Featured: A Wide Welcome
Five times a year, I share my writing in Cultivating, a lovely publication offered by Cultivating Oaks Press. Each edition is an absolute feast for the soul. Here are the opening few paragraphs of my essay about our beloved Grandma Pat’s generosity of heart and its rootedness in the generosity of God for the Spring 2025 edition exploring Generosity. You can read the full version of my article exclusively in the online edition (or in the print edition, which would look gorgeous kept close at hand on a coffee table and is available for purchase).
While you’re there, I hope you will enjoy the thoughtful, deep work of my fellow Cultivators. They are kind, wise, and stay close to Jesus’s side, and they have beautiful words to offer. Enjoy!
Endless generosity and bottomless orneriness came together in a sort of ragtime harmony in the life of my Grandma Pat. Or, rather, my husband’s Grandma Pat, but she would not appreciate me making that distinction (and certainly would not be too shy to say so).
Her faith was made sight last year at age 90. She was one of a kind, the sort of person that everyone who met her had a story about.
She was generous in the ways most grandmothers are: lavish with her praise, abundant in her encouragement, and bounteous with second and third helpings of food. Early in our marriage, we made monthly visits to her home in Sun City, Arizona. When it came time for my husband and me to head home, she would empty her freezer and half the refrigerator as a parting gift: crocks of leftover soup, bags of frozen veggies, small cups of fat-free yogurts, and stacks of Cool Whip containers that were guaranteed to be filled with any delicious thing except Cool Whip. Despite our protests, she would pile the food higher, insisting that she had enough.