A Little Pie and a Little Prayer | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: A Little Pie and a Little Prayer | Previous Challenge Entry
By Angela Holloway
06/19/06
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It wasn’t her stylish clothes. She only owned a handful of worn mid-calf length dresses, including the long sleeved yellow dress she saved each week for church. It wasn’t her good looks. She never wore makeup, not a day in her life, and menopausal hair loss necessitated her wearing a switch where her old fashioned bun should have been. It couldn’t have been the fancy car she drove. In point of fact, she never learned how to drive. I guess one could argue it was her pies. She was famous for this particular gift in all the surrounding counties. However, what it really was, really, was her life.

It was a simple life. I watched as her withered hand turned the page of a well used Bible. She hadn’t always been a Christian, but this second generation immigrant spent her eighth-grade education studying the Scriptures and conversing with anyone who would have it. It was never preaching, just conversing. In her younger years, she spent her days baking her famous pies as she prayed without ceasing for those she would visit that day. The lucky recipients of these mouth watering delectables were not at all special, that is not at all by worldly standards. Some were new comers to town. Some were bed-ridden or shut-ins. Some had just given birth. Others were just simply spiritually lost or broken. I am sure some just liked pie. It really seemed to make little difference to her. Her life was about enriching theirs, if only with a little prayer, and a little pie.

To many, she appeared outgoing and gregarious. She was, however, joyful and could make anyone smile. When her husband was in recovery following surgery to have a rib removed for cancer, she took his hand, gently smiled, and asked “So, are you going to have another woman made out of that?”

Still, this woman, barely 5’ tall, lived a giant life of quiet faith. Without ever mentioning Jesus she led people to the Lord: people who saw Christ at work in her life and saw the difference that it made.

Now, cut off from the world, forced to spend long days alone with only the company of her God, she prayed. She prayed for the lost and the broken, praying first for the salvation of her grandchildren, all of whom, but one, had turned away from the faith, and were raising their own children in poor, godless houses devoid of pie, let alone prayer. She prayed.

When all was said and done, and the sum total of her life at end, she had survived her parents, all 13 siblings, her husband, and one of her two children. She left this world just as she had lived in it, joyfully, quietly, prayerfully. The result of this life well lived? Streams of people who had given their life to the Lord; men and women whose children and grandchildren, and maybe even great grandchildren were now living lives unto the Lord. And her children and grandchildren? No longer lost or broken, most of them have surrendered their own life. Some have even gone on to serve in the ministry.

No, it certainly wasn’t a glamorous life, but then neither was the life of Jesus. But, like Jesus, it was a surrendered life. In fact, when it comes right down to it, a life that touches other lives, seems much more like a life than a life that is only about its own. Oh, if only we each lived a life purposed to enrich the life of another, if only with a little pie, and a little prayer.

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