Christian Living

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“From Diaper To Shroud”
Ephesians 6:2-3 Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise; That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.

The beauty of motherhood is well documented and celebrated in the ancient and modern literature of all cultures. There is something distinctively sacred about mother.

Our time has seen a departure from the sanctity of the home and with this departure a demeaning of the role and position of mother. Mother is simply a limo driver for the kids and a short order cook and concubine for the hubby. Tenderness is something read about in old books.

My mother had one of the roughest lives I have ever heard of prior to her first marriage and then it got worse! For most of her 93 years she has been acquainted with grief, poverty and disappointment by the carload. Yet, at 93 she still drives to the dismay of my sisters who live near her. I don’t mind her driving as I live right at seven hundred miles away in relative safety. I do recall that recently one enterprising sibling took mom’s drivers license away and so me dear mother loaded her 300 plus pounds on the scooter for seniors and took off to the shopping center on U.S. 40, right down the four lane highway in all of her glory. I shall not be moved is her long standing theme.

With age and a little maturity I have come to appreciate the gigantic courage of my mother. Most could not have faced and overcome such things as this near orphaned child, conceived in Germany and born in Baltimore in 1914. Her father and mother divorced and mom was sent to live with a large family that owned a restaurant, where for most of her early life she lived as an indentured servant, though the term was not used. As a child up through her teen years she slept on an enclosed back porch on a sack filled with leaves. I heard her father attest to this fact way back when. School was out of the question for someone in her position.

The person more or less charged with the upbringing of mom was an older black lady who was the “go to” woman in the residence. Mom called her Aunt Adeline and Aunty called mom “White Sugar.” In latter years mom worked with special children as a foster parent and raised a severely retarded black girl from infancy to maturity and of course mom called this poor creature “Brown Sugar.” Brown Sugar was treated by the rest of us, who were either gone or in the process of going out on our own, as a special little sister.

Somewhere in the family treasure of memories is a picture of mom when she was about three or four years old, a tattered dress, some sort of make shift shoes and Aunt Adeline along with some other slightly older children, buckets in tiny hands working the rail yard in Baltimore. Their purpose in being there was to pick up coal spilled from coal cars. This was the cheapest form of heating fuel available. More than a few children died in the rail yards the cause being anywhere from being run over by a train, to being murdered by some of the people who hung around the yards. Mom’s life was not picturesque by any definition. Though I haven’t been able to locate the rail yard picture, it is seared laser like into my memory and I seldom see a train coupling and uncoupling cars here in Terre Haute without thinking of the courage it took to come out of that background and become a decent though very stubborn person. If mom were rich she would not be called stubborn, but probably ‘obstinate’ or even ‘resolute,’ but things being as they are most people just settle for stubborn. I have heard her referred to as, far out of hearing range, “That hard headed German.” I would never say such a thing, but my little sister said that ONE time in mom’s hearing. The aftermath nearly made up for all the times the little dear told on me. Life does balance out!

As far as I know mom only feared two things on earth, snakes and the first of the month when the bills came in. Both, snakes and monthly bills terrified her. I have no idea why the abnormal fear of snakes, but there were always more bills than money, often candles burned to offset the ignominy of no electricity or if we had it, it being turned off. Of course in our neighborhood we all bore the same type of crosses, if there was enough money it would be drank up or gambled away. Perhaps wasted on the Hussy up the road?

One of mom’s husbands, a big six foot six 250 pound raw boned man, worked at General Motors and also logged, and ran a little operation which back then I understood to be a junk yard. I learned at the age of ten to use an acetylene torch. In later years it dawned on me that in reality the operation was what would now be called a ‘chop shop.’ Ah, the joys of the ignorance of youth.

One evening after mom had some of the neighbor’s kid’s and me working the junk yard, hubby came home in an inebriated condition. The word means drunker than a skunk. Mom, said, “Have you spent all the money?” He got real smart in front of one of his drinking buddies and told her to shut up as he would deal with her later. Mom, in her sweet resolute German manner hit him right on the chin with a large truck stop porcelain coffee cup and with that one swat knocked him colder than a mackerel. In spite of her lack of formal education mom could be very persuasive! He stayed sober for an entire year!! My minds eye still vividly brings back the event. The Lord has a way of stirring the tender moments of our life.

After being saved and walking with Jesus for about ten years, events came into my life that brought about reconciliation between mom and me. In a while she came to visit me for a week or so at the church I was then pastoring. When the service was over my mother presented herself for salvation! She trusted Christ will all of her heart and now these many years she has faithfully loved and served Christ. (She is still hard headed).

Space demands that I bring this saga to a close but I want to tell you that there was a time when I would have written these lines with a twinge of shame, and for too many years I tried to run as fast and as far as possible from my own past and from what is called my generational past. But thanks be to God, through Christ, my future is better by far than any past, be it my own or generational.

In his grand book, “Growing Up” Russell Baker talks about visiting with his mother:
“These hopeless end-of-the-line visits with my mother made me wish I had not thrown off my own past so carelessly. We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.”

Through the years God has been teaching me to embrace the reality of the long ago, and to see the beauty, raw beauty though it be; in the embroidery of my life and to deeply affirm and appreciate the courage and inner beauty of my mother.

When you think about it, any village idiot could honor the type of mother syrupy poets write about. Yet God would have us honor our father and mother even though they be more human than divine.

I will tell you one thing, Christ makes the difference.

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