My very British grandmother became a nurse at the age of 14 as the war with
Germany was escalating and the Germans were practicing the newly developed and
imprecise science of rocketry on the stiff upper lips of Londoners. This meant
that each time my grandmother took the train back to the hospital in London
where she worked, another building around the hospital was gone, along with the
people who were in it at the time the rocket fell. In spite of this daily
danger the doctors and nurses, including my grandmother, stubbornly fixed their
jaws and served the people of London, running up to the roof to extinguish
incendiary bombs as they fell on the roof, rescuing patients from the basement
as it flooded with water from a broken water main, and in countless other ways
demonstrating a kind of courage that we rarely see in our soft and self-centered world today.
As I seek to help young men to understand why they should love the Bible and how to approach such a unique text, it has occurred to me that the same reasons my heart would beat a little faster and a smile would creep over my face as I heard my grandmother tell her stories are the same reasons that should cause us to thrill at the message of the Bible.
Why should I have cared so much about my grandmother’s stories? My grandmother is dead. I wasn't
