Memory is fluid and tricky. When I was a child, a neighbor found my Grandma Cora adrift in her own neighborhood, lost and unable to remember her way home. I learned then that memory can flow or ebb or even run everything you know through a spin cycle. My sweet grandmother had spent her life as the caretaker, and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s meant she now needed us to take care of her.
Depending on the day, my dad might be her son, her dad or her brother, and my mom either her daughter-in-law or a friendly woman she couldn’t quite place. Words of belief remained. She could still read her Bible—although sometimes the same page, over and over. Scripture, hymns, prayers and creeds were a comfort to Grandma; something I began to understand for myself as an adult, whenever I struggled to see things clearly.
Speaking our words of belief aloud matters. And those words stay with us long after other things fade.
This message is an excerpt from a Women of the ELCA blog by Elizabeth Hunter. Today is the 15th Sunday after Pentecost. We remember Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, bishop, renewer of the church, who died in 1872.
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