Ruth Grant, 30 September 1929 - 6 October 2007

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I wrote this in the fall 2015, soon after All Saints Day. Recently it returned to my mind. Some will wince at what they feel is dirty laundry. My response is that I think that Mum is smiling, that for one of the first times in history, she can be loved, not for what she presented to the world, but because as a God's creation, she is an object of love.

I haven’t written or honored my mother like I have my Father. If you keep reading, you’ll understand why, and today it is time to change that fact.

As the Church remembered All Saints Day, my mind went to her. It is time to tell her story from my perspective. My remembrance is only one such story. It is mine, and mine alone. Thousands tell stories of her faithfulness and devotion. They have a different story to tell. This one is mine, and yet it is also a story of loyalty and devotion, and it is no longer a white-washed story. It is real; at least in my psyche

To hear her tell the story, her father was a school teacher in the Deep South that was forced to leave his profession so that the family could eat when the Great Depression hit. He became a dam builder - moving the family first to Hoover Dam in AZ and then north to Grand Coulee Dam in WA before moving to Vancouver Washington to work in the shipyards during WW2.

She was the youngest of four and felt unwanted. Her life reflected that truth. Having said that, she worshiped her mother, who by all accounts was an incredibly gracious and Godly woman.

Mom confessed that she always lived in the shadow of her drop-dead gorgeous sister who had the world by the tail. She never thought she measured up to a standard even she couldn't identify. As far as she was concerned, she was the unwanted, ugly one. To counter that belief she overachieved. She graduated a year early from high school and then went “back home” to the deep south to study Speech at Bob Jones University, where she excelled.

While at Bob Jones, she realized she was supposed to be a missionary and she got engaged to Stuart Bundy, a man that was also called to the mission field. The trouble was, Stuart was called to South America while Mom knew she was supposed to go to Europe. She remembered steaming out to Great Britain on the Queen Mary. Passing the Statue of Liberty with tears streaming down her face because God’s call was away from all that she knew and loved. Her God never had her best interest at heart. He seemed heartless and demanding.

Once in London, Mom became the first human to produce a weekly Christian radio program broadcast across Europe. Because of a dockworkers strike, the tapes of the American preacher she was supposed to use couldn't get through. The strike afforded her the opportunity to put Englishmen such as Alan Redpath and Martin Lloyd-Jones on the radio for the first time.

At the same time, she met a handsome English gospel singer who was taking the English church scene by storm. She would put him on the radio along with the English preaching sensations. Though they had a hit show, the American’s who were financing the program were not so thrilled. The show was intended to showcase the head of her mission to Europeans, not English interlopers. The mission decided to pull the plug on the show and end all she had created.

About that same time the handsome English singing sensation asked her to be his wife. She initially put him on hold, saying that she was in England for the purpose of producing radio, and she was not sure how her English suitor fit into God’s plan for her. Though completely smitten with him, she didn't think God would give her such a gift.

She could not find any other missions or radio ministries that wanted to do what she felt called to do, so she married the Englishman in the fall of 1952. They soon joined the Eric Hutching’s Hour of Revival Evangelistic Team where Mom took control of the sound and the radio broadcasts while her husband played emcee, led the choir and soloed for the team. They traveled the world, preaching, teaching and loving one another. It was a fairy tale romance, and though they were poor, this was the happiest period of Mom’s life.

In 1963, my brother, Timothy was born. While his birth slowed Mom down, she was still able to run the sound board and produce the radio with an infant in tow, by her side. There are some fantastic photos of her in the sound booth far above the mission's venue. When I was born, that all changed. Two children were too much. Mom went from queen of the studio (where her words were law, and she reigned over the sound teams), sought after as a teacher (indeed she preached better than my Dad), and traveling Europe and Southern Africa, to a stay-at-home mom of a toddler and an infant. She told God and whoever else would listen that she was no good as a mother. She was good at the other things, but not mothering. It seems now like those early days of my brother's, and my lives were the darkest days of her life.

After being a virtual single mother proved to be too much, the family moved to the States so that Mom could be nearer her family and not have to feel so alone. She hoped her depression would lift. The move proved not to be such an easy transition, however. All of a sudden, the family that everyone knew was known by no one. The celebrity was gone. And though Mom had family to help she was still alone with two small boys, feeling all alone, like a failure, unloved, and back in her sister's shadow.

As we grew older Mom found a few ministry opportunities for herself and was the administrative force behind what would become Grant Gospel Communications — my parents non-profit.

Somewhere during this time, she also began to groom me to be a surrogate and started sexually abusing me. It would be wrong to say more than that here, for she was broken and doing the best that she could, and she didn’t mean harm, and she needed to kill her pain — and I paid the price. I do not know what price my brother paid. I know it was steep, though.

As my brother and I got older and left home for college, Mom and Dad began to travel together again. Mom’s second golden age began. She would practice piano for hours so that she could accompany Dad during his concerts. She also began to write and perform again. And when I say, "act," I mean, "act."

She memorized Romans 8, and large chunks of Revelation, along with other sections of Scripture. She presented them as dramatic performances for hundreds, probably thousands of admirers and fans. She brought the Word of God alive for her audiences. She was good. People loved her, and she blessed them.

She also wrote Christmas fiction, designed to help listeners enter into the Christmas and Jesus stories in ways they hadn’t been able to before. She would memorize her narratives and present them as a one-woman show. I can even remember her challenging me to learn Psalm 119 faster than her. She was serious and I knew I couldn’t compete, so I turned her down. I don't know if she did it out not. It wouldn't surprise me, though.

Twice she battled cancer. The last time she was miraculously healed. That is its own story, and is so incredible; it is almost unbelievable. I know that I wouldn’t believe it had I not lived it. I was with Dad in New England when we made the call to Mom to find out what the doctors had said and hearing her, overjoyed report, “The doctor states, ‘There is a slight swelling of the lymph nodes, we cannot rule out the possibility of cancer.'” The tumour, about the size of my fist the doctor discovered only two weeks earlier during exploratory surgery was gone.

For the next 12 years, Mom and Dad rediscovered their love story, They made over 20 trips to India and Europe for ministry and mission. Side by side they labored. Then in 1999 the diagnosis that my Mom feared more than any other was given, “Ruth, you have Alzheimers disease. We can slow it, but that is all."

In 2002 on the heels of my divorce, my Dad asked me to move in with him again to help care for my Mum. He couldn’t do it alone.

Already she had proven that she was not afraid to interrupt my sermons with some embarrassing story from my childhood. Now her story grew darker. She knew that her deepest fear was becoming reality. As her mind left her, she began longing for home and wandering off unsafely, sometimes barely dressed. In 2006, Dad and I realized it wasn’t safe to keep her at home anymore. Of course, she didn’t understand a locked down memory unit. And yet, she would still say, no matter how bad it got, “I know one thing, I am a child of the King.”

Those last years, those last months, everything that gave her self-worth were stripped away from her. She was left with that simple statement, “I don’t know, but I know I am a child of the King.”

Mother’s Day of 2006 was the first day she no longer recognized me. I merely became a sweet man that visited her. Some days I was her brother, sometimes I was simply there. Never again was I her son.

Finally in October 2006 with family around her bed, Mom passed into glory. Finally getting to go home and see her Dad, the king.

I am so grateful for those last years. All her life, Mom worked her butt off to gain acceptance, to get out of the shadows of her sister, to be worthy, to be loved by her Dad. Then, in the end, she discovered that she was.

That is a story that needs to be told. I don’t tell it to besmirch my Mother’s memory but to relate her story in a way that I think she now wants to be told. She was deeply wounded, and she deeply hurt my brother and me, not from spite, but because she didn’t know how not to.

People on four continents know Jesus because of her faithfulness, I know Jesus, in part because of her brokenness. That story has shaped me, for good and for ill. It deserves to be told. My Mom was an imperfect saint, like every saint who lived before her. In the wake of All Saints Day 2015, for the first time, I remember her among the great saints of the church — perfectly imperfect; full of crap and glory; shit and magnificence.