My grandmother kept a chair by the window, and most mornings growing up I’d find her there before the rest of the house was up, a rosary moving slow through her fingers. I didn’t think much of it then. I think about it now.

There’s a psalm where an old man asks God for one particular thing, not more years exactly, but to still be useful in the years he has left, to keep proclaiming what he knows of God to another generation before his hands can’t hold the task anymore. That’s close to what I think she was doing at that window. Nothing dramatic. Most of it wasn’t even directed at anyone she could name yet. Half the grandchildren she was praying for hadn’t been born when she started.

She just kept showing up, handing something forward to people she’d mostly never meet.

I don’t know everything she asked God for in those mornings. I know I’m standing in some of it.

Today’s exercise is simple. If you still have a grandparent living, ask them, plainly, what they pray for. Let them tell you. If you don’t, take five quiet minutes and thank God for one thing you’re fairly sure they prayed for you, whether you ever heard them say it or not.

Today’s Bible Study

Moses tells the Israelites something close to this in Deuteronomy 4:9, to guard carefully what their own eyes had seen so it doesn’t slip away, and then to make it known to their children and their children’s children. He doesn’t stop at the next generation. He reaches for the one after that, people not yet born, the same way my grandmother did at her window. A grandparent’s witness was never really aimed at just the household in front of them. It was always meant to travel further, past hands they’d never shake, to a generation they’d only ever meet in their prayers.

Recommended Reading

If you want somewhere to start, Pope Francis’s message for the first World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, written in 2021 and still free to read online, says plainer than I can why the Church set aside a whole day just to notice what grandparents quietly carry.