I grew up in the small southern town of Ashland, Alabama.  It was a wonderful place to call home.  It was “Mayberry” in more ways than one.  My grade school years coincided with the time known as the Civil Rights era– the 1960’s.  I began elementary school in a racially segregated world, but entered high school in a totally different world where blacks and whites graduated school together.  It was a changing time filled with uncertainty for everyone, especially in the Deep South.  But I had a advantage over many of my friends– my grandmother.

Grandma Nichols was different from her contemporaries.  She would have been perfect to play the part of Skeeter in the movie, “The Help.”  She was truly color-blind, in the symbolic sense.  She was gifted in mercy, compassion, and generosity– for black and white the same.  I stayed with her on Saturdays while my parents worked in their retail business.  We would spend much of our Saturday distributing leftover lunchroom food to needy families; checking on elderly persons in their homes; visiting patients in the nursing home; and cooking for folks who were sick.  Black, white, or green– it made no difference to her.  Compassion was for everyone.

Grandma Nichols, or Estelle as her friends knew her, was a “lunchroom lady.”  In fact, she was THE lunchroom lady, in charge of the entire lunchroom mechanism for the local public school.  Even before the Civil Rights era, she gladly hired workers of both races.  Where most hired minorities so that they could pay them less, relegating them to the back room washing dishes and peeling potatoes, she promoted any deserving worker to the “front serving line,” and paid everyone the same regardless of race.  She was sharply criticized on occasion, but it made no difference to her.

One day she received a threatening letter from the regional grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who lived in a neighboring town, but she refused to be intimidated.  After reading his threatening letter, she stormed into her bedroom and locked the door behind her, mumbling under her breath all the way.  A short while later she reappeared holding a sealed and stamped envelope in her hand.  Without saying a word to anyone, Grandma grabbed her purse and keys, climbed into her 1956 Chevrolet, and headed toward town.  It was assumed that she went to the post office, but there was no way of knowing since she refused to talk about the incident ever again.   For almost twenty years she was silent about the letter.

But then, as Grandma Nichols aged and became childishly fond of reminiscing about old times, the truth came out.  She had read his ugly letter, and then wasting no time, shot off a terse letter of her own in response.  With fiery pen she informed him that the lunchroom ladies were well aware of the many illicit affairs he had carried on with women in the county, and that publishing the details in the weekly newspaper would be no problem for her and the lunchroom ladies!  She dared him to bring it up again.  She never heard another word from him.

She was tough, but she cared about people.   Her kindness wasn’t a “care program” sponsored by the government or by the church, it was all from her heart.  She cared about their jobs, their dignity, and their souls.  They were her brothers and sisters in Christ, and considered her caring for them as part of her Christianity– and she was right.    Grandma Nichols defined for me where courage and compassion intersect.

So we can say with confidence,