Bible Verses and Mom

I have been working on a pioneer story about a woman whose family is wiped out in an Indian attack, leaving her to struggle on alone. This developed into a story of faith, with the woman turning to Bible verses and Christian hymns to sustain her as she fights to survive.

Curiously enough, many times when I tried to think of an appropriate Bible verse to insert into the story, I could hear my mom’s voice in my head, quoting scripture. My mom was a peculiar type of Christian. She was very devout: she read her Bible every day, she attended church every Sunday, and she prayed for all her children and grandchildren every single morning, in much detail. In her waning days, she once woke me at five o’clock in the morning by pressing her Life Alert button, and when I raced downstairs to see what was wrong, she simply said, “I was praying, and I couldn’t remember where your brother went for Christmas.” Well, God already knew that my brother was in San Antonio, but Mom thought He needed to be clued in, nonetheless.

Despite her piety, Mom was not a particularly kind person. She had very few friends and frequently expressed displeasure with her children. Even as adults, we “kids” often talked about being on Mom’s “crumb list” and about jockeying for position on said list. We joked about it, but usually behind the joking, we mostly felt bad. We never understood the disconnect between her love of God and her dislike of just about anyone else, including us. It made no sense.

One of the more frequently-quoted verses in our household growing up was “there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth,” taken from Matthew 13. This was usually used in connection to one of us having a task to do, and if we failed to do this in a timely manner, Mom warned us that we would live to regret it, i.e., we would wail and gnash our teeth.

She also favored the verse “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” That went into the story, along with “For He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.” I didn’t have to look them up. I could hear Mom reciting them, word for word.

Mom died on New Year’s Day 2020. I asked myself the other day if I would consider sharing my new story with her if she were still alive, and sadly, the answer to that would be “No.” She was not a natural cheerleader; she did not understand the concept of lying to spare someone’s feelings. Instead of telling me that she enjoyed the story or that it held her interest, she probably would have said, “I found a mistake on page 22.” That was Mom.