Today is my day to write about my mother. Through the first 23 years of my full-time ministry, I wrote about mother around Mother’s Day–a bulletin article, another sermon, even a poem or two. All of that changed with my mother’s death over 15 years ago.
Now I write about my mother on Groundhog’s Day. Not because it is Groundhog’s Day, but because it is her birthday. She would have been 87 today. I have reconciled myself to the fact that even if she had not been taken prematurely in an auto accident, the chances of her yet being alive today are slim. I hope it doesn’t seem morbid that I share my heart.
Death is a part of life, life is part of death. Some are dead while they live, other live beyond their death. In the grand scheme of the things of men, I suppose my mother’s life does not seem terrible significant. Significance is fleeting. Significance is not the same as name recognition. What seems to matter often doesn’t. What doesn’t seem to matter does. Mothers are always significant to someone. Fathers less so. That’s sad.
My mother was a pioneer–in lots of ways. She was my hero. She was the only person I knew (except my grandmother and my aunts and uncles) who had moved across three states in a covered wagon. The single-parent home she headed in the 1950s was for my sister and me security and belonging and fun.
As I reached adulthood, I tried to tell her in many ways that she mattered to me. For several years while my family and I lived in Michigan I phoned her every Sunday morning. I think she was proud of me–significance is a two-way street. She taught me valuable lessons, I still have folders filled with her wit and wisdom. I read some of those things from time to time. Today, tell someone who is important to you that they are.