Fifty Shades of Grace – A Remembrance

You may wonder how I get ideas for blog posts. Some are good, some are not so good.

But this blog post comes from a book I helped to write during the era when a different book called Fifty Shades of Grey (which was a kind of dirty book, the kind I would NEVER write!). But me and several others from our company, which was called Mennonite Media at the time, had the idea to write a nicer book about grace.

Grace is a word we don’t use alot, but I do have hope we look for grace in our lives, our friends, even our so-called enemies, or some not-so-graceful people.

This brought me back to the book we at Mennonite Media decided to try our hand at writing, and we named it Fifty Shades of Grace. And last night this story came back to me with amazing love–and this was amazing love often expressed by my Dad. The story about my Dad was called thus: Softened by Grace. I found the book on my shelf (was wondering if I still had it, but it was there, and I knew the story it held). You get to read it now! If you will! It’s a story I love and I hope you will enjoy too.

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Softened by Grace

When I was seventeen and about to embark on my senior year of high school, my family packed up the car, a pick-up truck, and a U-haul trailer, and moved nine hundred miles from Indiana to north Florida.

Northern Florida was light years away from south Florida in terms of the beach culture of Fort Lauderdale or Miami. North Florida was more like living in very rural Georgia or Alabama: Deep South in everything from accents to attitudes.

The year was 1969: the Vietnam War was in full swing; it was the first year of full racial integration of Florida’s public schools, and just a year after Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, for reasons not unrelated.

So I was the new girl in school. I can still remember one boy glaring at me and spitting out, “Damn Yankee! We don’t need any more of ya’ll down here. If we could fight the war again, we’d win this time.” And it was NOT the Vietnam War he was talking about. (If you need the explanation, it was the Civil War he was talking about.)

We had a government class called “Americanism versus Communism,” and every day the teacher, Mr. Dickens [name changed] would rant about “g’vment, religion, freedom, and don’t forget the fortunes of University of Alabama football, and huntin’.”

Not only was I new and freshly imported from the North, I was immediately categorized as Mennonite. Everyone know Mennonites were different. Some of the local Mennonites were different in dress, but others like me were different mainly because of our beliefs.

I had lived a sheltered life near Goshen, Indiana, where most of my friends, teachers and neighbors were either Mennonite, Brethren, Amish, or Conservative Mennonites. I went to the Mennonite high school in Goshen my first three years and enjoyed a great bunch of friends. My biggest crisis was breaking up with my steady boyfriend, shortly before we moved.

So even though initially I was excited about the move, once there, I felt isolated, lonely, and very different from most of my peers. For the first time in my life, I hated and dreaded going to school.

Mr. Dickens had a chip on his shoulder when it came to religious people. Mostly, he thought they were a bunch of hypocrites, “Fiiiine Babtists (his pronunciation) and on Sunday mornings, who do you find drinkin’ and drivin’ home from Joe’s Bar on a Saturday night? Whoohie!” he would explain, shaking his head.

Still, as a new southern transplant, I was fascinated with his stories. What high schooler wasn’t content to listen to tall tales and loud opinions for an hour rather than buckling down to discuss the assigned reading. At times, his logic and opinions made sense, and I realized his mind went deeper than huntin’ dogs and ‘Bama’ football. He was, after all, editor of the town paper.

Mr. Dickens picked up early on my faith background and would buttonhole me with questions like “How would Mennonites keep Communists from taking over our country if it ever came to that?” I remember my face feeling hot as I stumbled for answers. I was raised to be a “nice” girl, so I never thought of it as bullying or badgering, or a hostile classroom environment.

In our Mennonite family, one of the firm rules guiding our lives was that Sunday was a day of rest. We only did the necessary chores of taking care of animals–and “women’s work” of cooking and washing dishes. Dad, as a rule. would never drive a tractor or do any work on Sunday that could wait until Monday.

But in Calhoun County, a day of rest for humans was also a day when hunters would take their dogs and go scouting for deer.

One Sunday afternoon in the fall, when the ground was soggy and full from the hurricane season, Dad could hear a vehicle stuck in the mud, somewhere across the fields. You could hear the tires whirring in the mud. So Dad went out quietly and got his tractor, fetched some sturdy chains, and went rambling down the paths between fields until he reached the source of the sound.

Who did he find there but Mr. Dickens, and his dogs, with his truck stuck up to its axles.

Dad quickly pulled Mr. Dicken’s truck out of the mud. I don’t know if Dad worried about whether neighbors would think he was working on Sunday when they saw him on his tractor. But Dad did tell me he’d found and freed my government teacher.

On Monday morning, Mr. Dickens began class with “I was out huntin’ with my hounds Red and Rowdy yesterday ….” and we all settled in for what we hoped would be a long diversion from civics, government, and religion.

“Well, I was out near the Miller farm” he said with a nod to me. “And then Whoohie! Fooey! Hot dang! The ole’ truck jes’ mired down and wasn’t going nowhere, no way. I rocked it back and forth. Of course, it jes’ made the mud worse, and I knew that, but what was I to do? I was eight miles from town.

“And then I looked up and who did I see puttin’ across the fields but Mr. Miller, on his tractor, on a Sunday! And he commenced to putting his chains on my truck and had me out of there in no time at all.”

“Now that’s a fine Christian man who don’t ker’ what his neighbors will think, that he’s disobeying the rule about not working on Sunday, to help this poor ol’ teacher out of the mud.”

He turned to me. “I’ll never forget that, Miz’ Miller. You’ve got a fine father. If everybody who went to church was like that, we’d all be better off. Now that’s what Christian love is all about. You tell him thank you again for me now, will ya?”

And Mr. Dickens never did forget my father’s simple act of kindness. He brought it up often in our discussions of religion the rest of the year. I felt less “on trial” and less suspect in my faith tradition.

Dad’s bridge of grace to help someone in a ditch in spite of normal Sunday rules softened my opinion of a curmudgeonly teacher that day–and maybe of this young self-righteous northerner who needed to open herself to be more accepting of anyone, no matter what kind of opinions they expressed or where they lived. I doubt Dad thought of himself as extending grace when he went to get his tractor, but Mr. Dicken’s ideas about Christians, pacifists, and Mennonites would never be quite as hardened.

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Grace is not always easy to extend. But I will be remembering my father and his prayers, his love for people in all the world (seriously), and hopefully will extend to our family, perfect or not.

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You can read the book called Fifty Shades of Grace: Stories of Inspiration and Promise, published by Herald Press. Here’s a link. Fifty Shades of Grace a book by The Herald Press Editors – Bookshop.org US