The Hands That Held Me

God was working in ways I could not yet see.

Let me tell you a little about my grandparents—my mother’s mother and father.

Grandmother and Granddaddy were the safest place I knew as a child. They made my life bearable when so much else was uncertain.

They could not rescue me from all the chaos surrounding our family. Some things were beyond anyone’s power to fix. But they held me and nurtured me with everything they had within them. In the middle of what could not be changed, they gave me a place where I could breathe.

As a child, I knew them only as my grandparents. It took me many years to understand that they were also people with remarkable stories of their own.

When I was little, I thought my grandfather had always been strong. I did not yet know that his strength had been forged through losses he carried long before I was born.

He knew what it meant to keep putting one foot in front of the other. So, when he taught me to put my shoulders back and my chin up, to fish, mow the lawn, walk through the park, or simply take the next step, he was not merely giving advice. He was living what he had learned. He was passing on the way he had survived.

My grandmother’s strength was different.

At eighteen, she stepped into a life most young women could never have imagined. She became responsible for three small children, including a profoundly disabled little girl, and helped build a family out of grief, duty, and love.

She did not preach faith.

She lived it.

She carried it quietly through ordinary days, without recognition or fanfare. Only as an adult did I begin to understand what she had surrendered, what she had given up, and what it may have cost her to become the woman who later helped raise me.

I hope to tell their stories with the tenderness they have earned—not to place them on a pedestal or portray them as flawless, but to honor the quiet and faithful ways they helped keep a little girl alive in body, heart, and spirit.

They could not change everything that happened to me.

But they changed what became of me.