A Lenten Devotion by Ginnie Hatch
Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:28-30
Ginnie Hatch found this poem written in a Bible that belonged to her grandmother, Gertrude Loomis. Her daughter, Esther Loomis Gordon (Ginnie’s mother), thought it was written about her Grandmother, Nancy Lemon.
This is Grandmother’s Bible, just as she left it when
She went upstairs in the darkness not to come down again.
Night after night she read it; thin old hand on the page
Spectacles in the kind old eyes that were tired and dim with age.
Night after night we saw her, deep in her thoughts and prayers
Then came the night we missed her—looked and she was no there.
Not there—yet the candle was burning—her glasses lay on the book.
The chair and the chimney corner looked just as they used to look.
And we went to her room to find her kneeling down by her bed,
Just as if she were praying; but the life and the spirit had fled.
Eighty years in God’s service, and for seventy she had read
Some part of his holy teaching before she went up to be.
In days of joy or of sorrow, when famine came to the farm
And the little child that was dearest went from her loving arms
When her daughters left her in marriage, when she yearned for her soldier son,
Grandmother turned to her Bible and murmured, ‘Thy will be done.’
Somebody closed the Bible, somebody moved her chair
Out of the chimney corner, that we might not miss her there.
Yet we feel she is somewhere near us, not quite has she gone away
From her children and children’s children—who learned at her knees to pray.
Something helpful and holy lies like a fragrant spell
Twixt the cover of Grandmother’s Bible, whose pages she loved so well.
Thank you, God, for the heritage of faith, passed down through generations. Amen.