A Chosen People

*My father was not a wealthy man except in education.  He came from the worst childhood I can imagine, for he, on a rare occasion, would share a horror tale with me, many as we sat in his sauna during his last dying years.  My mom was the same but had little education.  She quit her schooling at 16 to marry him. She was raised wealthy by a drinking and gambling father who gambled it all away, charged once with murder, convicted of manslaughter, and timed his due at Brushy Mountain.  She will still and only say of him, “he was a good man, but he was a drunk.”  Both my grandfathers were dead at 41 with nothing to show for their life on earth save one daughter to one and one son to the other.  I would say my parents were beloved people, beloved by those that count, the poor, the needy, the widow, the down and outers, and those of color.  When I was a baby, my dad rode a train to Death Valley, California, to bring Jesus to the Native Americans.  When I was 12, he began to bring “coloreds” into his church, for which he was promptly voted out of the pulpit and onto the street.  People loved me because of my parents, and my love for them grows greater by the day now that I am old. and he dead some 20 years, and she now has lost all her memory save for a bit here and a name there.   But these two lost souls found each other as young teenagers, married, and began to remake their history.  We number 52 now, and one great-grandson on the way.  Neither lived or stayed conscious long enough to know how great their legacy, pastors, teachers, artists, warriors, and a few shared their grandfathers' propensity to addictions.  However, the grace found in my parents found us all cured.  I have never known true hardship, not the hardship of having nothing except what you might make yourself.  There was no dowery left for either of my parents, not even a good name, but they were saved, and in their salvation, they found a reason for being and doing, for meaning and purpose, to build a firm foundation upon which the other 52 of us now stand and build upon.  They had four, and we bred, birthed, or brought 48 more.  But the two of them did most of the hard work, the living without, the scrapping to get by, the time on their knees and with their Bibles ensuring that what they read, prayed, and lived for would bring forth a harvest  "For I have chosen him so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just."          *on reading Genesis 15-18