Unto the Least of These

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Robert Frost

I love my son-in-law. He only lives a few doors away, and two or three times a week, he drops in to talk. We cover politics, religion, child-rearing, animals, and gardening—to name a few. One summer, he and I went in quest of the best local hamburger within a 100-mile radius. My daughter wasn’t interested; she doesn’t love burgers like we do! Week before last, when he came by, he was saddened by the headlines he’d read in that morning’s newspaper. A long-time seminary teacher, he feared that news stories were beginning to imitate the predictions he read in the scriptures about the end of the world.

It was one more thing to worry about. But then I remembered my grandmother.

My father’s mother lost two husbands before she was forty. His father died of gangrene from a ruptured appendix. A farmer in a small Utah town, my father’s family simply couldn’t get his dad to the hospital in Salt Lake soon enough. My grandmother lost the farm or sold it; I don’t remember. But she took her four small sons (my dad was the youngest—less than 3 years old) and moved back in with her family in another small farming town—this one in Southern Nevada. My dad remembers sitting under the desk of his grandfather and listening while his grandfather counseled people in trouble or gave patriarchal blessings. I’ve heard him call his grandfather his second “father”. He never really knew his birth dad.

My dad’s mother was a tiny thing—barely five feet tall. But she was tough. To support her little family, she became a midwife, visiting homes and delivering babies. In those days, that often meant staying several days with a family until mothers had recovered enough to be comfortable taking care of a new baby and often several older children. My grandmother always took her youngest son, my dad, with her. He was too small to leave at a home where the other family members worked long hours milking and feeding the cows in the small dairy that was their livelihood. He told me he didn’t remember much about that time in his life, but he remembered the mothers and their babies. He loved every baby he came across right up until the day he died.

His mother lived to be 89 years old. She was a widow for almost 50 years. The daughter of a polygamist family, she had two mothers—sisters–one with 9 children and the other 10. She claims that she didn’t know which one was her birth mother until she was almost twelve. (One of her brothers became a noted Nevada lawyer and was the keynote speaker at a yearly National Bar Association Convention. He said after his speech, almost no one had questions about his subject matter, but he spent two hours in the Q and A section answering questions about the sister wives and his 18 siblings!) When her four sons were older, my dad’s mom bought a little house in Las Vegas and took in boarders who worked on Hoover Dam. I don’t think it occurred to her to be angry about her situation. She was too busy taking care of her family.

During her widowed years, my grandmother and four of her elderly, also widowed, sisters formed a band of intrepid travelers. They saw Europe, Israel, Alaska, and many national parks across the country. Old ladies with gray or white hair–they pooled their resources so that in bleak times no one would be left behind. They climbed on airplanes or buses, giggled like schoolgirls, tested ethnic food and brought home recipes from across the world, walked the streets of foreign lands without fear, and inspired a spirit of adventure in their now five generations of descendants.

History has kind of ignored women like my grandmother. Probably because most history is written by men who have concerned themselves with war, peace, government, money, and policy.  (My husband always tells me that he’ll handle the big stuff like whether or not to support the United Nations, or what kind of changes to tax policy will incentivize business. He leaves the lesser stuff to me—which house to buy, how to budget our income, training of our children, and such.)

 But I’ve known lots of women like my grandmother. When we first moved into our neighborhood in Kearns, the only power we had access to was a limited wattage because construction was going on all around us, and permanent power boxes had not been installed. The half dozen women living on the not-yet-paved street got together and made a schedule of who could use the power for cooking or washing clothes and when. Without that organization, the power clicked off from overload. Like my grandmother, my friends simply considered the problem and figured out a solution. They were ordinary women quietly easing the burdens, resolving the conflicts, and facing the problems confronting their own or the families around them.

Today, the media is filled with voices who shout that women who are responsible for families, in whatever shape or form, are spending a lifetime of little accomplishment and limited importance. But I was powerfully reminded this Sunday morning that it was also women who centuries ago walked to a lonely tomb to anoint the tortured body of their beloved leader. There were no requirements of education, wealth, or beauty. That quiet pattern of daily service to family and community led those followers of Jesus to be the first to see the resurrected Christ. They took an unassuming path we all might emulate toward building heaven on a troubled earth.