Redemption: A Mother’s Story
The author’s mother.
My mother was a self made woman, long on work ethic but short on intimacy. She had little patience for anything other than perseverance and making lemonade when life doled out lemons. She taught me how to roll with the punches and never give up which served me well till it didn’t. At 28, I had no fight left in me and was led to the Lord by a very unlikely source, which is a story for another time. If you have a redemption story you know there is no way not to be excited and yell it from the mountain top and the first person I wanted to share it with was Mom. My joy was temporarily dampened when Mom put down her cigarette and exclaimed “that’s just a crutch.”
The slightest mention of my life in Christ was always met with rejection, until I never said another word about it to her. The verse in the Bible about there being a special kind of hell for those that impede a person’s path to heaven haunted me and I didn’t have enough faith at that time to understand it was not up to me to drag her to heaven with the right words. Her last two years, I was her caregiver, always leaving work to take her to the hospital because the emphysema was slowly drowning her. Her last year was spent in a nursing home, but she never left her room except to take a bottle of wine on her scooter to the handsome octogenarian down the hall.
I went to see her, do her laundry, bring her a meal, a couple times a week. But the conversation I desperately wanted to have with her, since her time was short, I wasn’t brave enough to share. I, for unknown reasons, even before my conversion, had always been a thorn in Mom’s side and she had made it clear Jesus was off the table.
On one night, folding her clothes, she handed me a scrap of newspaper containing the sinner’s prayer. Her words, “What do you think of that?,” blindsided and scared me. Now it felt like we were standing on a tight rope where one wrong word would send both of us to our deaths. I handed it back with a shaky hand and said, “I think that’s good Mom. I’ve done that,” and she moved the conversation quickly back to how bad her meal was.
Mom was a tough cookie, but she died a couple weeks later and I was devastated and so disappointed in myself that I couldn’t love my mom to heaven. When the nursing home chaplain came to talk with me he shared that he knocked on mom’s door several times a week but she would never let him in until a few days before she died. He relayed that she cracked the door enough to hand him the scrap of newspaper he was now holding in his hand and she said, “I’ve done that.”–Hollis Bullard
