Cryin’ In My Cobbler
Thanks once again to our friend Kinswoman for giving us something lovely to muse about over Thanksgiving…
Have a wonderful one. Appreciate your family and friends, and most especially, the gift of our salvation in Jesus Christ.
Love,
Laurel
Cryin’ In My Cobbler
by Kinswoman
My thirteen year-old son is playing “Now Thank We All Our God” on the piano as I sit eating a bowl of warm blackberry cobbler, a recipe from my children’s great grandmother. I think of my great grandma, a woman unknown to me, who died when my own mother was just six years old.
Great-grandma Maude Gould Forbes was an evangelist in the turn-of-the-century (1900’s) Church of God. I have read her two or three existing journal entries from mid-life…. Oh, how alike we must be! My mother is her very image, and my children are named after her aunts, uncles, father, sister…
…”Honour thy father and thy mother…….” It echoes across the years down through history to a people they would never know.
Grandma Maude met Grandpa Ebner when their parents moved to Louisiana to plant churches after the War Between the States. Kenny and Hattie Forbes, James Gould and his wife…their witness, oral and written, is that they loved the God of their fathers. Some days, when discouragement would crush me into the grave, I consider these, “my old people,” as I call them, and that is all that keeps body and soul together, until God, my God and the God of “my old people” calls me home to Him, to them. Tears run down my cheek; I savor the juicy, sweet, tangy cobbler.
I look at my children and see Grandma’s smile, Great Grandpa’s eyes, Uncle John’s nose and attitude, Granddaddy’s inborn musical ability, an aunt’s strong-headed creativity…
I must teach my children that honoring their fathers and mothers includes having children that look like them, like their fathers and mothers…
And I contemplate that these ancestors, my “old people,” whom I never knew, who never knew me, strongly influence us day to day. I know many of their names; many more I do not. Will anyone know my name in 100 years? The important question is, Will they know my God in 100 years? That will have been the prayer of a nameless, faceless grandma 100 years from now.
The last notes of my son’s song of Thanksgiving float away into air on this waning afternoon, so now to it! Finish my cobbler, dry my tears, and back to the task at hand!
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