Simple Things Bring Great Riches

When our Georgia weather turns winter, with loads of rain and blustery, chilly wind, it's colder than a number on the meteorologist's report. In a season like this, I always think on my Daddy's memories of his childhood...a cold and scary place. He grew up very poor, next to the railroad tracks in downtown Smyrna. He was the youngest of eight children with, effectively, no father. His parents stayed married but his wanderlust patriarch was rarely home and never worked, except to polish up the occasional horse to sell. Winters were unbearable, with no heat in the house, no shoes and not enough food on the table. All of them piled into one bed to keep warm at night. I asked him what they ate and he said it was usually biscuits and coffee, no meat, though in the summers there were vegetables from the fields where MawMaw worked. If I didn't know he was the epitome of a truthful man, I would have believed these were tall tales.   

But I didn't have to grow up this way. Daddy married a good woman who believed in him, a Yankee, bless it. His mother-in-law taught him to read and appreciate good literature. They started out poor as Job's turkey, but he got a menial job with the postal service and they lived within their means. That meant that we didn't have all the new fashions or the vacations to fancy places. Our home was clean, the food was simple and hearty, the yard was mown, the world was stable. When Daddy became a Christian, there were no complicated devotions but there was a daily walk with them, as we rose up in the morning and lay down at night...a walk of trusting God and praying about everything. The Bible was open, laid out, read and studied and believed. I saw the realities of old bitternesses forgiven, a couple who argued and fought and then made up. Real people, cracked people, who lived out the muddiness of life, at times slogging through and at times flying above. I think it was their "realness" that sold me. My parents' raw, unvarnished walk with God could not be denied. I saw both their failings and their victories in front of me, with no hypocrisy, and I saw God's grace prevail.

Before Daddy died suddenly in 2018, I stayed with them one night. As I lay down in the spare bedroom, I breathed in the smell of crisp, clean sheets. I looked out at the window, where the small lawn had been freshly mowed and the bushes clipped. My parents had worked all of their lives to make a better world for their children, Daddy out in the daily grind (for most years at a job that did not give him riches or accolades), Mama at home and in cottage industries. Matthew Henry said, "It is not poverty, but discontent that makes a man unhappy." At the heart of what my parents did right was a thankfulness for what God gave them, a looking to Him as their provider, and a willingness to take care of what was in front of them. Contentedness. We might need to resurrect that concept.