lessons from the past

I was shopping in Walmart one afternoon.. I noticed a very elderly lady that I felt was taking note of me, she stayed close to where I was for about 20 minutes and about the time I had decided to ask her if I could help her with anything she wandered off. I did my normal see if I could find anything I didn't know I needed before I found it thing and I stopped on a aisle, there was a lady with a very young child in the basket close to where I stopped, the little girl told her mom ' look at the lady's pictures, she has all the colors, like a coloring book'. I thought it was so cute and when I smiled at her smiling at me , the look on her mom's face was unreal! Mom proceeds to tell the little girl those are marks of people who have nothing to themselves, no faith, so they destroy themselves.. .. I smiled and said children should get to see beauty in whatever they are able to see it in while they can and I turned around, tearing up, to see the little elderly lady standing just at the end of the aisle. Looking at the mom behind me. I left the aisle and heard ' that, dear is what is wrong with our world' so I left the basket to go back onto the aisle ready to become very ugly acting and the mom says to the lady ' I just don't understand why someone would put that image out there and not expect negativity'.. The lady turned around and smiled at me just like she knew I was there, turns back to mom with ' not her dear, you. You just taught your daughter to dislike someone without knowing why'.. so I went to tears and got my basket to leave and this little lady stops me at the front. She wants to read my writings (one of which is the Rede on my back).. she looks at all my 'pictures' that can be seen easily, several times, while she's talking to me.. See, she started making quilts when she was a teenager with her church. . She has done them her whole life since and her favorite ones to do are with scriptures and hymns. She was 3 days away from 94 years old and planned to finish her final quilt that she will do on her birthday, that one she called " Life is a Patchwork Quilt".. As she got done with her story, and hugged me really tight, she told me she admired the beauty in my quilt that I wear and the courage it takes for me to wear it proudly. . That she had been brought up that the words I wear are bad from a bad time and from bad people, but she just can't see bad in my eyes. I told her I had learned the people who follow the words she carries are bad hiding behind those words to make their bad acceptable but I saw none of that in her eyes and she may not understand the depth of my appreciation for our meeting, but to know that chat went warmly all the way thru me.
The religion, the belief system, the god the gods an goddesses. . They don't make the person who or what they are.. We all have in us what we have in us. My little elderly lady was stand fast Christian.. I'm not.. she reminded me that day, None of that should matter