Congratulations to the Los Angeles Rams on winning the Super Bowl!
Remembering Ann
This past Wednesday marked the birthday of my late grandmother, Elizabeth Ann Prescott Watts (1930-2011). She would have turned 92 this year.
I remember where I was when I received the call that she had passed. I had just moved to Missouri even as our family knew her time was growing short. I pulled off the road into a Walgreens parking lot as I processed the news and began to make plans to fly home for her funeral.
Grandma Ann was born in the height of the Great Depression in Sumter County, South Carolina (see her parents below). I still see the cotton fields as I recall the rare visits we made to the area in which she was raised. I remember her cooking, her dry humor, and life-wearied hands. I remember her disciplining me, which I’m sure was well-deserved! I even remember visiting a family cemetery and discovering a relative on her side of the family named George Washington Prescott. (It was common in the 1800s and even early 1900s for folks to name someone after memorable presidents. I have an Andrew Jackson Hicks on the other side of the family.)
Grandma was born into deep poverty. In those days nearly all Americans in rural communities experienced it. Her meeting and marrying another poor kid, Julius Charlton “J.C.” Watts, didn’t put this 17-year-old in much better position for a bright future. But their hard upbringings cultivated the perseverance they’d need to establish a home, grow a farm, raise a family, and be an important part of a community.
The truth is less idyllic than this may sound. Life was difficult. Amid the peak of seedtime and harvest, Grandaddy could be demanding. Grandma herself suffered from depression and rheumatoid arthritis that restricted a lot of her activity in later years.
She could also be severely shy, though if you knew her you knew that she wasn’t disinterested. Her generosity with the produce from her garden, her sewing, and delicious cakes said otherwise. I’ve written previously on the matter of eating. Many fellow church members and neighbors would tell you that they fondly remember her cooking. Thankfully, some recipes were handed down to her daughters.
My thoughts always come back to her hands. Arthritis destroys hands. I can remember her wincing more than once when releasing an object. But those same hands stayed busy serving others. She fed her husband and five children. She worked a vast garden. She sewed. Over the years she even helped care for more than one relative under her own roof. And when it was time to kill hogs in December, she was in the thick of things. She’d learned some of this from her own parents (pictured below), I’m sure. But she continued to show others how to do the work.
My memory of her is a combination of heaviness and tenderness, burdens and care. We can and should extol the accomplishment of 60 years of marriage, the days when Christians had more children, and living simply without extravagance. But these values require great discipline, perseverance, and sacrifice.
I remember her, but time has a way of dimming our memories. We have to work hard to recover them, retell them, and sometimes research in order to learn things we never knew before. No doubt God intends both the home and the church to be institutions of remembrance. We’re not to live in the past or make it out to be better than it really was. Both of those are unwise and dishonest. But marking birthdays and other key dates of deceased relatives has been a meaningful way for me to try to cultivate gratitude and wisdom.
So as I remember Grandma Ann this February, I remember her giving spirit and perseverance. I remember her idiosyncrasies, like how she pronounced tacos (“tarcos”) and chocolate (“chaht-lat”). I remember a hospital visit in the last year of her life when a nurse commented on what a good-looking grandson I was, to which she responded, “That’s the only kind I got!”
Thank God for grandmothers!
Signage Matters
Recently I’ve been working with our Trustee Board and other church leaders to address our signage needs. It has been an extensive process. We first updated our interior signage years ago, hoping to help visitors orient themselves to our facility. More recently, we’ve been looking closely at our exterior signage.
This subject is of much more practical importance than most people think. Signs are the kind of thing we take for granted. After our initial visit to a restaurant, doctor’s office, or church building, we no longer use the signs to guide us. We work from an internalized mental map of where something is, and we continue using that map going forward. It’s difficult for us to remember our first experience trying to find somewhere we’ve never been before.
While we haven’t argued over signs, I suspect some churches do because it’s easy to lack the imagination of a new person. How might they experience this place the first time? Would they know where they could or should park? Would they know where the restrooms were? Would it be obvious to someone driving by that this is even a place where a church meets?
Church planters who meet in unconventional spaces aren’t the only people who need to ask these questions; leaders in established churches do, too! Ironically, the establishment mentality often hinders us from thinking well about these topics. We may too quickly assume that because our ministry has existed for 25, 50, or even 100 years, surely everyone knows we’re here! Of course, by then we’ve already written off all the newcomers to our communities.
Two additional problems undergird this myopic perspective.
First, we too often rely on the externals of the church’s ministry to do the hard work that only spiritual people can do. If we rely too heavily on signage to communicate the presence and significance of our church, we end up minimizing the thousands of ways that members’ lives should be signposts in the community, pointing the way not just to a service, but to a Savior.
Second, once we do properly know how to relate the internals to the externals of a ministry, we can still draw wrong conclusions about what the externals are for. Is this sign primarily for us, or for those unfamiliar with us? Is this sign designed to say everything of significance about our ministry, or a key detail? Does this sign need to last for a year, or for 20?
We need a better rubric or paradigm for evaluating what we’re doing, and that seems to start with asking better questions.
1) What is this really for?
2) Who is this actually for?
3) Why do this now?
4) Is there an alternative way to meet this need?
5) Have we prayed about this sufficiently?
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it combines simplicity with depth. The interrogatives are a given (what, who, why), but words like “really,” “actually,” and “now” are designed to turn shaky decisions into solid ones for ministries.
Signs matter. But my advice is to make sure what they’re pointing to is solid, then fix the signs. And make sure everyone knows they’re already a sign, whether they like it or not.
Currently Reading:
Catch-up week on previously unfinished books!
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I’m opening up the comment thread on this post so you can share a favorite memory of a grandmother. And if you happen to have known Grandma Ann, let me know what you remember about her.