Hillbilly Faith

A small story about my Mamaw, and her great faith in her Savior

No one would ever say that my Mamaw was a pushover. She was known to be feisty and stubborn, and used the phrase, “bless your heart,” in exactly the way every Southerner knows it’s intended, but tries to veil. She’d had a rough upbringing; bounced between the spartan but loving home of her maternal grandparents and into the dance halls of her mother’s chaotic life, she married young, birthed only sons, and was a homemaker her entire life. Her life was never as simple as it might have seemed from the outside. She had, after all, been a 13 year-old bride, and then a 16 year-old mother of twin babies. She and her 20 year-old husband—my Papaw— raised their boys in a little house that had once been white and was now sighing heavily on its foundation of concrete blocks. The holler was named for Stinking Creek, which flowed not twenty steps from their tidy little porch. It had seemed a blessing when they first rented the house. They could fetch water easily, and when heavily pregnant, it had been less of a burden to drag the wash basin and board the short distance. But with not one, but two baby boys learning to walk, Mamaw (known as Little Mommy then) found herself preoccupied with keeping her little ones safe. She still had washing, and cooking on a coal stove, and milking, and any number of chores that she might attend to with a single toddler. But God had been generous and given her an extra portion, pressed down, and she would see to it that her blonde headed babes didn’t meet the fate that befell so many children in the rural Appalachians. So each day, she prayed over her boys, tied a section of clothesline to their left ankles, and secured them to the sturdy porch. Then she went about her business, them following behind as they could but always tethered to the safety of the most solid thing she could find.

I asked her later how she managed, going about so many physically demanding tasks that required her full attention, not having her eyes fixed on her babies. I tried to picture parenting without baby gates and car seats and the luxury of a disposable diaper if I was too backed up on laundry to feel like dealing with cloth. She smiled and shook her head at me as if I was missing the point.

“That’s why they call it faith, Heather Sue,” she told me. “You just have to let God be God.”

It sounds so utterly shallow, doesn’t it? It sounds exactly like the kind of thing an uneducated mountain woman might say. Yet you and I know that the depth of her words exceeds any truth taught in a university classroom. Confronted with a problem, even one that she feared, one that threatened her own children, she chose to trust. Really, she didn’t have a choice. Her options were limited in rural Kentucky in 1950. But maybe, just maybe, not having the illusion of choice is more the point.

Those baby gates? The car seat? They aren’t God. They aren’t acts of faith. I’m not even remotely suggesting that we quite using them, or are weak for our dependence on them, but I am saying that perhaps they have tamed our most primal worries just enough that we no longer lose sleep praying over the things that once stalked children on a daily basis. We don’t tremble at the thought of our crawling infant finding an uncovered well, or at the constant awareness that an open flame sitting inside the hulking cookstove might send a spark to the floor and set the whole house ablaze. We trust that these things won’t happen… but it’s not God we trust. It’s ourselves. It’s our safety ratings. It’s our fire codes. It’s putting our babies down in organic wool sleep sacks on a mattress stuffed with ethically harvested coconut husks and wrapped in all-natural rubber sourced from an independent farm owned by native women farmers.

We worry. We ache. We fret. And when a potential issue arises, we hit the internet for answers and demand that laws be changed or programs instituted to make sure the odds are in our favor even if Jesus isn’t.

Seventy-two years on, my Mamaw’s faith that some twisted cord and a few words spoken over a set of rambunctious twins left near a fast-moving creek and heaven knows what else while she went into a shed to milk is worthy of a CPS call. But before we mock the teenage mother with an 8th grade education, before we chalk it all up to a backwards culture of ignorant hillbillys, let’s pause and reflect on the kind of trust this one woman had in Jesus every single day. Let’s look at the surety she felt in His presence, and His care. And let’s look at the summation of her life, lived out in a daily walk with Her Savior right up to the moment He called her home.

I don’t know about you, but I long to embody that kind of faith. You won’t catch me tying a kid to a porch, but you will see me asking Jesus to be my first solution, not my back up plan.

In Christ,

Heather

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