But That's Another Story

I just learned that my great-grandmother was an Italian cheese-maker.

All my life I’ve listened to my dad tell stories about spending summers on his grandmother’s farm where he rode horses, worked in the fields and cleaned out chicken coops. But this was the first time I’d heard about her making cheese. 

I wondered what kind.

Mozzarella? Provolone? Ricotta?

My dad says he remembers her stirring a big pot on the stove making homemade cheese that she'd take into the city every week to sell, along with her produce, fresh eggs and baked goods. 

Is this where my affinity for food, delight in the culinary arts and interest {although very little skill} in cooking comes from?

Farm life is a rather unusual storyline in my family because I come from a clan of hard-working city dwellers who emigrated from Europe to work in the steel mills of Pittsburgh. 

All I really know about my great-grandmother was that she had the statuesque name of Michelangela and she left southern Italy when she was sixteen to come to America. She had a dozen children but in the middle of her life, she started a new chapter by buying a farm and becoming a business woman. 

I wonder what she thought of her life. 

Did she wish she’d stayed in Italy? What prompted her mid-life change of direction?

I think about the barest of threads that connect our stories from generation to generation. I wonder how I am like those that came before me. 

Maybe I inherited my neat-freakishness from her since my dad tells me she kept a shipshape house, making those doing outdoor work use an outhouse rather than track dirt and mud into her clean house. 

{Which, by the way, I think is a stellar idea.} 

Although sometimes we start a new chapter or turn the page or add an illustration, I think God really writes our life stories.

He's the ultimate author dipping the feather in the inkwell, slipping in commas where we think a conclusion has been written, and giving us a glimpse of the dust cover every now and again so we can find our place in the bigger story. 

He presides over the divine storyboard, from beginning to end, scribbling in new adventures, composing a collection of love poems, skillfully writing a narrative that gracefully unfolds over the entire course of a life. 

And his stories are unlike any we could have created or chosen on our own. 

I used to wonder if my headstrong notions or over-zealous passions through the years set me on a winding and curvy course away from the mainstream crowds. Maybe they got in the way and things could have been different.

Maybe if I'd have taken that job in Dallas or said yes to that date or kept up the friendship or agreed to serve in that volunteer role, things would be different in my life. 

But I don’t think so.  

I’m pretty sure things were supposed to turn out this way. 

That relationship wasn’t meant to work out. 

That job was never earmarked to be my career. 

That friendship was destined to fade away. 

That opportunity was intended to come to naught. 

That dream was meant to disintegrate.

Everything that happens to us in life contours our character and unfolds who we are on the inside, inclining our hearts toward God until we are near enough to see and hear and feel his heart for us.

For all those things in our lives that don't work out like we thought or dreamed or wanted, in due time new hope emerges. 

Telling myself I have to, should have, or could have been limits my story and makes it only about me.

Because there's never just one way to be happy. 

How could there ever be just one job, one person, one dream that will make a life beautiful?

I'm not sure why, in the middle of her life story, my great-grandmother decided to become a farmer and cheese-maker. 

But I wonder if she realized that her farm was such a place of joy for my dad, offering him a refuge away from his cramped city apartment and inspiring him with the love that was missing in his motherless life. 

Even now, little pieces of her story still flutter across the generations. And maybe it's that way for us too. 

Maybe our life stories are more purposeful than we could ever imagine.

It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone. -Eph. 1:11-12 (MSG)

Despite my questions, my dad can’t remember what kind of cheese my great-grandmother made. He only recalls that it tasted delicious.

Then a thought flashed across my mind.

Were there any goats on her farm? 

My dad couldn’t rule it out completely but said he didn’t recall any goats. 

Oh well. Maybe the Italian goats I'll meet on my trip to Italy in the spring will turn the page on the comedy chapter in the story of my life.

I'm ready for more of the story.

I'm having coffee with my friends at Holley Gerth's Coffee for your Heart. Hop over and read more posts to encourage your day!