Ten years ago today, I was sitting in the original Grandly “office” above the Soup Spoon Cafe. I was 24 at the time and had made one of the most significant decisions of my life up to that point. I had moved to Lansing, Michigan, from ‘almost-always-warm’ Xalapa, Mexico to run The Strategic Grandparents’ Club. It was early November and I was sighing at the cold weather that was beginning to settle in.
If anyone had asked me, “Where do you expect The Strategic Grandparents’ Club to be in 10 years?” I would have had to pause and think for a moment. My audacious answer would have been something like, “We hope to impact 10,000 grandparents and, through them, perhaps as many as 50,000 grandchildren.”
Things were moving along and our webpage had been recently completed with the domain name, grandly.org. (We were shocked to find the name was still available – a seven-letter website name in 2016 was a rare find!) We promptly changed our logo to Grandly – The Strategic Grandparents’ Club and it remained that way until 2020 when we dropped the word “Club”.
That same morning, I was preparing our first five online articles (posts) for our website. They had been edited, spell checked, and grammar checked. All that was left to do was to press the “go” button and they would appear on our website.
I recall now that the virtue of hope was the topic of one of the articles posted that day. Many Christian grandparents struggle with maintaining hope for their grandchildren who seem to have little or no faith-life. They fail to recognize, however, that they – the grandparents – are experiencing a crisis of hope! Sadly, this lack of hope is crippling their ability to think, pray, and act in their grandchildren’s lives in an effective way. Hope powers motivation. It gives us the will to act when we are inclined to despair instead.
From the beginning we presented a vision. We spoke about that vision using the image of building a cathedral. The magnificent cathedrals of Europe weren’t built in a year or even a decade. Likewise, a child’s faith can take many years of work to “build”. This is where a grandparent differs from a youth worker. Youth workers come and go, but grandparents play the long game – patiently helping their grandchildren learn the Lord’s Prayer or memorize their first bible verse. What might be some of the small building blocks your grandchildren, whatever their age, need your help with?
We were stating our vision “on paper” for everyone to see. I smile when I think how clear and stable that vision was at the time and continues to be today.
Now, ten years later, I am sitting at my desk once again. Cold weather is settling in, as it does every November, and I find myself sighing anew. But today, these are sighs of thanksgiving. What a wonderful mission God has called me to! What wonderful people I work with and what wonderful grandparents I have come to call my friends! What a wonderful future God has planned for us all!
And, ultimately, what a wonderful God we serve!
Pili Abouchaar is the co-founder of Grandly and the mother of three. She and her husband, Gus, live in Lansing, Michigan.
You can see our first post ever, here: “A Grand Idea“