“Observations”©

Donald S. Conkey

 

Date: May 7, 2009 - # 9919 – Mothers: the Real Heroes of America (826)

 

Motherhood! What Power, what Purpose God gave to mothers. They bear their burdens quietly, they teach, they nurture and they love and care for their families. True motherhood is a gift of God. How fortunate are children born to such mothers! Sunday is Mother’s Day. Honor your mothers.

 In the past I have written about my mother and shared how a feeling of peace came across Mother’s face as she silently slipped from mortality ten years ago this week. She is missed and our mother-son relationship of eighty plus years will be eternally remembered. Mother knew where every “Mother” fit into the family tree and helped me learn about all my generational mothers. They were all strong women, all worthy of sainthood.

With Mother’s help I walked vicariously with my ancestral mothers as they boarded small sailing vessels in the 1700 and 1800s in Scotland and Ireland, surrounded by crying children and weeping relatives being left behind. I helped carry on board supplies to last eighteen months.  I vicariously helped bury those that died at sea. I was there when they died at the port of entry, or were quarantined for a communicable disease.

Once in America I walked with them through the forests, hovered with them around open fires to keep the wolves at bay, and cooked with them over open fires until their men-folk could build a log cabin. One record tells of a grandmother, with only a blanket covering the door, listening to “wolves hungrily howl only a short distance away.” Another record tells of an ancestral grandmother walking “across the mud flats of Toronto” in the dead of winter, carrying a two year old, and sitting on logs crying, not wanting to go on. But with the gentle urging of her husband they arrived at their destination where they built their home in the wilderness and cleared the land to feed their family. They were strong women, mothers of large families. Some died in child birth, alone in the wilderness; others lived to be a hundred, surrounded by family.

This is how I learned that each generation must bear its own cross. It is easy to believe their cross was heavier to bear then our cross is today. It wasn’t!  Their four-legged wolves were as deadly to their generation as the wolves of our day; rejection of God, immorality, drugs, pornography, etc, are to our generation.  Their generations built a nation with faith in God. Some today want to rid our nation of God, who, for many, is America’s security blanket over their liberty, protecting us from the howling wolves of an ever growing secular society.

Health issues have provided me ample time to ponder the past, present and future generations. While pondering the past memories filled my mind of those ancestors who crossed oceans to flee tyranny, built log cabins in the wilderness and walked in faith to build a new nation. While pondering the present a sense of gratitude lifts me, especially for my wife who has stood beside me during the difficult years and mothered our ever-growing family.

Yet I worry about the future generations. Their wolves are the ongoing threats of terrorism and the growing internal people-divide brought about by a new administration’s rejection of Jefferson’s cornerstone of liberty (the laws of God) that, in my opinion, is leading the people into an ever-growing dependency on the government, which is another form of tyranny as deadly as the slavery our ancestors fled from. While my ancestor’s generation build this nation of liberty, my generation fought and died to preserve that liberty during numerous wars.  From this I learned that every generation must cope with its own set of challenges. Each generation must be tested, and the current generation is about to be tested – perhaps more than it can bear.          

Boyd K. Parker recently addressed this topic when he asked that same question, and then, after feeling a sense of assurance said “the upcoming generations will have a good future” I thought about this. It is especially true for those children born to mothers who know and teach ‘the Power and Purpose of God’s Plan’ to their children.