Rock Writers’ Guild

     I’ve heard it said that it takes seven contacts with the Gospel message before the average person converts.  I think it took more than that with me, since so many of my first contacts were negative.
    Oddly enough, it was my own words that were the most persuasive witness in my walk towards Christ.
     It came about like this: my grandmother was dying.  She had pancreatic cancer, and by the time they found it she had weeks to live.  I had mixed feelings about my grandmother.  On one hand, she adored me, wrote me, sent me presents, and took my side against my parents.  On the other hand, the woman just plain could not shut up.  She could talk the leg off a table, and I would occasionally sit at her supper table and fantasize about punching her on the mouth so she would finally stop talking.
     But I made arrangements to go up with my boyfriend and see her for a week before the new term at USC began.  I needed John as a buffer between myself and my father.  Our relationship was highly charged and strained.  I was physically afraid of him, and I wanted to have someone there on my side if worst came to worst.  Unfortunately, John’s personality provoked my parents almost past bearing.  It wasn’t an ideal situation.  And it was complicated by the fact that my grandfather was, at that point, nearly dying from long-term alcohol abuse and my grandmother hated his guts. 
     What a cast of characters!  My angry, sarcastic father,  worry-addicted mother, drunk grandfather, dying grandmother, arrogant boyfriend, three young siblings, oh- and a mystery cousin named Pat, who felt that we were all interlopers who didn’t want the best for my grandmother and who told me frequently that I had no idea how my grandmother had suffered in life.
    Pat’s problem was that we were trying to pursuade Grandma to forgive Papa before she croaked and it was too late.  Even though my parents were basically atheists, I think they had some kind of residual moral twinges over dying in a state of bitter hatred and disgust.  I think Pat felt that bitter hatred and disgust were just about what was called for under the circumstances.
    So here we all were, packed in the house on top of each other, trying to smile and be civil and share the bathroom.  And in the downstairs bedroom my grandmother sorted pictures and struggled to eat and fought for breath.  She kept trying to give me and my siblings things.  Her $500 leather coat.  Her diamonds.  Her furniture.  Her car.  Pat kept trying to get us to take them.  My sister and boyfriend wanted everything they could get.  My mother wanted everything saved for Papa.  I didn’t want to think about her dying.  I was scared- scared to death, scared of death.
     I had been terrified of death and the idea of hell for years.  I had recurring nightmares.  And being confronted by it face to face with weeping and forgiveness and last requests was almost too much.  I withdrew from the family and wandered around the house pretending it wasn’t really happening.
     This is all a long prelude to a fairly simple story.  One morning I couldn’t sleep.  I awoke long before the family in the dim blue dawn and crept downstairs.  When I slipped into the bathroom, I found my grandmother crying on the toilet seat.
     “I don’t want to go,” she cried, clutching me, “Everyone I love is here.  I don’t want to die!”
      I was speechless, befuddled, 19 years old with no real religion to fall back on, and terrified of death myself.   How could I comfort her?She held my hands tight.  Her hands were so soft and thin, wrinkled like crepe paper and softer than velvet, softer even than my baby’s hand.
     Finally it occured to me that she was a Christian.  I was a little blurry on the details, but I knew the christians believed in heaven.  So I told her so.  I told her about all her friends and relatives who had died before her, who would be waiting to throw a welcome party when she arrived.  I think I imagined them holding a banner like they were meeting someone at the airport.
     “Really?” she asked me.  “Do you really think so?”
     And I lied.  I lied the biggest, fattest, most brazen and convincing lie I could come up with.  “Yes, I really do,”  I told her.  “And more than that, I need you to go on so that you can be there to welcome me when I come.”
     No sermon ever preached to me about sin or hell or anything could ever have been as convicting to me as those words out of my own mouth.  For years they haunted me.  Had what I said been a lie?  What if it were true?  What if she waited on me and I didn’t come?  Was heaven real?  What comfort could a pagan or an atheist possibly have offered her?  What hope was there for anybody if it weren’t true?
     Maybe you could live a good life, a fun life.  But at the end of it, every single person on the earth would be like my grandmother: frightened and asking what was next and not wanting to go.  If there were no heaven, if there were no afterlife, if there were no God…. then all of life was a cheat and a falsehood.
     It tormented me.  And my promise to her tormented me.  I had promised her that she would go to heaven.  And I had promised to meet her there.
     And now, someday I will.  And I hope to fill her arms with children and grandchildren who have submitted to the cross and taken passage on faith to reach her.  I don’t know if any of my other relatives will ever believe and be saved, but I hope that I and my children will help satisfy her for the ones she lost.   I hope it will be a great family reunion.  I pray that it will.