The Great Depression could be greatly depressing or so my grandparents told me. One grandfather would still choke up a bit when he talked about finally finding a job (parking cars) for “wages.” When government relief (as it was called) came to West Virginia, my Nana knew a person who just went to bed and let the drapes rot in the windows.
Yet all four grandparents kept doing things and on the whole looked back on those years fondly. They were young, so were their kids, and they put down the foundations for happiness. They refused to get depressed and did something from building a church to having kids. If Papaw Earl and Nana built a house only to lose it to crooked shenanigans, he moved on. When Granny and Papaw Reynolds faced health problems in the family, they did what had to be done and moved on.
They lived in the sunlight and never in the den of ennui.
We live in difficult times, but let’s be plain: they faced Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Imperial Japan. Colonialism and racism were respectable ideas and doctors told you to smoke cigarettes. Jobs may be hard to get now, but they faced an unemployment rate in the thirties throughout the thirties. As their generation has gone to glory, they have left us a free Germany, no more Soviet Union, and Japan as an ally. Colonialism and racism are condemned and doctors help you quit smoking cigarettes.
As death came to each of my grandparents, they were prepared to move on. Death was what happened at the end of life and Jesus was waiting on the other side. Granny refused to have surgery at one point, because it was time to move on.
They were not supermen and superwomen. They lived in a generation where some embraced political extremism in the United States: populist dictators like Huey Long, lunatics with plans such as Townsend, or ranting preachers of hate like Father Coughlin. My grandparents kept their Republican values in the mainstream, worked, paid their taxes, and went to churches that read the Bible and kept their heads.
They were liberal in spirit and conservative at heart, but mostly they lived. I don’t think it occurred to them that they could lose, because they never played the game. They lived by God’s eternal rules, the Constitution of 1789, and West Virginia common sense.
They never retreated, never gave up, and built something better than they inherited. If it was tempting to hide in the hills, men like my cousin Paul left the hills and beat Hitler and then came home. Some surrendered to Depression, but Mountaineers Are Always Free.
The reason for a Constantine strategy is to build on the lessons they taught me by their lives. They acted, lived, built, refused to lose. The great Emperor faced a “no win” situation and changed the rules. If he could not defend Rome, he would build a new and better one. My grandparents were the same: they refused to let false choices overwhelm their joy. While some thought the future belonged to some form of tyranny and that one had to choose a Redshirt or a Brownshirt, they said “No.” They persisted. When one church got padlocked by men so narrow they could see down a straw with both eyes, they went to a new one. They never changed God’s laws, but they could make the Depression better by refusing to go to bed and hide.
They had bowed at the Cross, been washed in the blood of the Lamb, and in this sign and with that baptism they conquered.
Let’s leave the dead to bury the dead, refuse the false choices of our age, get up from our bed, and go build something new. By God’s grace with Hope, I am doing something. Join us!
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