My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Tice, was impressed with my poetry. I owe my mom the thanks for it. She’d get me up early before school – I am still am early riser today – and coach me through my poems as she made breakfast. Those early morning pre-school writing sessions with Mom are some of my fondest memories.

In high school I took a speech and debate class. We had to do a public speech. Mom set me up to speak to the realtor’s association luncheon. There I stood, rushing through a speech on redlining to an audience of white realtors in one of the whitest towns in Nebraska. I was clueless about the setting now that I look back on it, but Mom was proud to put me in front of her audience and praised me going home.

When Ann Jarvis established Mother’s Day in 1912, she wanted a permanent day of true sentiment of children toward their mother. Jarvis was a peace activist and she believed that if men (I do mean here male members of the human race) focused towards life giving blessings in their own lives, that sentiment might begin to also transcend their war-making all around the world. In 1925 Jarvis protested the American War Mothers selling carnations to raise money for their cause, which she saw as commercializing the day in support of war, and was arrested for disturbing the peace.

Giving carnations to mothers on Mother’s Day ought to be an expression of genuine love and hope for real peace. Martin Luther paid all mothers the highest compliment, saying that our first true bishops are our mothers because they are the first ones to teach us to pray.

Surely God comes to each of us through the ones who give birth to us. May our Moms, living on earth and in eternity, be blessed and may our sentiment for them be true and real.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Grace and peace,
Pr Russell Meyer