Each Mother’s Day I spend a little time to pluck various images from the wings of memories that become sort of like a necklace of jewels on the pages of history to me.
I think of home, love, joy, sadness, fireside, hymns, her goodnight kiss. I recall my mother sitting by the kitchen table, with eyes swimming in tears, shoulders hunched down deep, when there was no food to feed her large family in the Second World War.
As a young child, my father told me that a good mother is worth 100 school teachers. I tend to agree with that today.
The first university a child attends is the university of home. Where else can a child learn the lessons of ignorance and experience, youth and age, courage and caution, hope and fear, faith and trust ?
But I cannot help but think of what it must be like to raise a family, by both father and mother, in today’s developing technological explosion, with moral standards disintegrating all around.
Wisdom from the past informs us that the greatest word in life is God; the deepest is soul; the longest eternity; the swiftest is time; the nearest is now; the darkest is sin; the meanest is hypocrisy; the broadest truth; the strongest right; the tenderest is love, and the sweetest word is home.
But the dearest of them all is mother.
I wonder how it is that every time I hear someone speak in a degrading tone about the role of motherhood today, it feels as if someone is trampling on my mother’s grave?
Some of the great world figures like St. Augustine, John Wesley, and King George the VIII, have said that no other member in their family influenced them more then their mother did.
One cannot dethrone the fact that some of the greatest letters ever written, measured by their influence, were written by a mother’s hand.
These are the genuine love letters of the world, baptized with tears of spiritual anxiety, and tenderly penned down with human affection by the hands of unselfish devotion.
It has been said that there is no influence in the world today like the motivation of a praying mother. One thing is sure, that no matter how wayward his, or her, footsteps may be; how deeply sunken in sin; each will remain some mother’s dear child. And that’s a fact.
I pray that the prayers, hopes, beliefs and expectations in their children of all devoted mother’s will never die.
Gertie Pool
