I watched the sun set from 30,000 feet on a Sunday last month.
I was sitting on the front row only because it was a tiny plane with maybe thirty souls on board. Not only does the front row of those planes not mean first class, but there is also no overhead compartment for those seats, a fact that mattered little since my suitcase had been lost in Philadelphia two connections ago. My seatmate was a chef, and when our conversation finally petered out after he told me about his spin on a Beef Wellington (pork tenderloin with apples in place of filet and duxelles), I watched the sun set over rural Missouri. The clouds were pink and gold and orange, and the sky was just so big. I always think that on a plane. The sky is just so big. I leaned my head back in my seat, watching the ground grow closer. I’d been traveling all weekend, speaking at a conference just days after my grandmother passed away.
Five days prior, I’d driven like mad to get to Tennessee where I kept vigil with my parents and was privileged to hold my grandmother’s hand as she died. Hospice nurses were in and out. We sang hymns, recited Scripture, wept, prayed her into eternity. We counted breaths for a long time. It was quiet in the end. With one hand I held her frail fingers, with the other I gently felt for a pulse. “She’s with Jesus,” I whispered to my parents, “Blessed in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.”
My grandmother died on her ninety-sixth birthday, “old and full of years,” as Moses liked to put it in Genesis. What a thing it is to die quietly at home with the people you love around you, to be gathered up to your Father at the end because the thing that mattered most was the One who saved you. My grandmother was raised in a home with an alcoholic father, and when she was ten years old—somewhere around 1937—she wandered over to the Methodist church across the street from her one-room schoolhouse and attended a revival service where she heard the gospel and placed her faith in Jesus Christ. Her salvation would impact generations.
She didn’t have a lot of opportunities for growth and discipleship but jumped into church attendance when she was old enough to get there on her own. She worked some secretarial jobs in Memphis, but mostly she wanted to be a wife and mother. She married a WW2 vet, but her early years of marriage (like mine) were plagued by infertility. In 1955, she and my grandfather adopted a baby boy—a boy who grew up to be my dad. She later gave birth to a daughter, dealt with uterine cancer, was widowed in her sixties, and was hospitalized many times for various illnesses, including Covid in the spring of 2020—after which she moved in with my parents. Between the big events in her life, though, she labored in the local church, discipling young women, teaching Bible studies and Sunday school classes, and giving everything she had to neighbors and strangers alike. No matter who walked in the door of her home—a physical therapist or a repairman—she would ask the same question: “Do you know Jesus as your Lord and Savior?” And if they didn’t, they’d get the gospel plain and simple from my grandmother.
After she died, I stood next to my dad in the kitchen when the undertaker wheeled the gurney down the hallway and took his mother’s body away. I slept on my parent’s couch that night, borrowing a pair of my grandma’s pajamas because I hadn’t packed a thing. I drove home the next morning, trying to shift gears for a speaking engagement that had been contracted for nearly a year. I spent a full day traveling, another speaking, another traveling. Six planes and eight airports and lost luggage. I knew I’d have to hit the ground running when the plane landed. So much to do.
In the in-between, suspended in the air on that last flight from Nashville to Cape Girardeau, I watched the sun dip down low and forced my mind to be still while fatigue washed over me. Big sky, I thought, like I always do. Bigger God. What is man that You are mindful of us? Yet, in that small plane where I sat in 1B, God was with me. He’s not only unsurprised by the big events in my small life, but He has also lovingly filtered them through His good hands. With those good hands, He has carried me—is carrying me. The plane touched down with a gentle bump. I made a claim about my lost luggage. We buried my grandmother two days later in Memphis.
Sometimes I look at my life and wonder how it fits into God’s plan for His kingdom. Thinking about my grandmother and her single-minded devotion to making Christ known in her little corner of the world, it begs the question—what is a meaningful life? I could write out my grandmother’s full name and you wouldn’t recognize it. She wasn’t famous, wealthy, accomplished, or well-known. But her unremarkable life was truly remarkable because of who Jesus was to her. A couple of years ago, I sat in her bedroom and sifted through handwritten letters from young women she’d discipled from decades prior when people still wrote letters regularly. So much spilled ink sharing how my grandmother had discipled, cared, given, served, loved. My grandmother was legally blind by that point following a retinal bleed, so I read the letters aloud to her. She never focused on what she had done, only how much she loved all these young women the Lord had put in her life. Generations have been impacted by her simple but tenacious faith in Jesus. Generations. That isn’t an exaggeration. I would not be sitting here typing these words were it not for the gospel of Jesus she faithfully passed down to my father. To me. To my children. To anyone reading this.
After my grandmother’s memorial service, I slipped into the funeral home restroom. While I tried to wipe away tear-smudged eye make-up, a women entered and joined me at the sink to wash her hands. She asked, “Are you Margaret’s granddaughter?” I nodded. “Your grandmother led me to the Lord in 1970.”
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The sky is big, and God is bigger, and we could not be smaller in His shadow. But, oh how He loves His children, how He calls them out of darkness and into His marvelous light. How He delights in saving ten-year-old girls in unsafe homes and changes the would-be trajectory of an entire family tree. How He redeems what is broken, finds what is lost, meds what is torn. How He transforms our hearts, shapes our character, polishes the edges of our faith with suffering. How He saves sons and granddaughters and great-grandsons. How he keeps us close, walks with us through sorrow, travels with us through the valley of the shadow of death, to the very, very end and final breath. And farther. Forever.
The thing is, He is very, very mindful of us. So much so that He sent Jesus to die in our place to pay a debt we could never afford so that we can have an eternal life we could never imagine. My grandmother would tell you that.
Photo by Saif71.com on Unsplash
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.