I’ve missed posting the last two weeks for two very different reasons. Last week, my husband and I were enjoying our first real vacation of more than a long weekend with just the two of us in 32 years (since our honeymoon). Since we were on a cruise and I hadn’t had a chance to write something in advance, nothing got written or posted. The previous week, I was at my last grandparent’s memorial service and then traveling home from that.

This week I want to do some reflecting inspired by the experience of losing my grandmother. However, I’m not going to focus on the grief itself or the comfort that Christ offers. While I love 1 Thessalonians 4:13 and other verses that give me confidence that this woman who firmly believed in God is no longer suffering and that I will see her again, I want to pursue a different thought path.

This most recent loss was of my favorite grandparent growing up. She was young to be my grandmother and treated me and my sister in many ways like a (very slightly) more permissive version of our mother. She was also someone I wanted to be like. She was a teacher, and I wanted to be one. She played piano and sang, and I loved to do those things. She became my first role model.

She and my granddad were a major part of our lives. Before we went overseas, we spent a fair bit of time with that set of grandparents. They visited Indonesia during our first term. We sort of lived with them on our first furlough (we had a house in the city, but spent the majority of nights at our grandparents’ house in the country). During college, I generally stayed with them on vacation. I have many, many positive memories of visits of their homes: the cat, the dogs, the horses, the Barbie doll suitcase full of dolls and lovely hand-made clothes for them, the playhouse they built at the first Tijeras house, the piano and organ and the hours we spent around them singing in small and large family groups, the many sounds the organ could be used to make back in the days before digital keyboards, the weird phones (Granddad worked for Mountain Bell), the many friends they welcomed to their home, singing in the choir at their church and working in VBS there. Then, of course, there are the interesting memories like mud coming out of the shower head or trying to water the horses when the hose was frozen or chasing the pig who refused to stay in the back of the pickup. My mother sitting on the pig was the best part of that last one. In many ways, my grandparents supplied a kind of home that couldn’t come from a life of moving once a year on average and that more fixed home had love in it that rivaled the love in the home that moved all the time.

And my grandparents stayed important in my early marriage. My parents were in the States for the birth of my first child, but not for my second, so my grandparents came. When my oldest was hospitalized with pneumonia and other issues before he turned three, my grandparents dropped everything and came to help sit with him and help care for the infant.

However, sometime in my later twenties I discovered that my first role model had clay feet in some ways. First, I discovered that I had some theological disagreements with her, which led me to look more to other role models. But then she said a couple of things that really hurt me. One was a criticism that may or may not have been true, but that I took offense at. The second was to tell me that I was to blame, at least in part, for arguably the worst thing that ever happened to me, something that happened when I was child. It took me a long time to forgive her for those words and even longer to reach a point where I really believed the words weren’t true so that I could move forward in my healing.

After that, our relationship was never quite the same, even after I moved past my hurt and anger. The grandmother I had idolized was no longer someone I wanted to be. That was hard and some of it was bad, but part of it was right, because I use the word “idolize” deliberately. The reality is that my grandmother wasn’t perfect. My parents aren’t perfect. My pastor isn’t perfect. None of my other earthly role models are perfect. And the role models from the Bible were equally flawed. John the Baptist doubted that Jesus was really the One who was to come. Elijah whined about being all alone. Moses got frustrated and hit the rock. Peter showed his flaws off left, right, and center. And David, well, there was that incident with Bathsheba. I could go on at length.

A good thing about recognizing the flaws of those around us and the reality that we are all flawed is that it becomes easier for us to see past flaws we’ve accepted in order to see the good in people. I got hung up on my grandmother’s flaws because I didn’t expect them and didn’t really accept them at first. I couldn’t deal with the idea that she was telling me something that was wrong and deeply hurtful. Until I came to accept that she could be wrong in her thinking, I couldn’t see past that flaw to all of the good things about her that I’d known all my life. I think that’s a lot like the reaction of someone who puts a pastor or other visible Christian on a pedestal and walks away from the church and even away from God when he discovers the pastor in some act of sin. When we recognize the flawed nature of all humans, we are better able to see past the sin to the good and to the God behind the good. And, really, whenever we get hung up on the flaws of another human, we’re looking in the wrong place, because the only person without flaws is Jesus and that needs to be our only focus.

However, as I reflected on my grandmother’s life and my relationship with her, there’s one really cool thing that I realized about her flaws: they’re gone. Salvation is often described as having three parts: justification, sanctification, and glorification. Justification is the salvation all believers have when they accept Christ, often described as “just as if I’d never sinned.” Sanctification is that often slow and painful process of becoming more like Christ while here on earth. Glorification is what we get after this life, when we become completely free of the remnants of our sin nature and participate fully in our eternal life with God. And that’s now where my grandmother is. And that’s exciting and encourages me all the more to look back and see all of the good that God was developing in her during the 91 years on earth and to look past the flaws that are no more.