Bible Study for Grandmother and Granddaughter — When Writing the Stories Your Great-Granddaughter Will Need
⏱ 5 min read
A bible study for grandmother and granddaughter doesn’t have to look like a curriculum with a workbook and a schedule. Sometimes it looks like two people at the same kitchen table, one of them writing slower than she used to, both of them trying to get a story down before it’s gone. This is a study for that table. Eight verses, grouped by what they’re actually asking you to do — remember, tell, notice, keep writing — with room to talk about each one before you move to the next.
You don’t need a theology degree for this. You need a Bible, a notebook, and a granddaughter willing to sit still for twenty minutes. That’s the whole curriculum.
Why This Study Exists
Most Bible studies are written for people who have decades left to apply what they learn. This one is written a little differently. It assumes you might be the last person in your family who remembers certain things — a grandmother’s voice, a hard year survived, the reason your faith held when it could have let go. It assumes the point isn’t just personal growth. The point is transmission. What you know has to get from your hands into someone else’s before it’s lost.
Scripture takes this seriously in a way modern devotional writing often doesn’t. The Bible is full of old women and men handing down what they’ve carried. This study gathers those verses into four groupings, because a bare list of eight references doesn’t do much for anyone. What matters is what you do with them at the table.
Group One: What You Have Seen, God Has Done
Psalm 71:18 — “Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.”
Start here, because it names the fear underneath the whole project: forsake me not. The psalmist isn’t asking God for one more thing before he dies. He’s asking to be kept alive and clear-minded long enough to finish a job — telling what he’s seen. Read this one aloud first. Then ask your granddaughter a simple question: what do you think I’ve seen that you haven’t? Let her guess. Correct her gently. That’s the study, right there.
Deuteronomy 4:9 — “Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons.”
This verse assumes memory needs guarding — that a life’s evidence of God can simply leak away if nobody tends it. Moses isn’t scolding here. He’s warning, the way you’d warn someone standing near a ledge. Talk with your granddaughter about one thing you’re afraid you’ll forget, and write it down together before you close the notebook.
Group Two: Telling the Generation to Come
Psalm 78:4 — “We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done.”
Psalm 145:4 — “One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.”
These two belong together because they name the same refusal: we will not hide them. Not “we’ll get to it eventually.” A decision, made on purpose, against the drift toward silence that happens in every family when nobody speaks first. Use this pairing to talk about what almost went untold — a story your own grandmother carried that nearly died with her, or nearly died with you. Then ask what story of yours is at that same risk right now.
Group Three: The Women Who Went Before
2 Timothy 1:5 — “When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.”
Paul names Timothy’s grandmother by name. Lois isn’t a footnote — she’s the first link in a chain Paul can trace with his own eyes, three generations deep. If you want one verse to build this whole study around, it’s this one. Have your granddaughter say your name and your mother’s name out loud the way Paul says Lois and Eunice. Let her hear how it sounds to be named as part of a line.
Titus 2:3 — “The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things.”
This verse gives older women a job description, and the job is teacher. Not a passive presence in the family — an active one, with something specific to hand off. Ask together: what is one “good thing” you were taught by an older woman, and who taught it to you?
Group Four: Still Bearing Fruit
Psalm 92:14 — “They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.”
Proverbs 17:6 — “Children’s children are the crown of old men; and the glory of children are their fathers.”
End here, because both verses push back against the quiet lie that a life stops mattering once the body slows down. Psalm 92 doesn’t say the righteous rest in old age — it says they bring forth fruit. This bible study, this notebook, this granddaughter across the table: this is some of that fruit. Proverbs 17 turns the crown the other direction — it’s not just what the older generation gives, it’s what the younger one is, to the people who came before her. Let her know that. Say it plainly, in your own words, before you close the study.
How to Actually Use This Together
Pick one grouping per sitting — four sessions, not eight. Read both verses slowly, once each. Ask the question attached to that grouping. Write down whatever comes up, even the parts that wander off-topic, especially the parts that wander off-topic. The stories that surface sideways are usually the ones that mattered.
Nobody needs to lead this like a Sunday school class. The verses are a doorway, not a lecture. What’s on the other side of the door is a story only you have — and a granddaughter who, whether she says so yet or not, wants to hear it before the door closes.
If this kind of slow, page-by-page remembering fits how you already think about your faith and your family, Stilling Waves publishes a companion for exactly this season — the Grandmother Devotional, When Writing the Stories Your Great-Granddaughter Will Need, a 140-day journal built for a woman doing this same work on her own pages, one day at a time.
If this kind of slow, page-by-page remembering fits how you already think about your faith and your family, Stilling Waves publishes a companion for exactly this season — the Grandmother Devotional, When Writing the Stories Your Great-Granddaughter Will Need, a 140-day journal built for a woman doing this same work on her own pages, one day at a time.
