Psalm 116:1-2 – I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplication.

Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I live.

How do you live a life that was bathed in prayer even before you were born? I had a praying grandmother who taught her daughter the power of prayer and indirectly influenced my life from the very day I was born. The story told to me by both my grandmother and my mother was that I was born at home, about six weeks premature because of my mother’s poor health. She developed toxaemia and was bedfast for a good many weeks before I was born and I only weighed 3 pounds at birth.

The doctor told my Dad to “take the baby into another room tonight so that the mother won’t know when she dies. She will never live until morning.” My grandmother took over and God gave her the wisdom to make an improvised incubator out of a shoebox and hot water bottles. That shoebox was my bed for a good while after birth. After I outgrew the shoebox, my bed was a dresser drawer in my parent’s room. There were no bassinets in those days – not for the poor folk, anyway. God heard and answered their prayers and spared my life and for all these 70-plus years, I have been both the instigator and the recipient of answered prayers.

At the age of two, I contracted a viral infection of the immune system, called erysipelas that threatened to take my life. My mother told me about it many years later after I was married and had children of my own. She related how the doctors told them to “take the baby home and just try to keep her as comfortable as possible. We have done all that we can do.” With tears in her eyes, my Mom said, “I had never made a bargain with God before, but I found a secret place of prayer and told God that if He would let me keep my little girl, I would raise her to serve Him. The day you married Waldo, I felt like I had kept my part of the bargain.”

God kept his part of that bargain and the disease abated and I not only lived, but also grew up to become a preacher’s wife and spent the next 50 plus years serving God with my preacher husband. How I praise God for a praying Mother and grandmother.

Audrey Mullen waldokeith@cox.net