Make Time For Mom, You’ll Be Glad You Did

by Kevin Burton

   One day my mother received a letter. The people who owned the house she was renting were going to sell it, and she had 30 days to get out.

   It was ridiculous to expect her to move that quickly, and my brother successfully negotiated an additional six weeks. But we did not delay, beginning immediately to prepare for her move and downsizing.

   Going through her belongings was an emotional experience and somewhat frustrating, because she tended to cling to too many things.

   On the day she left her rented house at 8 a.m., her new quarters in assisted living would not be ready until about 4 p.m.  Those interim hours she spent with my wife and me at our house.

   Some of that time she spent sleeping. Until then I didn’t know she slept on her back. 

   Seeing her on our couch, sleeping, being very still, breathing very quietly, was unnerving to me.  It made me think of her death.

   Keep in mind, I am legally blind and couldn’t see her chest rise and fall with her breathing, the way a fully-sighted person could see it.

    That experience taught me to savor my time with mom. If you read Page 7 yesterday you know she died Monday, at age 91, six days before Mother’s Day. . I must admit there were years when Mother’s Day was an afterthought, or even no thought, to me.  May God help you readers to honor your moms and enjoy each moment with them.

   My mom and I had aa long and blessed time together.  We’ll hear today from Alistair Begg, speaker on the Truth For Life radio ministry, who I often quote in posts on Sundays.

   Begg did not have nearly as much time with his mother. But he shares his thoughts today on Mother’s Day.

   “Thinking of spring and now entering the month when we celebrate Mother’s Day got me pondering the fact that for more than fifty years, my own mother has been “absent from the body and present with the Lord,” Begg wrote.

   “Resisting the temptation to bemoan the fact that she neither saw me married nor met her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I choose to use this moment to record my gratitude to God for the twenty years I enjoyed with her and to honor her memory.”

   “I do so in the hope that it will encourage others not to miss the opportunity time affords to make sure our mothers know how much we love and appreciate them. After all, many things in life come in twos and threes, but for each of us, there is only one mother in the whole world.”

   “In case you are wondering, my mum was one of nine children, born to William and Louise Milliken in Glasgow in 1925. Her Christian faith was expressed in her actions as a wife, mother, friend, and encourager to all. Like a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, ‘the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive.’”

   “She was quiet and unassuming, loved animals, fed the birds on wintry mornings, and cared for my sisters, Maureen and Kathleen, and me with unselfish delight,” Begg wrote. “She clearly believed that humor ‘doeth good like a medicine’ (Prov. 17:22 KJV), and her ability to see the funny side of things caused me to do the same. She was part of a huge company that performed unhistoric acts while faithfully living a hidden life but known to and by the living God.”

   “In what turned out to be her final letter to me, she unwittingly gave me a benediction in the words of Psalm 100:4–5:

Enter his gates with thanksgiving,

and his courts with praise!

Give thanks to him; bless his name!

For the LORD is good;

his steadfast love endures forever,

and his faithfulness to all generations.

   “If you have ever wondered why the theme music for Truth For Life is the melody of the Hundredth Psalm, now you have the answer!”

   May all you who are mothers feel the love from your children every day, but especially today. 

   And may the children express that love freely, or as I must do now, honor the memory of mothers who have passed on.