Mama

Mama.  I have one of these, and I love her immeasurably.  But…I’ll get to that in a moment.

I have been considering other women who have been mothers to me and helped to shape my life in different ways.  May I introduce a few of them to you?

Mary 

When I was six, my dad got a job in another city.  During the work week, he boarded with Mary Brown, an elderly lady who lived in a little post-war brick home on the East Side of that city.  Her husband, Charlie, was in a nursing home, and I think she needed the income a boarder would bring.  Eventually, the rest of my family moved in with Mary until we bought our home in the new city.  That dear little lady put up with a family of four (including two rambunctious kids) in her two-bedroom, one-bathroom home for nearly a year.  She was strict (being 80, she was more than a little old-school), but we knew she loved us.

Not too long after we moved in, she just became our grandma.  Both of my grandmothers and all of Mary’s grandchildren lived far away, so she easily became part of our family during the four years that we all lived in that city.  When she moved to Nova Scotia to live with her son and his family, I learned that this meant no more jello salads containing vegetables and cream cheese, no more fresh gingerbread, no more admonitions that “This is not a rumpus room!” and no more stories about what it was like to grow up at the turn of the last century. 

Mary Irene Brown has long since gone Home to be with the Lord, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she visited with my dad every now and again just to remind him to wear his galoshes…for old times’ sake.

Lisa Ann 

I took a babysitting job for the Henderson family when I was a teenager.  Their little girls were 21 months old and three months old at the time and both as cute as buttons.  Lisa Ann worked from home, but her job kept her from being able to supervise the girls, so I enjoyed playing with and caring for them during her workday. 

Lisa Ann taught me how to make a bottle, efficiently change a diaper, read books in a way that engaged a toddler’s learning capacity, make the perfect ham and cheese sandwich (it really is all in the mayo), plan and sew a simple (though large!) quilt, and truly appreciate the music of Petra and Margaret Becker. 

Side note:  Those little girls are both college-aged now.

Esther 

When I was in Bible college, I met Esther’s husband, Bill Lewis.  He was an older student taking courses to finish his degree while I was an undergrad.  He found out that I was the editor of our student newspaper, so he would send me devotionals that he had written for inclusion in each issue.  They weren’t fancy, but they were full of truth.  Over time, he let me know that while he and his wife had never been blessed with their own children, they had taken me into their hearts as if I were their own daughter.

 

We kept in touch after my graduation—usually by email since they lived a couple of hours away from my home.  Both Esther and Bill prayed and prayed for my family and for me.  I am sure that I was blessed and protected many times by their intercession for me.

Bill went Home to be with the Lord a couple of years ago, but Esther still prays and prays for me.  It was an honor for me to sit with Esther at Bill’s funeral.  We don’t talk or visit as often as I would like.  I am certain, however, that the Lord has bountiful heavenly rewards for Esther and Bill because of the way they loved and prayed for me over the years.       

Karen 

I have a sweet friend who is a friend to many.  She found her calling in music ministry, and she has faithfully served the Lord as a gospel singer for over thirty years.  I’ve loved her music and her testimony for at least half of those years.  The Truth in her music helped to keep me on the narrow way when I was an impressionable teenager.  She’s found great success in her career, yet she remains “real.”

A few years ago, she sat at her dining room table and gave me sound counsel.  Let me set the stage:  Karen Peck Gooch and her group host a “homecoming” concert on her family’s property in Georgia each year.  These events are a pretty big deal in Gospel music, and it takes months of hard work to pull them off well.

On this particular day, Karen had worked a full day to set up for the concerts, had sung for a couple of hours in the sweltering July-in-Georgia humidity, had talked graciously with countless folks among the hundreds gathered for the concert at the field down the hill from her house, and was now hosting an informal meal for several dozen friends, employees and family members in her home.  Oh, and it was 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning.

Karen sat down with my friend Stacy and me at her dining room table and offered a bit of simple, Godly advice to us about caring for our husbands and children…though Stacy was married (I was not), neither one of us had children at the time.  I guess she felt led to help form a firm foundation for our futures.  She encouraged us to speak and act with respect and preference toward our husbands, knowing that this is the Lord’s best plan for marriages.  She also implored us to be very careful about the concepts and words we speak over and into our children—to be sure to speak Life and Truth to them.  Karen may not remember this conversation from 2005, but I have carried it with me to this day.    

NanNan, Grammy Lucy, and Grammy Peggy 

My great-grandmother (“NanNan”) and my grandmothers Lucy and Peggy each played a significant role in the Christian woman I have become.  I never met my NanNan—she went Home a few years before I was born.  She helped to raise my mom and her siblings, and she was a woman of great faith and patience.  She was quite the prayer warrior and was known to pray for the generations to come, and I know that means she prayed for me and my salvation long before I was created.        

My dad’s mother, Lucy, lived overseas with my aunt’s family for several years when I was growing up.  I rarely saw her until I was a teenager and she moved stateside.  However, she made sure to stay in close touch by way of letters and phone calls (this was before the age of email and Skype).  When she would visit us every couple of years, it was quite like she had never been away.  She enjoyed life, though much of her life had been difficult.  Always up for a card game with the grandkids or a rousing piano rendition of favorite hymns or Christmas carols, she approached being a grandma with passion and gusto.  

After her stroke (during my college years), she was bedridden and unable to speak.  Later I learned from my uncle that even at this time she kept up her devotional practices of reading Scripture daily (or having it read to her) and of praying specially for her family and friends each day.  Shortly before she went Home, she regained enough facility to play the piano with her left hand.  I was gifted with the joy of playing our favorite hymns with her—she played the tenor and bass lines from memory, and I added the alto and soprano lines with my right hand.  I believe when I get to heaven and hear someone whistling the tenor line of a hymn of praise to the Lamb, I’ll find her, eyes twinkling, not too far from me.

My mom’s mom, Peggy, was a mystery to me for most of my life.  She and my mother were not very close over the years, and geographically we lived quite a ways from each other, which seemed to underscore the emotional distance.  When my dad was ill, however, she really shone.  She had finally received the health care she desperately needed and had reconnected with the Lord, which allowed her to come to terms with many of the difficulties that had overshadowed her life up to this time, so she was able to be supportive while we navigated the obstacles that are cancer and death.  

It wasn’t until I myself dealt with what a whacked-out thyroid can do to a woman that I understood her and her trials better.  I had a supportive family and twenty-first century medicine to help me with my imbalance, both blessings she did not have when she needed them.  She went Home about a year after my dad, but what a precious couple of years we had with her!  I know that when the Lord called for her, she went Home shouting the name of Jesus.  My guess is the angels had a hard time keeping up with her as they led her through the pearly gates.

Mama  

How do you condense thirty-two years of a mother’s patience, kindness, sacrifice, prayers, faith, and love into a few sentences?  I don’t think it’s possible.  

My mama is my best friend.  She has been for years, even when I was thirteen and convinced that she was crazy (and I was normal).  We are so very different, but there are times that we think alike, which is—just keeping it real here—comforting and frightening at the same time.  I often tell her that God could not have given me a better mother than she.  I truly believe that. 

We talk and drink coffee and laugh and cry and fuss and pray and shop and vacation together. 

More importantly, she points me to the Lord every day.  Who else does that for me? 

Anyone who knows me well knows that my mama is awesome—partly because I tell them so and partly because they usually get to meet her before too long.  In general, they agree with my assessment…which is further proof that my mama is awesome.  (I wonder if awesomeness is hereditary.  If it is, I hope I got at least some of it and it didn’t all go to my little brother.) 

So, Mama, happy Mother’s Day to you…and to all of the other mamas who have spoken Life and Truth into me.           

“Her children arise and call her blessed….” 

Proverbs 31:28