I don’t have as reliable a brain as computer memory possesses, but as I face the fact of my mother’s mortality, I can’t help but find comfort in some familiar stories she’s told and retold time and again ease my mind about the solidity of my mother’s faith.
Here’s the first one:
When my mother was young, she saw a procession of building parts being hauled by her house to a place in town where a new church was being built. As a young girl she’d been wondering where she needed to go to find God, and on that day, she felt He told her: to that very building. She made sure her parents gave her the chance to go there.
Here’s another:
Sometime later, the biggest question in my mother’s mind about God was the whole question of Yeshua’s resurrection on the third day; after all, dead things don’t come back to life. The empty tomb bothered her; it made the Gospel feel like a children’s story instead of the truth.
Well, mom had a pet frog along with one of her brothers and one of her sisters. He lived under a staircase. One day, the frog died, as creatures eventually do, and the three of them carefully placed it in a shoebox, held a funeral for it, and buried it in the back yard. But on the third day, her mind kept returning to that frog; she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
So she dug it up. And what do you know? The frog was gone. The shoebox was empty.
“That’s when I decided, OK, God, I’m never going to doubt you on anything you say, ever again,” is how mom always ended that story.
With stories like that, I have to believe that haShem has honored the faith of my mother and will welcome her into the kingdom of heaven. It’s what she’s clung to no matter how much life has changed or disappointed her in the past 70 years or so (she’s 78).
I believe God honors those with sincere hearts seeking to know and honor him; he’s not someone who’ll toss someone aside for minor issues, like the fact that she called the Son of Adonai Jesus Christ instead of Yeshua the Messiah.
It’s not in Adonai’s nature to be petty; that’s our specialty.