New Testament Reading—2 Timothy 1: 1-7
How many of you out there are experts on what it means to be a mother? Raise your hands. In other words, how many of you would get an A+ in mom-ology? Even though I could never raise my own hand, I think there are some men out there who could probably raise their hand as well. Now, some of you might be wondering how I could possibly say that. Well, a few years ago Eunita’s father complained to her that he hadn’t gotten any gifts for Mother’s Day. At first, Eunita was like, “Huh?” Her father then let her know that as a single parent he had been both a mom and a dad for her and her brother for many years.
The latest developments in the field of mom-ology would seem to support this claim. This past week a panel of experts convened at our church during our Tuesday morning Bible Study to discuss the critical matter of what it means to be a mother. Experts such as Daryl DeSilva, Nita Calvert, Doraine Kohler, Betty Ferner, and Kathleen Williams all agreed that one does not need to be a female to be a mother. Moreover, being a mother doesn’t require giving birth or even having a house full of kids. What really matters is that one embodies the qualities of a caring, loving, and nurturing person.
At our conference on motherhood Tuesday morning, the one other male present besides myself was Jim Ferner. Jim could understand what our experts were talking about. He had observed his own mother for years. Long after her children had left home, she was always looking out for others and taking caring of them. Even during the final ten years of her life at a nursing home, she continually looked after the other widows and residents. Everyday, for instance, she would go visit a woman named Dorothy. She would read the newspaper for her, check her mail, and do all sorts of other things. Dorothy passed away two years ago, and not long ago, Jim’s mother passed away as well at the age of 98. At the memorial service for Jim’s mother, the chaplain of the nursing home told of how it was through her care that she likely prolonged the life of Dorothy for five years.
As the only other male present at our conference, I had come there in order to unravel how it is that God works through the care and love of mothers. My hope was that we might learn how to harness some super-mom power for our capital campaign. Clearly, Paul saw this same power present in Timothy’s mother and grandmother. They were responsible for keeping the faith alive from one generation to the next. I knew that we needed to tap into that same divine power source, and our panel showed me an encouraging sign. The panel made me realize that all of us have some super-mom potential. All of us can be a source of maximum mother-strength love and care regardless of our age, our gender, or anything else. But what I still needed to know was how precisely mothers could serve as role models for our campaign. It’s one thing to say that this campaign will depend upon caring hearts and people caring for this church. It’s another thing to capture what care looks like in practice and how that same kind of care can be applied to our campaign. I knew that figuring this out would require more than ivory tower research. I would have to go out into the field.
From many of the experts on motherhood in our congregation, I had heard that Ollie Stevens is a legendary mother. I thus visited Ollie this past week along with her daughter Dolores and her son Thad. Many of you maybe have not met Thad. He has been housebound for the past 22 years. When I went to visit Ollie, I was at first worried that Ollie would not share too much with me. She likes to think she’s nothing special despite the opinions of others. As I told her, however, I was going to slyly ask her questions until I got to the bottom of what makes her a super-mom. I then realized that probably if I am going to be sly I shouldn’t tell her that I am going to be sly. Nevertheless, I started off by inquiring about the wonderful plate of cookies she brought out for me to eat. I soon discovered that Ollie had a full-blown ministry despite a cookie thief who has not yet been apprehended.
Eventually, I got Ollie to open up, and I discovered something that just astounded me. Her mothering is not just confined to her own nine kids. After her own kids were all grown up, she spent twenty years mothering three kids who belonged to the Pagel family. She would baby-sit them every Friday. The oldest is now 20 and off to college while the youngest is 15. Ollie still visits the Pagel family every week, and on the wall of her home, one can see pictures of their kids.
Even though it was hard work getting Ollie to give me the inside scoop on her, Dolores also helped me get to the bottom of things. She told me that the word “caring” fits her mother perfectly. She talked about all of the things Ollie does to care for Thad. Later, that day I happened to visit Oral Thompson who is taking care of Thelma, and I told Oral about everything Ollie does as a caretaker, and I could tell he strongly identified with it. He sympathetically declared that taking care of others is often a thankless job. Well, I hope we are a church that gives thanks for what is often thankless. For everyone in our church who serves as a caretaker for someone else, let’s give a round of applause.
Another thing I learned about Ollie is that in raising her kids she was a late night mom. To Dolores as a child growing up, it seemed like Ollie was up all night. Ollie explained to me what happened. When the kids were awake, they just got in the way of her doing any work. If you cleaned something, they would just get it dirty again. So after all the kids went to bed, Ollie would stay up late into the night cleaning, ironing, sewing, and cooking. Dolores told me that they always ate well for breakfast. Ollie would bake big fluffy biscuits—yeast cakes I think she called them. The kids would then get creative with these at breakfast. Often they would spread peanut butter on them before dipping them in syrup. I’d like to try that sometime.
After staying up late, Ollie would then wake up at five in the morning to get the kids ready for school. Once they left, Ollie herself would leave for work. She would then be back at home for when they returned. I didn’t mention that Ollie not only has a cookie ministry, she also has a popcorn ministry. When the kids got home, there would always be popcorn waiting for them. As you can tell, Ollie clearly put in a lot of hard work and a lot of long hours for her kids. Dolores remembers how one time none of the kids could find her. They kept saying, “Where’s mom? Where’s mom?” Eventually, they found her. She was in the car sleeping. It was the only quiet place she could find.
Having collected from Ollie’s house an enormous amount of data on how super-moms put love and care into practice on a daily and nightly basis, I still needed to interpret my data and apply its lessons to our capital campaign. For this, I called up one of the best experts I know: my own mom. She has been a bit of late night mom herself at times, so I asked her how I was to understand this late night trait that often seems to be present in super-moms. She explained to me that it is precisely because super-moms care that they do so much. A mother who cares can’t just say, “I won’t feed my kids tomorrow morning, or I won’t see that they have clean clothes to wear to school.” A mother who cares can’t just call it quits. So with their super-mom strength, they stretch days into nights. They do more than others might think is convenient or even possible.
This capital campaign has certainly not seemed convenient, especially in the midst of a recession. At times, it might have even seemed impossible. Despite whatever doubts we may have had, at some point I think most of us have come to realize that we can’t just call it quits on this church. We care about it too much. In the end, I think if we approach this campaign with the same kind of caring spirit that mothers like Ollie have, we will find that we have reserves of strength and determination that others might never have thought existed.
Let me end with a story I came across while doing my research on super-moms. Cynthia Rahn grew up in rural Appalachia during the early 1960s. She attended school in a town miles from where she lived out in the country. At school as a new kindergartener, she was “shy and insecure” because felt like she looked poor compared to all the other kids who looked rich to her. Not long after she had started school, she was given an assignment by her teacher Mrs. White. She was instructed to go home and “find something that [had] to do with a farm animal or a barn.” She was then to bring it in the next day so that they could create a farmyard scene in class. All of the kids were very excited about the idea, and Mrs. White had probably not thought about how the assignment might be difficult for some of the kids to complete.
When Cynthia got home, she immediately changed out of her school clothes and went out and played until it got dark. Around that time, her mother came home from work. They ate dinner and then got “ready to go to bed.” It was at that point that Cynthia realized she had completely forgotten the assignment. She told her mother about it, and they looked around for a toy or stuffed animal, but they couldn’t find anything. It was also too late to go to a store. In rural Appalachia back then, they didn’t have Wal-Marts where you could buy things late at night. Cynthia became quite upset and started to cry. She told her mother that she couldn’t go to school the next day because she didn’t have anything. She even became angry at her mother for not being able to help her. Her mother responded, “Well, you should have thought about this when you got home. You waited too late. You weren’t responsible. You have to go to bed now.”
Because Cynthia’s mother worked, she would leave early in the morning before Cynthia got up for school. Before she left, she would put out a breakfast for Cynthia and her sister. When Cynthia came down that morning for breakfast, there sitting “on the kitchen table was a barn made out of notebook paper.” With plain notebook paper, her mother had folded the walls, the roof, the doors, the shutters on the windows, and the little steps leading down from the loft. She did everything without a single staple or a piece of tape. Cynthia later remembered, “It was like magic…I was so happy and so excited when I saw that barn.” She could hardly believe her mother did it. Cynthia’s mother did not know origami, so Cynthia never could figure out how she managed to do it. Neither did she ever find out how long it took her mother to make that barn. When Cynthia got to school, all “the other kids had bags of store-bought plastic farm animals.” The rest of the kids were amazed by Cynthia’s barn. All these many years later, Cynthia still remembers how she felt. She says, “It made me a very happy little girl, and I was very popular that day in school. I just felt like a queen. And I knew, too, that [my mother] cared.”
This Mother’s Day let us celebrate how God’s love lives through the care of mothers, and let us be inspired to care ourselves. Amen.