Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay
One of the books that Robert Edward Ludlow Sr. had been exposed to as a little child – not to say that he read it, but his Lee grandmother often read parts of it to him – was John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. That had provided him foundational ideas that the walk with God was a pilgrimage of a type that denied the racist and yet churched upbringing that his Ludlow family offered.
This quiet act of subversion by his mother's mother had allowed Capt. Ludlow's faith to survive when marrying a similarly churched woman whose only thought was to make chattel of him, enjoying his money and the men she really wanted while he was away serving his country, of course went wrong – so incredibly wrong that divorce was not even enough. Alienation of both known children and the hiding of a third – and then the eventual suicide of wife and children and orphaning of all known grandchildren – that had shook the captain's faith, but not broken it.
“Sometimes you need to know the trap you're in so that you actually can know the trap you're in,” his grandson Andrew would always recalling him saying upon intercepting his eldest grandson about to make a mistake. “God is good when He shows you, although what He shows you might not make you happy.”
Every day, as custodial grandfather of his seven grandchildren, Capt. R.E. Ludlow read from Pilgrim's Progress as either naptime story or bedtime story to one or another of his grandchildren, and eldest grandchildren Eleanor and Andrew each had their own junior adaptations.
Still, until the morning he was going to Big Loft to see how the adoption process was faring during the pandemic, it did not dawn on the captain the core of what his grandmother had taught him through that book, and what he, during the isolation of the pandemic, was teaching them. He woke up with it in mind.
“I am not going to Big Loft to receive anything from God, just as I was subtly taught that He was not in a building … there is no destination that I am going to down here that will give me what I need. I have Him and He has me, in Christ. I have what I need. I will walk with Him today and see what He has done and what He has for me to do, and He will make me more of who He wants me to be while walking. Just another day on the pilgrimage, walking toward home.”
It further dawned on him as he showered … the pandemic, for all its hassles, contained a blessing.
“My grandchildren now will never have to be confused … we will certainly go back to some church, but they will never have to confuse attendance at any building with the goal of the Christian life. No. We will walk with God daily together … and when I have reached home, they will walk on in faith, knowing how, without confusion.”
And then …
“That must also mean this adoption thing is going to work out!”
This was not the frame of mind Capt. Ludlow expected to be in on one of the key days in his family's life … but all the prayers from his grandmother and mother on down, and all that they taught him, had prepared him.