The stroke robbed my grandmother of two major traits I thought defined her: physical humor and feistiness. Many years earlier, when her boys kept showing up at the breakfast table in their underwear, despite being told repeatedly not to, she arrived at the table one morning - in nothing but her underwear. Everyone showed up fully clothed for breakfast from then on. When I was small, she would put me in a headlock and give me noogies, but when I began to tower over her, she would flit around like a prize-fighter, playfully taunting me with “C’mon, put up your dukes!”
Once the stroke deprived her of most mobility and rendered her speechless, my perception of her started to fade. She just wasn’t the same person I had seen in action. Friends and family expressed similar feelings, usually with a hushed “Poor, poor Mary.”
One of the last times I saw her was during a dinner, just the two of us. At one point, she tried to lift a drink to her mouth, but dumped it all over herself. I expected to hear angry, frustrated grunts as I was about to jump up to help. But before I could move and before I heard anything, she glanced at me, shrugged her good shoulder . . . and winked.
The Message Bible paraphrases Proverbs 15:30 as “A twinkle in the eye means joy in the heart.” That simple wink indicated all of the visible troubles and physical ailments I focused on had not touched the spirit inside her heart, a spirit that made it possible to exhibit all of those feisty and funny traits that I knew and loved. I judged how my grandmother should be feeling and acting based on what I could see. But that wink let me know how wrong I was.
Years later, I came to realize why I was so wrong. God is not concerned with how we look, as long as our hearts are focused on Him, because “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). As Christians, like my grandmother, we are supposed to be joyful always (1 Thess. 5:16), regardless of our circumstances. In other words, when everything appears to be going wrong, can you demonstrate where your heart is by mustering a wink?
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Feel free to print a post in a non-commercial publication (like a church newsletter), link to this site or a specific post, or extract up to 100 words from a post on to another site, as long as you provide a link back to the original post and include the following notice: “©, Sean Connolly. All rights reserved. Originally published at http://freerangedevo.blogspot.com/.”
However, you must have written permission to repost or publish an entire post from my site anywhere on the internet, use a post for commercial purposes including selling or licensing printed or electronic versions of my content, or alter, transform or build upon the content of any post.
