If you’ve lost your mom, Mother’s Day is a holiday of mixed emotions and bittersweet memories. Today, at (in)courage, I’m sharing a heart-healing story of how God shows up and faithfully cares for those we love in their times of deepest distress. Here’s an excerpt:
Feeling helpless when someone you love is in distress is pure torment. Until God shows up.
For thirty years, Mom and I painted together every Friday. I’d arrive and we’d head to her art room — Mom with her tea and me with my pink energy drink — and we’d paint, talk, and laugh into the evening.
Mom was a best friend to each of her daughters and was always there for us. Whether it was as a shop ’til you drop companion or bumping along in my sister’s truck over the Sierra summit for a vet clinic while bundled in a heavy coat and long underwear, all while balancing a sixty-four-ounce tea on the pile of blankets on her lap . . . Mom was there, laughing. Always laughing.
So when her early dementia diagnosis came, it hit us like a mudslide, stripping away our familiar family landscape in a tumbling mess of pain.
Because my dad couldn’t manage their ranch and simultaneously care for my mom, we moved them out-of-state to be closer to more family. But within a year, my dad died of heart failure and Mom, with progressing dementia, landed in a memory care home.
Not the story our family expected.
Suddenly, three states away felt like fifty . . . but when you’re a doer and there’s a need, you get things done — until you can’t. Mom was in distress and I was helpless to save her.
Saying we trust God with our loved ones is easy until He asks us to let them go . . .
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(Featured image courtesy of laura adai on Unsplash)