The Rosebud Cross

We invited granny Bess to stay for supper. She accepted our offer saying Jerry was gone to Harper and wouldn’t be home for a few days. Charles went over to her cabin and did up her evening chores while we were starting supper.

            Our supper preparation time was spent in a biblical discussion. She had been reading in the New Testament about the miracles Jesus had preformed and she wanted to share some of her insight with me. I was thankful for the opportunity to hear her opinion. Her knowledge and wisdom about the Bible was remarkable. “Never forget to read and study your Bible, child, share it often with Charles and the boys,” she told me. I told her about reading Bible stories aloud to the twins and Charles. I told her about Reverend Collins and Matilda putting on a puppet show for the boys. I said they were planning to do a puppet show for my Sunday school class.

            “Sounds like just what the church children need,” she told me. “You can never start to early, teaching children about the Bible. The more they learn, the more they’ll want to learn.” She said.

            “I was just a young girl, when I come to know Jesus as my Savior,” she told me with tears in her eyes. “My grandma Young, mama’s mother was real sick. We were at her house, so mama could care for her. I heard her ask mama to let me come in to see her. She said, she wanted to talk to me. I went in not knowing what to expect. I was sort of hopin’ she might give me her locket. My birthday was coming up the next week. I had seen her wear the locket on special occasions, pinned to her best dress. It was silver, the purtiest thing I’d seen in all of my ten years. The top of it looked like a silver ribbon tied into a bow. Where the bow was knotted at the bottom, that’s where the locket was attached and hung down. It was oval with flowers and leaves at the bottom. There was chain etching at the top. I always thought she had pictures inside, but I was wrong, she showed me once. There was a soft lock of fine blond hair. It looked like woven silk. She told me the hair was a lock of her first born baby’s hair, a little girl, name of Sara,” she said, as her mind remembered that time from long ago. Did she grow up in the cove, granny? I asked her. “No, she went to heaven two days after she was born,” she told me with sadness in her voice.

            “Anyway I was a hopin’ for that locket. She asked me to sit beside her, she began to tell me of how one day at church when she was about my age, the preacher talked about Jesus dyin’ for our sins. How he’d give his life on the cross of Calvary, so that by accepting salvation we might be saved.

            She told me to git her Bible and read John 3:16. I did as I was told and when I’d read the verse, she told me how that day at church, she’d asked Jesus into her heart,” granny Bess said.  

            “When the preacher gave the invitation she’d went to the altar and asked Jesus to save her and forgive her for her sins. Bess, she said, he’s lived in my heart ever since. I saw that she was drifting off to sleep, so I left the room,” granny Bess told me.

            “All that week, I read that Bible verse and thought about what granny had told me. My heart seemed to ache as if it had a hole in it,” she said.