Get Up Higher

Pictured above, in her younger days, is Lillian Parker Crain, known to me as "Ma."

One summer while our parents worked at separate textile mills, my then-pre-school sister and I often stayed with “Ma.” That summer, Ma told us about her spiritual dream.

Dad would drop us off each workday at Ma’s (his mother and our grandmother) before the sun had a chance to smile on the rural South Carolina landscape that hosted Ma and Pa’s small farm. Our grandfather, Pa, would have already “lit out” to go to his carpenter job by the time we arrived with sleep still in our eyes.

I was no more than seven, maybe eight years old, when we enjoyed spending time with Ma.

She’d let us eat what we wanted for breakfast. I usually chose chocolate milk (real cow’s milk with powdered cocoa stirred in) and a mayonnaise sandwich. Ma, known as Lillian at the Pentecostal church all three generations of our family attended, was tall and thin, though she furnished much of the Southern cooking that put meat on the bones of us prone-to-fatness family members. She’d probably have treated me to biscuits, sausage and red-eye gravy, but most every morning during that summer, I wanted chocolate milk and a mayonnaise sandwich.  

One day, about midmorning, Ma surprised us.

“Let’s go on a cookout,” she said.  

The near-noontime sun beat down on Ma’s close-cropped pasture that helped feed two mules and a cow as my sister, Ma and I lugged a black iron skillet, Irish potatoes and eating utensils to a part of the pasture that slanted toward its creek. Under a lone, shade-providing hillside tree, Ma gathered rocks, placed them in a circle and created a little stick-fed fire amid the rocks. She set her frying pan over the fire and peeled and sliced potatoes.

I don’t recall Ma “asking a blessing,” but as we partook of tasty potatoes, she said, “I had a dream the other night.” She paused and looked back toward the barn and her house. “I dreamed I was in the pasture when a mule came running toward me, braying and snorting, with his teeth bared. I turned and started running.”

I pictured a large mule—like one of the two Pa owned—with his ears laid back, his teeth bared and his hooves clamoring over the rocky part of our pasture, as he snorted and raced after Ma.

“As I ran,” Ma said, “a voice from the sky said to me, ‘Get up higher.’ And then I ran and climbed a tall tree, and the mule was below me, braying and moving about.” Ma waited a few seconds before she interpreted her dream. “I figure the voice from the sky was the Lord, telling me to get closer to Him—to get up higher with Jesus.”

Almost 60 years have passed since Ma’s cookout in the pasture, but I often think of her dream, especially when my problems start to loom large and I, like Peter in the New Testament, begin to look at threatening waves and not at the Lord walking on the water. It’s then I often think of Ma’s dream and her words: “Get up higher, get up higher with Jesus.”

Words from an old hymn called “Higher Ground” often come to mind after I think of Ma’s dream. One stanza of that hymn contains these words: “My heart has no desire to stay where doubts arise and fears dismay. Tho’ some may dwell where these abound, my prayer, my aim is higher ground. Lord, lift me up and let me stand, by faith, on heaven’s tableland. A higher plane than I have found—Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.”