Go Beyond

Today is the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death. When I awoke this morning I immediately thought of her and of a conversation we had a few weeks before she died. I had taken a few days to drive home in April 2009 to visit with Mom and Dad before traveling to Kashmir in May. I often told Mom how much I enjoyed returning home because it is one of the few places where I can fully relax. And I really wanted to get some good rest before leaving the country again.

As always, Mom and I talked a lot during our visit. In the course of one early morning conversation, Mom randomly asked me if I thought it was ok for her to be buried with her Bible. I simply replied, “Yes, Mom, it’s ok. But we don’t have to think about that for a long time.” Like my grandmother who had died a week before her 102nd birthday, I expected that my Mom would live just as long. I was wrong. A few weeks later my beautiful mother died in the hospital at the age of seventy-five.

When it came time to make funeral arrangements, I remembered my conversation with Mom about her wish to be buried with her Bible. Wanting to honor her wish, I found her Bible. However, before turning her obviously worn-from-use Bible over to the funeral home, I spent hours looking through it and scanned many of the pages. I was blessed by what I had found. Mom had noted each of my international trips and the dates of those trips next to passages of Scripture that she was praying for me.

I always knew that Mom prayed for my safety and success on my travels, but I never knew that she was recording these things in her Bible. It’s no wonder that I have survived so many occasions when I have been in danger in remote locations around the world. Mom kept me tethered to safety by her prayers. She had also noted the dates I had called home from overseas and initialed these notes with the letters TYL — Thank You Lord. Mom recorded several of my trips around Psalm 91, perhaps because the theme of this psalm is security and how God preserves those who abide in Him and love Him.

Mom loved God’s Word and understood that His promises are true. She trusted God for the welfare of each of her kids and bombarded heaven with prayers on our behalf. I am confident that her prayers for us and her trust in God’s promises shielded me and my siblings from so many things that could have harmed us. On this fourth anniversary of her death I am especially thankful for what I found in my mother’s Bible — yet more evidence of how much she loved me and our family.