Prayer Answered by Pranksters and My Grandpa’s Wooden Leg
My dad and his two older sisters had a rough childhood. Their dad was a single parent and they were very poor. At that time there were few safety nets like food stamps and school lunches. They often had very little to eat. One fall night they ran out of food. Their dad, my grandpa, gathered the family together, together they prayed asking God to provide food. Then they went to bed. As it turned out, that night was the night before Halloween, also known as “Devil’s Night.” This was a night when pranksters played tricks on people. They would do things like write messages on windows with a bar of soap or empty garbage cans onto lawns. They even turned over my dad's outhouse, as they did not have indoor plumbing. These particular pranksters snuck onto my grandpa’s porch and filled it with cabbages! Their prayers were answered and they ate cabbage all winter long.
One thing about this grandpa that I remember so well was that he was missing a leg. Before high tech plastics and metals could make artificial legs do all kinds of things, the only choice was wood. His was like a short log. It did not bend. To my child’s eyes, his leg was fascinating. At night he would take it off and sleep without it.
The family story is that when he was twelve years old and still had two legs, he was sledding at his neighborhood hill in Pittsburgh, where he lived. He ran into a barbed wire fence. This caused an injury to his leg that became infected. The infection did not heal and he ended up in the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, where he stayed for almost a year. Due to the infection, his leg was amputated and he went home with a wooden leg.
As I tell my grandchildren, sometimes when bad things happen, people want to find an easy explanation. Some people blamed my grandpa’s situation on him, saying he was sledding on a Sunday when he should have been resting. I can’t imagine how those kind of comments hurt him. My dad told me that even with his wooden leg, my grandpa could still outrun him.
If you have a prayer request and want me to pray for you fill out this form: https://forms.gle/L5GRR2E7yv1Y9nov5