Testimony About Grandmother

[Castaway57]

I recall some very dark times when I was a little boy, and, as strange as it may sound; I have many fond memories of those times

I can still see her showing up on our door step with boxes of her home made pies and tins of lovingly made bran muffins, just wanting to bless us some how with a little cheer and hope. Grandma was Catholic, and I know that she used to draw on some of the teaching/concepts of a Catholic writer - St John Of The Cross, as he is called.

Of course, she told me about all that I am going to say here in her own Grandma words; but here is how I read it all.

My Grandma lived her beliefs with her actions. And one of the things I took out of all this is how the dark 'shadow' side of the true spiritual life has too often been trivialised and neglected, sometimes to our serious detriment. Superficial and naively upbeat spirituality does not heal and enrich the soul. Nor does the other tendency to relegate deep spiritual growth to only mystics and saints or preachers.

Only the personal, the honest, sometimes difficult encounters and confrontations with what Christian spirituality has called and described in helpful detail as 'the dark night of the soul' can we be lead to true spiritual wholeness. (see Micah 7:8, Isa 40:31)

Grandma used to emphasize to me, during our walks in Canmore near The Three Sisters mountain peaks, when I was struggling with the results of severe burns to large portions of my body how that the dark night of the soul is not necessarily a time of suffering and abject despair, but a time of deep transition, a search for new orientation when things are clouded and full of mystery. The dark of our experience gives depth, dimension and fullness to the spiritual life. It gives us a perspective that can lift others up - and I have grown to see this perspective as the way of the eagle of scripture.

The eagle of Isaiah 40:31, as a part of the natural world has a power to inspire the best and soothe the worst within each of us. It has much to teach us about the wilderness within, and about the "greater power" manifest in the grandeur of nature.

As you consider your life; allow the eagle of scripture, (Isa 40:31), be to you a personal spiritual guide which reveals the great lessons available to us about how God works in us when we retreat from our busy lives to the serenity of the natural wilderness; the domain of the Great Bald Eagle.

Maybe then, you will see the way to climbing out of your darkness, and find someone's doorstep to show up on with boxes of pies and tins of muffins. (or something else that they need. It is the way of the eagle; the path by which we mount up with wings as eagles;" and "renew" our own strength; and ANYONE can be that eagle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5EE6g_a9gs&feature=youtu.be

 

[Tigger45]

Thx, very uplifting message.

 

[KBond]

Nice and very true. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Castaway57]

My hope here is that others will pitch in and post testimonies about their Grandmothers, or some other Grandmother they know. Here is one about my wife's Grandmother:

WHAT DO YOU SEE IN YOUR CLOUDS CHURCH?"

"Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him," (Rev 1:7).

This is the emphasis that we as a Church have missed out on in a very serious way.

"People do not see the bright light that is in the clouds...(Job 37:21)

In the Bible, clouds are always connected with God somehow. (see also Dan.7:13). In the earthly realm of things, clouds are those sorrows, sufferings, or providences within or without our personal lives that seem to somehow dispute the ruling of God in our souls.

It is by those very clouds that the Holy Spirit is teaching us how to walk by faith in Christ. If there were no clouds, we would have no faith. "The clouds are but the dust of our Father's feet."

Don’t you see church? The clouds are a sign that the Lord is there! (1 Thes.4:17). What a revelation it is to realize by personal experience that sorrow, tragedy, bereavement, and suffering, are the clouds that come along with God! Remember; the definition of heaven is the presence of Christ!

I would like to share a testimony about how a Roman Catholic priest taught me this lesson years ago. I got this story from my wife when we first got married 22 years ago.

What do you see in your clouds? Clouds are not needed you say?

How can God come near except with clouds?

The story I am about to tell will shed more light on how God's Word works even in the darkest clouds, and because of this story, when I read the verse in the Bible that says, "God is love," (1 Jo.4:8), and "Love never fails,"(1 Cor.13:8), I have a surer, and brighter picture in my mind of God, and the value that He places upon my soul during the darkest moments of life.

In other words; I see Christ in my clouds, and it was a Roman Catholic priest from long before I was born who showed me how Christ can be seen in our clouds...

The story starts in the heat of the Second World War. Hitler was working his death machine onto the people of Poland. My wife her Mom, with her parents, and four brothers and sisters, cowered in abject fear, in their little village home of poverty.

My wife's Mom was about 12 years old at the time. Her Mom's Dad was swayed by Hitler's mentality, after the Germans came in and cruelly butchered eighty Polish men in front of their families.

Later, when a law was passed that no one who was Polish was allowed to buy food from the regular sources - the black market - my wife's Grandfather actually turned in a man to the German authorities just for buying a bag of flour for his wife and five little children. As a result, this poor man had to go to a miserable work camp, where no one usually returned from.

After spending six years there for buying that flour to feed his family, the tables started to turn. The Germans were being routed from Poland. The Polish people were returning to anyone who was German, double what they got. Now the Germans were being killed and tortured. Now the Germans were starving.

When this man came back from six years in the work camp, to the little village, and saw how hungry the family of the man that had turned him in was, he actually repaid them with kindness by giving them what little food he could muster up. My wife's Grandfather was not yet home from the battle front and POW camp.

About this same time, the Polish authorities decided to gather up eighty of the German women from this same little village. They were taken to a central place in the town, and forced at gunpoint to start digging a mass grave, for themselves, with nothing but their bare hands. When the soldiers came and took my wife's Grandmother away, to join these 80 women, she was very brave and tried to encourage her screaming little ones by saying: "I will see you again."

While these poor ladies were still digging, this man who had spent the six years in a death camp, came to my wife's Grandma's 5 children - which included my wife's Mom, and again, he repaid them with kindness. He gave them a little more food, and spoke what must have been the strangest words one could ever hear at such a time such as this:

"Don't worry...I think the Lord is going to help you...you will see your Mom again...I'm sure of it."

To everyone's amazement, about one thirty in the morning, my wife's Grandma arrived exhausted and blackened from head to toe, at the home of her precious little ones. A miraculous intervention by a Roman Catholic priest in the town, whom everyone really looked up to then, had saved these eighty women. The priest had pleaded with them to "Love your enemies."

All in a day's work for a Roman Catholic priest who loves Jesus, and sees Jesus in his clouds.

I can never, since hearing this story, believe the cruel things that some Adventists just love to repeat about our Roman Catholic brethren.

You may not be like those women, digging your own grave, but you are like them, in the sense that to all appearances, things will sometimes look, rather final, and hopeless in your life. All you can see are the storm clouds gathering, as the darkness surrounds you. But you can be like my wife's Grandmother in the midst of your clouds, and echo the words of the Psalmist who said,

"I love the Lord, because He hath heard my voice and my supplications. Because He hath inclined His ear unto me, therefore will I call upon Him as long as I live." (Ps.116:1 - 2). You can actually know, and have this certainty.

This is what my wife's Grandmother saw in her clouds!

What do you see in your clouds brothers & sisters in Christ?

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