Childlike Faith (Mark 10:13-16)

Sitting on my bureau in my bedroom is a statue of Jesus embracing a little lamb. Sometimes when I look at it my mind travels back to a time when I was a little girl sitting by my grandfather’s bed.

My grandfather had come to America from Italy as a young man to help build the railroads. When World War I began he went back to Europe to fight. He was gassed in the trenches in France. After the war he immigrated to the USA and worked as a coal miner. He survived the Great Depression and then sent his two sons to fight in World War II. When I was a little girl I was quite sure that my grandfather was the strongest man who ever lived. That is, until the Summer that he had his stroke. When he was finally able to come home it was in a wheelchair. They set up a hospital bed in the living room, and his world was reduced to the kitchen, living room and front porch.

After his stroke I spent many hours sitting with him listening to stories about the “old country”. He told me how he missed the country of his childhood. One day when he was telling me about his father, his voice choked with emotion. That’s when I remembered the picture that he had in his bedroom upstairs. I knew that he would not be able to climb the stairs again, so I brought his father’s picture downstairs and hung it where he could look at it from his hospital bed.

My grandfather filled my mind with stories about his childhood in Italy. As I listened to him it was as if the years were melted away. All the hardships that he had known, the war, the struggle to survive, his concerns about providing for his family, faded into the background. It was also during this time that I began to read the gospel to him. I can still hear his voice in my memory saying, “Sada, tell me again the story of Jesus.

One day I found granddad crying. I now know that depression often comes when people have had a stroke. One of the stories my grandfather had told me was about how he had cared for sheep when he was a boy. I found a picture of Jesus holding a little lamb and brought it to him. “Granddad, you are like this lamb Jesus is holding in his arms. When you were young and strong you were like the other lambs in this picture, running all over the field. But now Jesus holds you close to His heart.”

I think about my grandfather when I read that Jesus said, “Whoever does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will not never enter it” (Mark 10:15). I can still hear the echo of my grandfather’s childlike faith saying, “Sada, tell me again the story of Jesus.”