Reflections on Mom

This morning I have been looking through my mom's Bible. One of the many things in her Bible is a slip of paper with lots of quotes or little sayings that she liked. Reading through them, I can see that her life really reflected these little bits of advice. The first says "The happiest people are not those who have the best of everything but those who make the best of whatever they have." During my parents first years in Bolivia, they sure didn't have the best of everything. Dirt floors, no washing machine, an outhouse...they really lived on very little. But my mom learned to make the best of everything and came to love it. Another quote in her Bible says "If you're conflicted about whether to be right or be kind...be kind!" If ever there was a disagreement about something trivial, my mom would just say "oh, ok", as if the other person was always right even when she knew they were not. And most of the time it was her who was right. The next one says "Nothing is a bad as it first seems and nothing is as good as it first seems." In my entire 19 years with her, I never once saw my mom lose her temper. She never yelled at us out of anger. She took everything calmly and I always admired her for that. There are a lot more of these quotes, but one that really sticks out to me is "We may not be able to build the future for our children, but we can build our children for the future." I can't think of a much better way to bring up kids than the way my parents raised me and Peter and Jonny. I hope one day I can be the same kind of mother that my mom was to us.

Heaven

In the last month I have spent quite a lot of time thinking and reading about heaven. A couple years ago I read a book by Ted Dekker, I don't remember what it was called, but it was about setting our minds on eternity and living in that hope every day. When you think about it, really, life on this earth is not even a tiny speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. Compare 80 years on this earth to eternity...millions upon millions of "years", at least in the way we understand time. I can't comprehend it but I kind of visualize our lives on this earth as just a glimpse of life before we are really truly born to life. And we groan as in the pains of childbirth...waiting, and longing for a time when we no longer have to face death. I remember my mom telling me once about childbirth. She said there's incredible pain for a little while, but as soon as she held each of us in her arms, she completely forgot the pain, and she thought she must be the first person in the world to experience such deep joy. I guess her sickness was like that pain. The thing that hurts me more than anything is remembering her sickness, seeing her body being attacked and eaten by the sepsis infection that slowly overcame every organ in her body. But that's all in the past. Now she's experiencing a joy that far outweighs the suffering in her last days on earth. And for that matter, it even far outweighs the joy of having a child. Now she gets to be with even more of her children than she had on earth. Four unborn and one son who got to heaven before her. My grandpa remembers my mom saying after Derek died that she has a whole family waiting for her in heaven...now she gets to be with them. We just have to figure out how on earth we can live without her until we get to join them in that perfect place where we can experience real life.