Our Daily Bread

I was thinking recently about the ways moms provide for their kids throughout their lives. One of the first and most crucial needs they fill is hunger. In fact, for the first few years of life, most of the food we eat comes from Mom. As you grow older, you start to have more choices about the food you eat and more opinions about when, where, and how you eat meals. You might chafe against the "clean plate club" rule or wish you could go out for pizza with friends instead of being home for family dinners. Then one day you're out of the house and on your own for meals, and you remember how good your mom's Swiss steak and mashed potatoes tasted on Sunday afternoons or how exciting it was to see the fogged-up windows when you came home from play practice because you knew that meant it was spaghetti night. You look forward to coming home for visits to eat Mom's home-cooking again. It's something kids never really outgrow. But twice now, with Steve's mom and my own, I've seen that moms start to outgrow their ability to provide those meals. As with so many parts of the parent-child relationship (the last time you held your parent's hand, the last time your family all went somewhere together in the family car), you don't usually realize while you're eating it, that it's the last meal your mom is going to make for you. My mom's home-cooked meals are a thing of the past. The last time I visited her in her new little personal care apartment, she offered me a cup of coffee, but she couldn't even quite remember how to operate her Keurig.

If you were raised in a family like mine, it wasn't just physical food your mom provided, she also nourished you spiritually. You probably took for granted the daily bread she provided: everything from her little wooden music box full of Bible verses on small colored cards that played "Standing on the Promises," to the familiar sight of her well-worn black leather Bible with its onion-skin pages and the flat red pencil she kept tucked in its spine for neatly underlining favorite verses, to her helping you memorize Luke 2 and the first chapter of John. As you grew older, your spiritual diet started being supplemented at Bible Club and youth group meetings, and those new tastes started to seem a little more appealing than the same old spiritual food you got at home. You may have started to get a little impatient with mealtime and bedtime prayers, and you chafed at missing Wonderful World of Disney every Sunday night because of evening church. Then one day, you are out on your own, deciding for yourself when and where to go to church and pray and read your Bible.

However, unlike all the physical meals your mom made while you were growing up, the spiritual food she provided continues to nourish you throughout your life. Over the years, you find yourself humming the hymns you heard your mom singing around the house and repeating the same mealtime and bedtime prayers with your own kids that she said with you. And your mom's ability to provide spiritual guidance extends much longer too. For as long as I can remember, every three months, I'd find a fat envelope in my mailbox containing a copy of "Our Daily Bread," a little booklet that contains short daily devotionals I've read steadily over the years. In April, my mom's emergency surgery and the aftermath that changed her life and ours ended that long-standing tradition. The picture above is of the last copy she sent me. For four months now, I've been on my own: I've had to forage around and find my own copies of "Our Daily Bread"; it's been fine, but the ones I've found are one-month versions, rather than the three-month copies she sent, and I miss finding those fat envelopes in my mailbox. Although she can no longer mail me those booklets or make me a meal or a cup of coffee, her ability to feed me spiritually has not ended. Last time I was down, she told me about how she's catching up on her daily Bible reading and thinks she'll make it through Revelation by the end of the year; she played hymns for me on her CD player. And I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she prays for me and for my kids and for the rest of the family every single day. Some days I think those prayers are the only things keeping me standing, and I hope and pray that for as long as I live, I will follow in her footsteps and "stand on the promises" as firmly and strongly as she has. Thanks for all the food, Mom.

Good Friday

When I was growing up, we went to church at noon on Good Friday.  It was a somber service for a somber day, but afterwards we went out for pie at The Landmark, a local restaurant.  We spent Saturday coloring Easter eggs in coffee mugs filled with vinegary-smelling dyes.  On the years the weather cooperated, we got up in the pre-dawn darkness for sunrise services.  When we got home, we hunted for our cellophane-wrapped Easter baskets and searched for the jelly beans my mom had hidden all over the living room.  Then we put on our best clothes and our freshly polished shoes and headed off to church where the sanctuary smelled of lilies as we sang "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" and "Up from the Grave He Arose."  We came home to Easter dinner, followed by an Easter egg hunt with the real hard-boiled eggs we had dyed the day before.  For many days after Easter we took the cracked, colorful eggs in our school lunches with little salt and pepper shakers and ate deviled eggs and pickled eggs for supper.  It was the same year after year.  Here's the strange thing: I re-created very few of these Easter traditions with my own kids.  Our church didn't have a Good Friday service, and most years classes were in session at the college, so I was teaching anyway.  My kids didn't like hard-boiled eggs, and it seemed wasteful to color eggs we were going to throw away, so some years we dipped white wax eggs in colored wax instead.  I hid my kids' Easter baskets, but I just used the twiggy baskets we had around the house and didn't wrap them in colorful cellophane.  Our church had Easter morning services and lilies, but we sang contemporary worship songs rather than "Christ the Lord is Risen Today." Some years, thanks to New York's long spring breaks, we drove to Florida to visit Steve's parents--those years we colored eggs on the patio in the tropical, eighty-degree heat, I packed Easter bags instead of baskets, we wore swimsuits instead of Easter finery and went the beach instead of to church on Easter Sunday.  I've spent a good bit of time worrying about this over the years.  I'm pretty big on traditions, and yet on this holiest of holidays, somehow I never could quite replicate the Easters of my childhood.  It's not the colorful cellophane-wrapped baskets or the Easter egg hunts I'm talking about, it's the Good Friday services, the sunrise services, and the reverence with which my parents approached Easter--those are the things that formed in me an unwavering, unshakeable faith in a loving God.  I hope and pray on this Good Friday that despite the piecemeal approach to Easter my kids have experienced over the years, they know, beyond a shadow of a doubt how precious they are to God. And regardless of how they mark these holy days in the years ahead, I hope every Good Friday and every Easter Sunday is a solid reminder of God's amazing grace and love.