10.28.05

She Loved Me

Posted in Uncategorized on October 28th, 2005 at 2:26 pm by TCS

by: Tommy Stewart My Great Aunt Rachel who I always called Aunt Rachel, died this week. She was 96 years old. She had ALWAYS embodied a Grace Note to me. In the years that have passed since I lived in the small town that I grew up in, I didn’t see Aunt Rachel all that often. But I feel a profound sense of losing something with her being gone. Aunt Rachel would always make homemade fried apple pies for me. That recipe died with her. She told me over and over that she had tried to make them once and pour the ingredients back out so that she could measure them. She claimed to have lost the paper she wrote it on. I suspect that she wanted to keep that secret. I don’t even want one of those pies made by anybody else. Aunt Rachel was gifted at any number of things. She had won hundreds and hundreds of blue ribbons for things like jelly and quilts and pies. She kept a garden up till a few years ago. She was upset this year as she knew her figs were ripe and the birds would get to enjoy them. So her daughter arranged for someone pick them and send them to Memphis where she was staying. I have tried to think of a defining moment of Grace that Aunt Rachel had shown to me. I can’t come up with one. Instead I come up with a life of Grace. Philip Yancey defines grace as: There is nothing you can do to make God love you any more and there is nothing you can do to make God love you any less. I have always loved that definition. Aunt Rachel loved me just as I am. There was never anything I did to earn her love, there was never anything that should have distanced her love for me that had effect. I know that she loved me always.