BY DANI TIETZ
dani@mahometnews.com
My grandmother was a devout Christian.
After my grandfather passed away in the late 1970s, she moved to Waxhaw, N.C., where she joined the JAARS missionary team. She lived there for almost 20 years, helping to serve groups of people overseas and at home.
She loved to listen to Charles Stanley and Billy Graham. She wrote us letters telling us how much God loved us. She wanted us to understand his guidance, so we were encouraged to recite Bible passages. She would sing hymns to us as she tucked us into bed, when she was visiting.
When Sunday rolled around, we were in a pew. And as graduation rolled around, she bought me a Bible.
These are pretty typical occurrences for any child who has a family member that is part of a religious group.
As a child, all I could see were the practices she participated in. As an adult, I know that her practices were rooted in a deep understanding and belief in something bigger than herself.
I think that the first time this occurred to me was when I was in my early 20s. I was visiting her home in Waxhaw. She lived in the basement apartment of the large house she owned; she rented out the other space.
After a meal of some of the worst tacos I’ve ever had in my life, she started talking to me about a book she was reading. The book was written as a supplemental story to the Bible. It talked about Jesus’ siblings, about Jesus’ actions towards other people, about the undiscovered manuscripts of the time that were supposed to be “the rest of the story.”
I asked her why she was reading and talking about that manuscript. Every other adult in my life seemed to just know what they believed, would shout it from the rooftops and rebutted anything that might make them think otherwise.
But here was my grandma, in her blouse and turquoise pants, the woman who had taught me everything she felt I should know about God, asking me to listen to something else.
She asked me, “How do you know that you really believe something if you cannot question it?”
There have never been truer words uttered in my lifetime.
She knew what she believed. She knew it. And so she wasn’t threatened by any questions or doubts that might pop into her head or those that were uttered by someone else.
This has been on my mind so much over the last few years. I’ve thought about it from the perspective of people asking me questions, the questions that I ask, how I react, how other people react.
And today, as we wait to see what the final vote on whether or not witnesses and evidence will be presented in President Trump’s impeachment trial are allowed, I think about her statement.
Regardless of what I think about the impeachment proceedings, Donald Trump, Ukraine or any of the topics surrounding the last three years of his presidency, I am curious as to why we live in a society that never wants questions to be asked.
If we believe something to be true, why would we want to push questions away?
We have questions about what happened, how it affects us overall, what happens next, how the process works, what it means and if our system still works.
I hope to one day have the faith that my grandma had. I hope one day society learns to have the faith that my grandma had.
I imagine that she knew Luke 8:17: “For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.”
By the time I asked her about questioning her faith, she was in her late 60s. Maybe that’s enough time to see things come, pass and then make sense. Maybe it’s enough time to know that everything that should, will come to be. Maybe she’d learned that not everything comes to be as we want it and when we want it, but that when something is truly true, it will stand the test of time.
