A Lesson From My Mother

There is this thing going around Facebook right now where if you love and appreciate your mother you will make her picture your profile pic until Mother's Day.  I would love to make my mother's picture my profile pic but I have very few pictures of her and am not even sure where those are anymore.  My mom has been gone for 25 years now.

While she is no longer around to guide and teach me, I am still learning lessons from the life she lived while she was here.  I was talking to my father the other day about all the things I have on my plate and it prompted him to pass on a lesson from the life of my mother.  He said that whenever she was carrying more than she thought she could bear that should would say, "I simply cannot handle this anymore.  I am going to pass it off to God and let him take care of it now." He said that with that statement she would literally pass of her worries and would appear suddenly relieved and at peace again.

I have been pondering that for the last week and asking myself if I really do hand over my struggles to God or do I hold them tightly in my little hands so I can still control the world around me or draw attention to myself because of all that I am dealing with? Ouch that hurt to admit.

I have come to the conclusion that when we go through hard times, we all wave the flag of something and it is suspended from the pole of how we view God.  If we view God as the one who came to this earth, walked around, and then left us here to take care of ourselves then we will hold the pole of our own self-preservation and wave the flag of poor pitiful me.  If we view God as the author of our lives, our sustainer, our comforter, and our savior, then we will hold the pole of faith and wave the flag of peace and surrender in the midst of the storm.

I believe that most of you are like me in that your were saved from the first scenario but not magically placed into the second.  It is a daily walk for me and takes practice for me to walk out my life in faith and hope that I can reach a place of peace and surrender that my father speaks of when he describes my mother's ability to place her cares on the Lord.  I want to be that way too.