She made him eat righteousness. Made him read the Bible cover to cover. Made him sit through the cassette tapes when he said he was bored. When he resisted, she got after him.
Then one day she released him. "Now you must grow up and be a man."
The forces hit him hard. He begged to come back under her wing. She said no.
I did not have a grandmother like this.
Most of you didn't either.
My grandparents on both sides were burying something. The Bible sat on a shelf no one opened. The faith skipped a generation because someone got hurt and decided silence was safer than repentance. The table was full of food and empty of scripture. The jaded house. You know the one.
Paul names the chain when he writes to Timothy. "When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice" (2 Tim. 1:5). Three generations. The fire passed hand to hand.
Paul does not say every faithful son had a Lois. He says this one did. Scripture is full of the other story too. Hannah had no Lois. She became one at Shiloh, weeping until Eli thought she was drunk (1 Sam. 1). Ruth came out of Moab with no covenant grandmother and walked into the line of David. Rahab walked out of Jericho and into Matthew 1.
The chain does not have to start where you started.
It only has to start with somebody willing.
If you are a woman reading this and your mother was cold, your grandmother was bitter, and the faith in your family line went dark two generations back, you are not disqualified. You are the start. Hannah. Ruth. Rahab. Eunice. Scripture names women who restarted what their ancestors broke. By name. In ink. Forever.
If you are a man reading this with kids still in the house and a father who never opened the book, being a Lois-grandfather is not a memory you inherit. It is a decision you make tonight at the kitchen table.
But hear Liardon's grandmother to the end. She fed him. Then she let him go. That is the part most parents fail. The love that will not release becomes the love that demands to be God. And love that demands to be God always becomes Judas.
