FAITH
Caring for Kids’ Character
Roberts answered the call on her life with a little help from her granny.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF MICHELLE SHIELDS ROBERTS
BY STEPHANIE GIBSON LEPORE For years—before she ever published a single word—author Michelle Shields Roberts’s grandmother was praying for her. In fact, Michelle barely had any faith at all back then. Growing up with a single mom, Michelle struggled without her dad around. “In my early years, the last time I remember seeing my dad was when I was 10 years old,” she says. “Later, after I was married, I saw him for the first time in 17 years when my own son was three months old.” During those early years, Michelle found solace by writing poetry and journaling through various situations life threw her way. Still, her grandmother—“Granny,” to whom she was very close—continued to press into prayer for Michelle. “She asked me to pick her up from church one Wednesday evening, after services were over,” Michelle remembers. “The preacher’s wife asked if I was a believer. Of course I said I was,” she says, even though she really wasn’t sure. Joining forces with her Granny, the youth pastor at that church and his wife—Keith and 22 Bham Family February 2022
Teresa—began praying for Michelle, too. It wasn’t long before Michelle was attending weekly services, which then led to her involvement with various ministries at the church. Keith and Teresa encouraged Michelle to attend college, and she was accepted at Tennessee Temple University in Chattanooga, where she enrolled in fall 1981. “I always thought I was a believer because of a Bible my aunt gave me that said I had accepted Jesus as my Savior in 1975. But during my first semester in college, I thought back on this supposed conversion experience, and I realized I had never really accepted Him,” she says. Michelle says that was the start of the Lord really beginning to work in her heart and life. She went forward during a Sunday evening service on February 7, 1982, in an auditorium that could seat 6,000 people. “I was on a row all the way in the back of the church,” she says of the long walk down. “But I realized, for the first time, that I was going to spend eternity without God if I didn’t accept Jesus as my personal Savior. CONTINUED ON PAGE 23
