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May 10, 2006
Mother's Day II
It was somewhere along Highway 67 in the middle of rural, western Illinois on the way to deputation. It was just my mother and me in our 1976 yellow-green Ford Maverick. She had just learned to drive a few years earlier in her late forties.
Deputation was that traveling road show that career missionaries were compelled to perform to raise support, a show which seemed to call for humility amidst a retelling of one’s accomplishments, and which worked best when spiced with cross-cultural anecdotes and colored by fancy dress and displays, to become like animated missionary prayer letters. Mom was a great one for color and anecdotes, but not so much on the self-aggrandizement. She pretty much was straightforward, and the nature of her work as a nurse and nurse educator and her person itself did the talking.
She was telling me about her quiet times, about how she had been reading about King David and how God would not allow him to build the temple because he had been a warrior and shed so much blood. Reading the pertinent passages since, I think she was more or less right. She went on to detail the see-saw pattern of wicked kings and righteous kings in the history of Israel.
What the discussion served to do at the time was to cause an epiphany of the sort you only have as you are growing up, when some key concept of how the world works is made clear. “Ah, we can do something with the Bible other than just read its stories. We can find patterns and principles.” Other top ten epiphany moments for me include learning about the surface to volume ratio and how it impacts cell biology and learning about predestination, “We believe what?”
What I envy about that situation now, though, is simply the possibility to talk theology with my mother, to see what she thought, to understand, perhaps, why she thought it. On second thought, I don’t think it would matter what we talked about.
I love rural Illinois.
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Personal Growth or Lack Thereof | By jackdas | 12:22 PM
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