Getting to know my mom

We went home to Cottage Grove on Saturday. I still don't know how to refer to it. I'm so used to saying "Mom and Dad's". Or "Mom and Dad's house". I've been specifically avoiding referring to it as "Dad's house". It doesn't change the truth of the situation, so I don't know why it really matters how I refer to it.

Dad told me to go ahead and look through Mom's stuff and take anything that I wanted. My mom has a lot of things so I don't anticipate that I'll be done going through everything for quite a while, but I did have a chance to look through some of her books and some of her Bible study guides. Mom and I both went through the Beth Moore study, "Believing God". I did it one year ahead of her. I was curious to see her workbook.

What I found was one of the clearest illustrations of my mom's entire life. The big assignment for that study was to create a timeline of your life and mark all milestones and specific areas where you saw God's hand at work. Mom took her assignment very seriously. There were lots of things indicated on her timeline. And then she wrote notes about each section of her life. It was basically broken down into 12 year intervals. For each 12 year segment, she wrote the theme or highlights of the things that the Lord had been teaching her.

The last segment of her life is full to overflowing with things that the Lord did in her life. As I read over it, it occured to me that many people don't experience as much of God's blessing in 90 years of life as my mom did in 58. And the only thing she had to do was allow God access to all the little corners of her life and trust that the Lord could trade her small dreams for bigger ones. He didn't let her down. It was not an easy journey for my mom. She experienced grief, loss and heartache, but she would tell you that the reward was far greater than any sacrifice that she made.

The end of her timeline said her age: 57. That was last Spring. After the "57" she put a ". . . ." to indicate that her timeline wasn't finished. I cried when I saw that. Little did she know that her timeline was nearly done. I so wish that line extended several more pages, but it's a blessing to have something tangible to hang out to that tells me so much about her.