my brain starts cramping and I’m usually begging for mercy in about five minutes.
This isn’t new for me; I’ve always been make-believe challenged. I wasn’t the little girl who wanted to dress up like a princess. I wanted to play sports and build forts because those are real. When coerced into playing house with prissy friends, I always volunteered to be the family dog so I didn’t have to engage in fake conversations. Crawling around and barking stretched my make-believe skills as far as they would go.
That weirdly realistic little girl grew up to be a weirdly realistic adult who is woefully bad at writing fiction. I’m not saying I can’t embellish and exaggerate the truth just a wee bit (oops, did I just confess something?), but I struggle to make stuff up out of thin air. I suspect I was born without a fiction lobe in my brain—a condition that certainly baffles and exasperates my imaginative granddaughters when they draft me to play make believe. My dolls, Lego people, and stuffed animals usually end up sounding disturbingly like W.C. Fields and Mae West.
Some folks might think it strange that a fiction-challenged person like me would build my life upon faith in a God whose existence I can’t prove and spend so much time writing about Him.
They would never believe, although I know it’s true, that my faith is itself evidence that God is real because I’ve never been able to believe for very long in anything that isn’t real. (Imagine how challenging it was for my parents to pull off Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy for me.)
If at any point in my now 40-year faith journey I had discovered that God isn’t real and His Word isn’t true, I would most certainly have bailed out.
Although I’ve never been called, at least not yet, to literally lay down my life for my faith, as thousands of Christian martyrs throughout the ages have, I do share with them the sentiment expressed by disciples Peter and John when they were commanded by authorities not to talk about or act upon their faith in Jesus: “… Whether it is right in the sight of God to give heed to you rather than to God, you be the judge; for we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19b-20).
Those two fishermen-turned-apostles would never have given their lives for something they made up … and neither would I.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” – Hebrews 11:1