Faith of Our Mothers
“. . .for you share the faith that first filled your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice. And I know that same faith continues strong in you.”
2 Timothy 1:5
As we contemplated the structure and content of this book, it touched our hearts to begin our time with you by speaking about the people who planted the seeds of faith in us during our formative years. Before we knew God for ourselves, there were people standing in the gap for us and pointing us to the cross of Jesus. This book is fruit from the seeds of faith that were cultivated in us four decades ago. The simple message of this introduction is that we all have a role to play in each other’s lives. Many people do not understand the power of prayer and the act of standing in the gap for someone in an intercessory manner. To illustrate this truth, we want to share with you brief stories of the inheritance left to us by our grandmothers and mothers—their faith…
C. Thomas Gambrell
For part of my formative years, I was raised by my maternal grandmother, Jeffie Lee Peacock. When I was living with her as a youth, I would watch her as she sat in her rocking chair reading and studying the Word of God. She would put on her glasses, get a pen, and then turn the pages, writing notes in the margin of her Bible. She introduced me to televangelists. I would watch the sermons on television with her as well as listen to them on the radio. This was in the mid-1970s, so some people were still listening to radio ministries as well as watching them on television. I was always intrigued by the fact that this was part of her daily routine. Those were early seeds that were planted within me. With all of the training that I’ve done, all of the reading and self-improvement, it was my grandmother who actually gave me the first book in that self-help arena, which was The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. She gave me that book when I was a teenager, but I didn’t read it. The title just did not resonate with me at the time. A decade later, I read the book after I was instructed to do so by one of my mentors. When I saw the cover of the book, I remembered that my grandmother had given me the same book ten years earlier.