A woman who regularly reads the stories in this newsletter asked me to come talk to her. She truly gets what we’re trying to do in telling stories of faith. She understands that sharing our faith allows others to recognize how powerful the Holy Spirit works in our lives. If the season of Advent is about hope, then faith sharing is about how those seeds of hope are planted.
We’ll call this woman Mary after the Blessed Mother. That's easy to do as this woman has many of the Blessed Mother's attributes! It was truly a humbling experience to sit and listen to her.
Mary's story lays heavy on her heart. She's a wise woman who has lived enough years to experience the good and bad in life, but nothing prepared her for what she was about to share with me. Positive grace is what we all look forward to in life. Negative grace is what we all fear and dread happening to us.
Now, in her later years of life, Mary is dealing with the pain of her son’s imprisonment. When she first learned that her son had been sentenced to prison she said, “I was embarrassed as a parent. I thought we brought him up right. What had we done wrong?” She found some consolation when a priest told her that it wasn’t her fault.
Prior to going to prison, Mary’s son didn’t have much of a faith life. She said, “I prayed that he’d get in with the right people.” Since he’s been in prison, her son has chosen to surround himself with other Christians. Mary said, “When my son called home to talk to us, he told us about the Bible study sessions he attended that were led by a prison minister. I knew right then that something had changed in him.” If the devil had won him over at one point in his life, she felt that God was now guiding him.
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