This weekend a pretty personal anniversary is coming up…
Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and I have struggled with whether or not I should make a big deal of this… but you know what, it’s a big deal to me, and so I want to share it with you, because August 21st will mark 10 years since my mother, Lindy Eareckson, went home to be with Jesus. And there is not a day that goes by that I don’t warmly think of her… some special memory… some place we visited together… or something she said. My mother had a huge influence on my life. She loved flowers, gardening, volunteering at the hospital outside our town, she loved singing hymns – she could really hold a melody against my harmony – and did she love to cook! In fact, tonight we are going to have my mother’s crab cakes with all the sides that she preferred – fresh red tomatoes, steamed asparagus, and applesauce. And, oh, by the way, if you’d like the recipe, I’ll post it today on my radio page on joniandfriends.org, okay?
What else did my mother love to do?! Well, athlete that she was, boy, did Lindy love to play tennis. When you played with my mother, you had to wear white and maintain a quiet, genteel atmosphere on the court (I guess that’s why she never did like John McEnroe, the Wimbledon champion who always screamed at the linesmen). Lindy would have none of that. She could even beat my husband when they played Canadian doubles – that was Ken against Mother and my brother-in-law Rob. I remember when she was 84 years old, she was going for a backhand and tripped – she broke her shoulder and, unfortunately, that marked the beginning of her long, downhill slide. Through the subsequent strokes and even breast cancer, she never failed to keep thinking about others. Always worrying about me and how I was doing. Through her decline, my mother possessed a true dignity.
It was a dignity of a different sort than the euphemistic slogan “Death with dignity.” It was an eternal dignity in accepting whatever indignities she had to suffer through to remain faithful to God. It was a dignity that persevered as she held her head high through every hospital and doctor’s appointment. As someone once said, “A person can be humiliated (that’s what my mother experienced as her body functions began to give way)… a person can be humiliated, and yet noble. And the humiliation makes the nobility all the more obvious.” My mother died with dignity too, although the advocates of euthanasia and their clean, quick, controlled exits out of life might not think so. She died looking death squarely in the face and was able to keep hope alive, all because she knew that Jesus Christ and His heaven was on the other side of her tombstone.
Yes, I’m proud to keep my mother’s memory alive because still, to this day, she remains a force for good in my life. Ten years… wow… where has the decade flown to! I live in California, nowhere near my mother’s grave back in that Maryland cemetery, but I’ll be calling all my sisters this weekend and, yes, we may even vie for whose crab cakes were the best this week! As I said, if you’d like the recipe, just head to my radio page after this at joniandfriends.org and you can copy it down. Or, we’ll mail you it on a 3x5 recipe card – just write me at Joni and Friends, P.O. Box 3333, Agoura Hills, California 91376. Here’s to our believing mothers… it’s good to know that one day we shall see them again… all because of Jesus.
Used by permission of
JONI AND FRIENDS
P.O. Box 3333
Agoura Hills, CA 91376
© Joni and Friends