It is football season which brings great joy to some of the members of my family. With football season, came a memory of my maternal grandma. Grandma was a tiny woman standing 4 feet 11 inches tall and weighing about 100 lbs. She had beautiful skin, platinum blonde hair, and looked like a porcelain doll. A smile most often graced her features and perhaps it hid the fact that my grandma was as tough as they come.
Grandpa and Grandma had a cabin in Island Park, Idaho and I have so many happy memories of spending time with them there. One year they had stayed at the cabin into the early fall and on a trip into town had noticed a preseason nine on nine football scrimmage of the local high school team.
They thought they would stop and watch for awhile. As they made their way to the grandstand, a play ran out of bounds and my little grandma was hit in the knee by the helmet of a teenage boy running at full speed. The medical care she needed was not available there so Grandma’s leg was put in a splint and they began the painful drive back to Salt Lake City, Utah. The doctors told her they could do surgery to mitigate the pain and part of her knee would heal, but the damage was too extensive, she was too old and most likely she would never walk again without assistance.
She came to stay at our house through her surgery and recovery and though I am sure she had her moments of fear and heartache, I never heard her complain or whine. What I do remember is the constant whir of the machine that kept her knee moving after the surgery to promote healing. I remember the set of her jaw as she did the physical therapy sets she was assigned without shirking a bit. I remember her listening to cassette tapes of the Book of Mormon while she alternated ice packs and followed her doctor’s regimen with precision believing that God would magnify her efforts. And a year later and for the next twenty years, I watched her walk without any sign of a limp or injury.
Sometimes we pray for immediate healing. Grandma had fervently believed that she would walk again and clearly a gift of healing was granted to her, but I am grateful that the healing of her shattered knee was not immediate, not so much for her, but for me and for those of us who got to watch her and learn what the daily effort of faith looks like. Daily faith requires consistent effort in little things, trusting God, focusing on what is and can be and not on what has been lost. When we move forward with faith, the results are often not immediately seen and yet they come. There is hope in consistent effort and the power of our Creator who knows how to help us grow and heal.