As we prepare for the celebration of Mother’s Day on Sunday please remember how important little acts of kindness and honor really are. Although the American observance of Mother’s Day only goes back to 1914 when President Woodrow Wilson made it an official national holiday, the idea behind Mother’s Day goes back to the days of Moses. When Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments, one commandment was “honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.” And in Ephesians 6:2 St. Paul notes that “this is the first commandment with a promise” when he counsels children to obey their parents in the Lord.
The Bible is teaching that children are to show respect and obedience to their parents and that adults are to show respect and honor to their parents no matter how old they may be. This is a commandment for every day of the year, one with the result that “it may go well with you” as well as that “you may live long upon the earth.” (Ephesians 5:3) People of any land, whether it is the Promised Land of the Hebrews or the wide land of the Americans, will build a stable and wise society when parents are given respect and honor on a daily basis.
My maternal grandmother died in 1936 when my mother was only 7 years old. I have often wondered what she was like and how she handled her final illness. What was she thinking as she lay dying in a TB sanitarium along the Wisconsin River knowing that she would be leaving a little boy and a little girl behind. After she died along came another woman and her husband who took my mother into their home as a foster child. They raised my mother as the child they never had, although they never legally adopted her.
When I went off to college I decided to write a letter once a month to my foster grandmother, who now lived with an illness of her own, multiple sclerosis, which left her paralyzed. In the nursing home where my foster grandmother lived a kindly Roman Catholic nun would come on Sunday evenings to read to the residents and occasionally write letters for them. She wrote a short letter to me that my foster grandmother dictated, and then, like Tertius in Romans 16:22, added her own little note. She wrote “I want you to know how much your letters mean to your grandmother.”
My foster grandmother died a few months later. No one wept, for she was freed from the prison that was her paralyzed body for so long. I never met the nun who wrote that little note. I have long forgotten her name, but I have never forgotten what she wrote. A simple letter by a skinny kid in his freshman year of college had brought a little cheer into the life of a woman who had done a magnificent thing in opening her home to an orphan in the midst of the Great Depression. And I never forgot how important little acts of kindness and honor really are. Do something nice for Mom this Sunday. She will appreciate it.
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