Happy Birthday Mom!

Happy birthday today to my mom!  I just wanted to take this once-a-year opportunity to thank my mom for so diligently passing on her faith to us three kids, and now to her 15 grandchildren.  We are very blessed to have our mom, and we do "rise up and call her blessed," as Proverbs 31 says.
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My earliest memories of my mom are of her laughing, or swinging into my bedroom early in the morning and throwing off my covers with a "Good morning, good morning, good morning!"  I remember an early morning, probably before I even was old enough to go to school, and I crawled up into her lap while she read her Bible.   She was reading John 10, the story of the Good Shepherd.  And later when I received my own large-print Bible in kindergarten, it was the first passage I wanted to find.  I remember stalling mom at bedtime with deep Bible questions, and even though she surely knew my ploy, she answered them anyway.  And I remember those answers.  I remember eavesdropping from the garage when she recited Scripture to the Mormons on our doorstep.  I remember the backyard Bible clubs, and homemade popsicles, and the stories she read aloud to us.  My childhood was saturated with her love for us as well as her love for God.
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As I grew older, I began to realize that mom's contagious happiness had met serious opposition over the years.  On long car trips, she would reminisce about her dad, and tell the story of his untimely death when she was just 18 years old.  She would talk about the lonely days, of walking down into the woods with Grandpa's loyal dog, and crying on the wood pile. She would talk about having to work a year of night-shift factory work after her dad died, so she could attend college.  And then she would add, "Oh, how I WISH my dad could have met you all!"   She buried her mother before she turned 40, and several years later, when her older brother was killed by a drunk driver, she responded to the news by saying, "I KNOW there's a praise in here somewhere . . ."  She was well-anchored, and I knew it.
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While dusting the living furniture one day as a teenager, I stopped to look at my mom's Bible.  Thumbing through the onion-skin pages, I found what I always knew was there.  Her personal notes, the red pencil underlinings, the quick sermon outlines jotted to the side of special chapters and in the middle margin, confirmed to me that her walk matched her talk.  The Bible verses she had made me learn, for school, or family devotions, or AWANA, were underlined too.   Her walk with God was rooted in truth, in a living relationship.  Even though I had been saved since I was five, I wanted to make sure that mine was more than just  a mechanical Christianity.  I, too, wanted a Christianity that thrived when no one was looking, that could grow in a private walk with God, that could produce hope and joy in a world that often makes no sense.
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I am so thankful my mom is real.  She has never pretended to be perfect.  She is usually her own worst critic and the first one to bring up her mistakes.  But she gave me the most important gift a mom can ever give her children:  She gave me a reason to trust God.