Ozark RDF:

It is commendable that we remember our own mothers with cards and other tokens of love this Mother's Day, but it is even more fitting that we thank God and pray for mothers everywhere.

As we see them today through grown up eyes, mothers are more special than we ever realized as children. They are, after all, Adam’s counterpart, molded in God’s own hands and created as caretakers of His most treasured creations — me and you.

Long before I was old enough to read or understand holy scriptures, for example, my mother modeled the Christian walk I was to follow. She took me to her church for christening and baptism, taught me to pray and revere God.

As I and my brothers grew older she compelled us to go to Sunday school and church when Dad would have had us go fishing with him (though sometimes, for the sake of harmony, she relented).

Never did I hear Mom or Dad take the name of God in vain, though in my teenager years when peers would have had me blaspheme with reckless language, it was the stern voice of Dad that tempered my own.

It was Dad who taught me how to work with animals, tools and machinery, as well as the virtues of toil.

It was Mom, however, who taught me to work with people, to respect others, and to do so with appropriate measures of both pride and humility — lessons I was sometimes slow in learning, but she was never lax in teaching.

From my earliest childhood Dad would had me pursue his dreams as a farmer and herdsman. Mom, on the other hand, encouraged and celebrated the diverse talents of each of her sons. Thus, this son of a farmer became a writer and journalist, my younger brother an artist and the next-younger a talented metalworker. Our youngest, sadly, never realized his dreams, caught in the deadly snare of a single, unplanned experience with alcohol while trying to befriend a pal.

That was the first time I saw my mother’s heart break, so inconsolably so that Christmas almost came without even a glimmer of joy. Yet, in time God’s love restored my mom, as it did all of us; but she was never the same.

Neither was I. Thus, my most fervent prayer this Mother's Day is that we seek God’s grace and comfort for mothers who have lost children, either to death or the snares of the world’s culture. Pray for moms when nothing short of God’s love can sustain them.

I know how it feels to lose a child to an untimely passage, but I cannot pretend to grasp the depths of grief endured by a mother. Though time can mask the immediate pain, it can never erase the loss. Only God can promise a joyful homecoming.

Thus, I ask this holiday that we withhold not a single card or gift we might have planned, but that above all we thank God and pray for mothers all.

If any among us yet wonders why, I submit the fact that each of us is here is simply reason enough.

Copyright 2023, James E. Hamilton; email jhamilton000@centurytel.net. Read more of his works in Ozarks RFD 2010-2015, available online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or from the author.