By Her Light
There has never been a moment in Greta Smith's life when she did not believe she was doing the right thing. Not the years she told herself she loved her husband's two small boys exactly as her own. Not the afternoons she sat across from a struggling daughter-in-law and gently, gently suggested that prayer would help. Not the morning she stood at her granddaughter's grave and decided the Lord had asked her to bear it. She has been the right kind of woman all her life. Ask her. She will tell you.
Greta's father was a miner who painted on Sundays. By twenty she had understood that clarity was the Lord's gift to those who paid the right kind of attention — her clarity its own evidence.
The man she married already had two small boys whose mother had not been able to stay, and she opened her arms to them, and told herself she had loved them exactly as her own. Nearly. There was always a half-inch she could not quite cross. Four more children followed, of her own this time. Them she loved too, in the only way she knew — by being very sure what God wanted for each of them, and very gentle when they wanted something else.
These days she lives in the city she helped to build. Grace is still said at every meal. Her grandson hears the same bedtime stories his father once heard. In her own quiet certainty, she was holding her granddaughter's hand in the way the Lord asked her to. The people who could have told her otherwise are mostly in rooms she cannot enter — and in her quiet steady way, she has made sure of it.
