Bless You, Mothers

“Do you have children?” a young dental hygienist asked me during one of my routine checkups.

I said, “Yes,” and told her the ages of the two adult daughters my wife Carol and I cherish.

“I have a son; he’s eight months old,” said the trim, blond hygienist whose husband works as a golf course manager.

“That keeps you busy,” I said.

“Oh, yes, but if we decide to go somewhere special, we take him with us,” she said. “He’s starting to ‘pull up’ and will soon be walking.”

“It’s great you’re committed to having children,” I said. “You may better appreciate this statement when your son is older, but someone said, ‘The decision to have a child is a decision to take your heart out and let it walk around on the earth.’”

She was silent for a short time before she said, “That’s enough to bring a tear to an eye.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have given her that quotation. I didn’t mean to cause her to lose the joy of telling of her son’s endearing baby behavior. I wondered what crossed her mind in the seconds between my statement and her reply? Did she envision her son growing away from her during his teenage years? Did she see him as a young man wearing a military uniform and waving as he boarded a plane?

I was no more than six years old when my mother looked at me while she said to a lady visiting our house, “They say war comes around about every 18 years.”

I remember thinking I would probably follow in the footsteps of my father, a U.S. Army veteran who fought in Germany during World War II. Mother had known the stress of waiting for her husband to return, and she seemed concerned about my future. Mother’s statement came to my mind many times before I entered the U.S. Army. I spent a year in Vietnam but saw no combat.

“The decision to have a child is a decision to take your heart out and let it walk around on the earth.”

Many mothers have “poured out their hearts in prayer” for their children. They’ve prayed for children who “made them proud” and prayed for wayward sons and daughters.

While living years ago in Greenville, S.C., I often listened to the Rev. Oliver B. Greene’s “The Gospel Hour” radio broadcasts. Greene was born in 1915 in Greenville, South Carolina, and based his ministry in that city. He died in 1976.

A Gospel Hour website describes Greene’s youthful life as “that of a wastrel, living in wanton wickedness. Drinking, stealing, bootlegging, immorality – he was a veteran of all those vices. But at age 20, God saved that wayward youth when he attended a revival meeting (solely in an attempt to date a pure country girl) and heard a sermon on ‘The wages of sin is death.’” Greene said he moved “from disgrace to grace.” In 1939, at age 24, Greene bought a tent, and for 35 years conducted revivals across America, until failing health forced him to stop.

During one of his radio programs, I heard Greene tell of “coming home drunk” when he was an unsaved young man. He heard his mother praying for him as he passed her room. A sermon may have convicted Greene and clinched his decision to follow Christ, but his mother had prayed for him for many years.

When the angel Gabriel traveled to Galilee and told Mary she would give birth to Jesus, Mary was joyful. After Jesus’ birth, Mary and Joseph (Jesus’ stepfather) carried Jesus to Jerusalem “to present him to the Lord.” The elderly Simeon “came by the Spirit into the temple” and took Jesus in his arms.
 
“And Simeon blessed them and said unto Mary his mother, ‘Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against. Yes, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul, also…” (Luke 2:35).

Mary knew the joy of giving birth to Jesus Christ, “the Light of the world,” and she knew the soul-piercing pain of seeing her grown son, her “sweet little holy child,” suffer rejection and endure the agony of crucifixion.
 
Dear Father, bless all the mothers who have known and will know the joys and sorrows that come from being willing to take their hearts out and let them walk around on the earth.

At the Altar

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Pictured above is an after-church gathering (around 1951 or 1952) on the steps of Gum Springs Pentecostal-Holiness Church in the Blue Ridge section of Greenville County, South Carolina. I was sick that day and missed being in the photo. My friend Don Hill and I are the same age. He is pictured on the front row near the center. He was about four years of age when this photo was made. My first-grade teacher, then known as "Miss Nell Thompson" is also shown in this photograph. (Left-click once on the photo to see it enlarged.) 

The church I first attended as a child had a banister-type, wooden altar rail that ran across the front of the sanctuary.

That red-carpeted church sanctuary had three aisles (one center aisle and two wall aisles) and two sections of pews. The pulpit stood on a raised platform behind the altar railing.

The folk in that rural Greenville County, South Carolina, body of believers called their group the Gum Springs Pentecostal-Holiness Church. The “church” was made up of people; the people met in a “church house,” a building that “housed” the church (the people). Those dear people seemed to go to the altar a lot after sermons were delivered.

The altar in our sanctuary seemed, to me, to be a very holy spot. People knelt there to “do business” with the Lord. Many who used the altar area prayed out loud, and the sounds of their corporate voices were beautiful in my ears.

Many altar-goers raised their hands in worship, and I often saw handkerchiefs in the palms of ladies who prayed at our altar. Those handkerchiefs absorbed tears that flowed.

Sometimes, when our pastor presented an “altar call” for anyone who had never accepted Christ, a solitary figure might walk to the front of our sanctuary and kneel at the altar. The pastor prayed for that man or woman. Several people gathered ’round to pray – sometimes with the “laying on of hands” – for each penitent person.

As a child, I perceived that the altar was a good place for people to lay down burdens and release tears, as their hearts cried out to God.

I’ve heard some people say altars in churches are outdated and that Christ’s work – his being laid “on the altar of sacrifice” (the cross) – took away the need for an altar. Many churches have prayer areas between pulpits and pews or sanctuary seating, but they don’t have “altars with railings” on which one can lay his arms, cradle his head, pray and let tears fall.

  

I’ve seen many people who seemed to “meet God” at altars. And I recall good times I spent on my knees at altars. I still have a fondness for altars.