By Jeremy Reynalds
Correspondent for ASSIST News Service
ALBUQUERQUE,
NEW MEXICO – (ANS)- With
Mother’s Day just around the corner, our thoughts are focusing on
“mom.” For this year’s celebration, let’s make sure that we do more than
just buy mom a rose or two, take her out to dinner and go back to the way we’ve
acted all year. Let’s make a resolution to start appreciating mom EVERY day of
the year while we still have her. Here’s my mother’s day story. While I wrote
it in 2000, I believe that it is still just as relevant this year as it was
back then.
The man made his way slowly up the
stairs to the second floor of the hospital where his mother was a patient in
the geriatric unit. He walked through the ward, passing by a variety of elderly
people in various states of apparent mental and physical decay.
While he had been warned that his
mother’s health was rapidly deteriorating it was still a shock to him when he
saw her. She was sleeping but her breathing was heavy and labored. Her hands,
lying pathetically at each side of her frail body, were badly swollen. Her once
immaculately permed hair fell untidily in all the wrong places.
Being assured by a nurse that it
would be okay to wake up his mother, the man went over to his mom and gently
placed his hand on her shoulder. “Mom, it’s me,” he said. “Can
you wake up?”
The woman stirred, blinked, opened
her eyes fully and although a little confused appeared to be pleased to see her
visitor.
“How are you?” the man
asked.
“Not so good,” she said in
a raspy, wheezing voice, speaking with difficulty. “I ask them to come and
they don’t. I’ve got bad phlegm. Can you get me some tissues?”
The man took the nurse aside and
asked her what exactly was wrong with his mother. She told the man that despite
running all sorts of tests they didn’t exactly know. However, none of the tests
explained the physical problems being faced by the man’s mother. The nurse
pointed out that the man’s mother did have a drug patch attached to her back to
help alleviate some of the pain she was experiencing.
After saying goodbye, the man left
and came back the next day. His mother was sleeping. This time, things were
worse than yesterday. When the man’s mother was woken up, her face was
permeated with a blank, vacant stare. She was even unable to recall who had
visited her that morning.
Then with the man standing directly
in front of her, she said how nice it would be if her son would come to see
her. The man sighed inwardly and went to see the nurse, who again reiterated
that while they didn’t know exactly what was wrong with his mother they were
still doing all they could to help her. However, his mother apparently didn’t
think so. With that vacant gaze she still kept telling her son, (apparently
referring to the medical personnel) “I keep calling but they never
come.”
A tragic story, but one especially
gut wrenching for me – because the elderly woman was my mother. I visited her
in late February 2000 as she lay in a hospital bed in South England: a
“guest” of the country’s nationalized health service.
A couple of days later I was back in
the United States, so glad that a pastor and a good friend had all told me that
I should do whatever it took to pay a visit to my “mum” while I
could. The week after my return, life went on as usual — except that as you
might imagine my mother was never that far from my thoughts.
The following weekend arrived and
with it plans for a birthday party for one of my sons, combined with a high
school graduation celebration for another and a birthday party for my
granddaughter. While it was a happy occasion the joy was tempered by a phone
call I received the day of the party.
My mother’s hospital had called
saying that she was getting steadily worse and it was not anticipated that she
would live through the day. When I asked exactly what was wrong they still didn’t
know. In fact, the response I received was very vague and non-committal.
However, being on the other side of the ocean, and being unable to visit
physically, what else could we do except pray and commit the situation to the
Lord? So that’s exactly what we did. A little while later the the phone rang.
It was a nurse from the hospital in the United Kingdom, saying she was sad to
have to tell me that “mum” had passed away a couple of hours before.
As you can imagine, I was very glad
that the Lord had prompted me to go see her before she passed on. (The Lord had
also been gracious enough to provide the funds for the airfare as well).
However, I was especially thrilled that some months before this, when
“Mum” first became ill, that I had contacted the pastor from my old
church in Bournemouth, England and he had agreed to go and visit my mother.
While my mother had initially been
very hostile to the gospel when I gave my life to the Lord in England in the
mid 1970′s, (probably due at least in part to my over zealousness in the way I
shared the gospel with her) she received Pastor Vic very warmly. As I knew he
would, Vic told my mom all about the love that Jesus Christ had for her. When
he asked her if she believed what he was saying, she apparently replied (in
that feisty manner that only she could) “Of course I do, I’m Church of
England.”
I believe that one day I will join
“mum” around the throne of the Lord and we will praise and worship
Him together for all eternity. Maybe some of you reading this have poor or
severed relationships with your loved ones. Perhaps some of you haven’t spoken
to your parents for years and still have no desire to do so. Maybe they were
bad parents and you have absolutely no desire to remember anything at all about
your childhood.
The situation boils down to this. As
a pastor friend of mine once said, the most important thing in life is
relationships; firstly with God and then with each other. Make sure that your
relationship with God is right, and then take care of all of the other
relationships in your life. You will never regret doing so. We are not promised
tomorrow. In fact, tomorrow may never come. I pray you have a blessed mother’s
day.
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