A Lenten Devotion by Pat Martin
Abide in me, and I in you….If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love…I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
John 15:4, 10a, 11
Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God and believe in me. In my Father’s household there are many dwelling places….I go to…prepare a place for you that where I am, you may be also. I will not leave you desolate. I will come to you….If a person loves me,…we will come to them and make our home with them.
John 14:1-3, 18, 23
My first clear memory of my Grampa Landro comes from when I was two or three years old. I am sitting on Grampa’s lap outside an open bathroom door watching my younger cousin Larry. Tragically, Larry was born with large tumors in and behind both eyes. When he was one or so, doctors removed one of the tumors. Larry lost that eye. It was replaced by a glass eye. They left the other eye alone after that. It was red, swollen and slanted.
As Grampa and I watch, Larry is standing on a bathroom stool in front of the mirror struggling to put a glass eye into the vacant socket. I am horrified.
Grampa Landro gently hugs and sh-sh-sh’s me and says, “See what I can do!” He opens his mouth and I see all his top false teeth fall to the bottom of his mouth! I am amazed. Wonder replaces horror.
Wasn’t that marvelous?
Wasn’t that marvelous?
Wasn’t that marvelous?
How could you not love a man who would do that for you?
Like many other Norwegian farmers, in winter Grampa Landro took up knitting. He made afghans for every child and grandchild. He made me a sweater when I was a teenager, and a coat. Later he made a matching coat and hat for my daughter Erika—a great-grandchild.
Above all, he made winter hats and mittens for children who had none. Every year he’d fill Christmas tree branches with small hats and mittens. When he was 96, a knitting magazine recognized him and put his picture with a mitten tree on its cover. When he was 100, the head of his nursing home persuaded him to make and send a red, white and blue afghan to President Reagan. Grampa commented he’d have been a lot happier to do that if the President had been a Democrat.
Yes, Grampa had decided political views. He was one of the organizers and founders of the Farm-Labor Party in Minnesota—the party in my day to which both Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy belonged. He was appointed the local supervisor of roads and bridges.
With only an eighth grade education, he still built the first round barn in the state of Minnesota. It allowed the cows to be fed, milked and cared for facing the center of the barn—a much cleaner and more efficient organization.
Dear God, bless us with wonder to replace horror. Amen