My grandmother Joanne Brubaker passed away two weeks ago today after a long, but amazingly graceful, struggle with congestive heart failure.  Aside from being a woman of great faith and a wife, mother and grandmother of tremendous love and hospitality, which included much prayer and care invested in me personally, she was also a highly talented artist.  She illustrated the Pictorial Pilgrim's Progress, which was published by Moody in 1960 and remains in print, and worked with many other themes and media before and after, even in her last days.

I thought I might take the opportunity to share a couple of her paintings which were only recently passed on to me a year ago on my birthday.  This is the note which she included:

Dear Ben, I thought you might like to have these pictures which I painted about 1945 or 6 with india ink.  I was 18 or 19 at the time, and I was Joanne Cameron.  I never got into painting animals but I remember always liking kittens & was heart-broken when my dad accidentally backed over a white angora one, which the fluffy one reminded me of.  I was about 12 at the time.  Love, Grandma

This is a picture of my brother Josh (designer of our beautiful site banners) and myself with Grandma a few Christmases ago, when she gave all of her grandsons a personalized painting of lighthouse:

My prayer for her over the last, most difficult months was an arrangement by John Rutter and The Cambridge Singers of Numbers 6:24-26; and it remains my prayer ...

"The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace."