My Mama’s Boy

My Mama’s Boy

I must confess. I thank God for my Mama. I love my Mama. By the grace of God, my Mama has been there for me since my beginning. I was her firstborn. She held me. She fed me. She taught me. She disciplined me. She loved me. For forty plus years, she has been there encouraging, chastising, and just being my Mama.

Mama has always been firm in her convictions. She spared not the rod of discipline. My brother and I had assigned chores to do. We had godly standards to live by. What she asked of us, she demonstrated herself. I am awed by how she held up. I am grateful to God for being her stronghold.

In my family’s trials, she was the rock, the purchasing agent and the executive chef. She medicated and mended as the doctor, and was guidance counselor and peacemaker. She put on the brave face. She looked at the positive side of things and taught us to be ever thankful. Whatever was needed she tried to get it done with dignity and grace.

She has endured so many trials. Heartache and pain have seemed to be always at her heals. Her father committed suicide when she was in her twenties. Though hurt, she kept walking by faith. Subsequently, her mother was weighed down with decades of depression and distressing behavior, making Mama to all intents and purposes mother to all her siblings and in many ways mother to her own mother. She bore her burdens in the heat of the day, knowing that the Lord would make away. She had hard trials, sleepless nights on pillows damp with tears, but God helped her make headway.

Daddy was in the home, grown in age, but long in the process of growing up. Mama did not run out, nor run away. She prayed and she waited. She waited and she prayed-calling on God to touch daddy’s heart and turn his life around. She called on God to touch my brother and me that we would be and do differently in our lives. She stood on the word of God and trusted God to make everything all right. God heard and answered. I was grown and gone, but Mama persevered to see God bring her prayers to fruition.

I can testify that my Daddy is being the man, now, that God is pleased with. He loves His wife. He is there for her, providing for her. She is his queen. He has a fruitful relationship with God and his marriage is fruitful because of it.

The time was ripe for us to draw nearer to each other. In 2008, my only sibling, my baby brother, died without warning of a massive heart attack at the age of thirty-seven. It was another blow for Mama, one that hit us all hard. We got through it together, just as a family should. I had the hard task of preaching the funeral. In spite of the burden, God helped me bear up and that buoyed my family, just as Mama had done for so long for us.

Daddy and I have grown closer together. We both serve God. I respect him as my Daddy and am grateful for how God has and is blessing and using him. I look like him and some would say I am stubborn like him, too. Still, my Mama and I have a special relationship. Tears, time, and trials wrought with the love of God has blessed it so. I am proud to be my Mama’s boy.

I encourage you to love and honor your mother for whatever good she has brought to your life.

Proverbs 31: 10. Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies…

RevLDReedSr
i owe Jesus
5/1/2010