Tribute to Mom

I wanted to post this the day of her funeral. Mom was buried today at what I felt was a good ceremony: honoring her, her Lord, and her life. This was what I wrote down to share about mom, and a good friend of the family (as well as one of my best friends) read it for me. I apologize to those that attended the funeral as this will be a repeat for you, but I felt I should share this with my other readers:

Mom has always been someone to write little notes here and there. She's owned several Bibles and she usually loads them with comments. There is one she had with her most often and this week, I've been looking through it for some remembrances. To my surprise, many of what I thought had been just mere notes from sermons are sermons themselves. To my even greater surprise are to-do lists and even one list of payees into a gift fund!
But I expected to see occasional notes to the Lord. That was her. As she would read--as she did nearly every night--she would also pour her heart out before the Lord. And she recorded these things--wittingly or not--to bless those that would later see them. I've been comforted as I've fingered through this Bible to remember Mom as she was. Not as she'd been in 2010. It was refreshing, for instance, to remember her for the woman that mourned deeply for my father. Notes from 1992 are abundant and poignant. Passages were apparently grieved over and worn with written prayers laying out her sadness and loneliness during that following Winter that would seem so long to us, and especially to her.
Another passage caught my eye that she marked from 2005. It was the date that my first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. She laid out her feelings before the Lord about the pain that I recall sharing with her over the phone as we both cried and grieved over the child that it seemed I would never be able to bear.
Yet I recalled her joy at the shower and in the hospital when my first daughter Mariah was born in 1998 as I looked through pictures this week. I then thought of the renewed hope--and fears--we shared when I announced the pregnancy that resulted in the birth of Julia this year just two weeks before the heart surgery that would ultimately cause her to lose her life. I am blessed that she was at least able to see her last grandchild and share in the unexpected joy of my recent pregnancy.
While it's been a busy year for me due to the baby and mom's decline in health, I can say as Job did (and as my older daughter realized): "the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD." I will miss her, but the Lord has mercifully eased my loss with a new and unexpected baby. But for my mom, it's all gain, and I rejoice with her as she's united with her Savior, and reunited with her loved ones. As she often said: "Getting old isn't for wimps," and I know she is now at peace, and her poor body that had been through so much is finally at rest.