While in the hospital I had a vision of heaven. I was carried away from earth by two angels who dropped me off at a gravel road. As I walked around the bend in this road, I came upon a simple country house. In front of the house, in a circle in wooden chairs, were seated my grandparents, drinking iced tea and lemonade and sharing stories. And one day, life will be that simple again.

My paternal grandpa was named Amos. My maternal grandpa was named Devon, but he went by Shorty. I didn’t know Amos at all, and Shorty was hard to know because he was a hard man who didn’t care much for kids. Grandma used to tell us to keep our distance. Both men were drunks and had chronic heart disease which killed them. Shorty was riding a horse and had a heart attack that killed him before he hit the ground, but he died with his boots on. Amos used to “walk the little girls home” after the medicine shows he performed, putting on blackface and selling snake oil. Grandma left him when my dad was young and later married Clyde Johnson, a good man who provided for her and her disabled child, but also a man who loved his beer.

I knew Clyde well. My favorite picture of him is when I got a toy doctor’s kit for Christmas. I would pretend to give him a shot with my plastic shot needle, and he would howl like a dog. I used to sit on my grandpa’s lap and ask him to flex his muscles like Popeye because he had a piece of metal that had turned blue with age stuck in his bicep from a welding accident during World War II.  

Grandma told me I used to sit on grandpa’s lap and say, “I smell your beer breath.” Aunt Vady, Clyde’s sister and a godly woman, used to tell him he was letting the devil in his mouth to steal his soul and that he needed to give his heart to Jesus. One weekend, my grandpa left his job as a machinist and went straight to the bar to spend his paycheck. He told me he didn’t remember anything from that weekend, but “came to” at his drill press on Monday morning. He thought back on his life and how he had wasted so much time drinking.  He thought about how his sister Vady would scold him. He thought back to the times I sat on his lap and smelled beer. He said that he started weeping and that his tears covered the drill press. On that Monday morning, he got down on his knees – right there at his drill press – and said to Jesus, “I need you” and asked him to forgive him for all he had wasted. My grandpa told me that when he stood up, he was stone-cold sober… as if he had never taken a drink in his life. And he never drank again after that day.

After Grandpa Johnson retired, he moved to Glendora across the street from Citrus College. Carolyn Coons from Azusa Pacific University who was doing some work with a mission in Cuernavaca, Mexico – just over the border from Calexico – came to his church to share about her work. And an adventure began for my grandpa. With his building and welding skills, he began building and remodeling the mission that fed and housed those who were desperate, impoverished and destitute. He would travel to Mexico every other week with donated clothes and building supplies. His partnership with APU was life-changing for him and for hundreds of people in Mexico.

Once, he was visiting us in Sacramento and saw an International Harvester truck in a used car lot. We pulled the car over, and he looked it over, started it up, and then bought it on the spot, pulling the money from his wallet. That truck made dozens of trips to Mexico pulling a trailer full of bikes, furniture, and building supplies.

In 1974, my church in Sacramento took a high school mission trip to the same mission in Cuernavaca. As a high school worship leader, I led morning worship during that trip at a mission that my grandpa was instrumental in building and sustaining.

(Pictured: Me and Grandpa Johnson, 1958)

(Pictured: Me leading songs at “Grandpa’s mission” in the village of Cuernavaca, 1974.)