Just a thought from the weekend of celebrating moms

We had a full day yesterday and I will be sharing about it all, but we have one more spring concert to go and since there is a theme there, you will just have to sit on the edge of your seat for that story.

In the meantime, I have had this thought bouncing around in my head as last week’s preparations for Mother’s Day got me reminiscing. I have been praying if it was worth sharing, ironically it is about prayer, and when I flipped the desk calendar over just now the quote is:

You may not feel mighty, but you can pray.

And you’ll see situations change by the hand of Him who is almighty.
Dayspring “Fierce Love” perpetual desk calendar

My godmother was my Aunt Lizzie. She was godmother to a lot of us cousins and probably family friends and who knows who else because she was single when all of us were born and raised and she loved big and well.

She married a widower just before she retired from a long and successful career as a secretary at General Electric Company in Louisville. And yes, she was called a secretary. Not an administrative assistant. And she was proud of her title.

She could type faster than she could talk, which was basically at the speed of light. She took care of her parents until her dad died long before I was born and then her mom for all the years after that until she passed in my sophomore year of high school.

In her later years, before Arnold stole her heart and her mom passed, she would travel to Europe once a year with tour groups. I have all kinds of keepsakes from her trips and lots of her books with her beautiful handwriting inside the cover dating it and often how she came about owning it.

The pages are underlined and marked up, much like my own reading, but much more neatly than I leave the pages. She was artistic and I have some of her sketches tucked away somewhere in one of these many boxes. She was musically inclined and sang soprano so high glasses could shatter in her presence…or so it seemed.

Her full name was Laura Elizabeth and of course I was named for her. My middle name is Jean after my dad’s sister, albeit a shortened version of Eugenia, which I greatly appreciate as Laura Jean sounds better than Laura Eugenia. And since my dad’s side of the family has always used my full name when speaking to or about me, this has proved less cumbersome for all of us.

But what I have remembered so much this past week is when we brought my mom, dad and aunt to our home in the late summer of 2003.

Aunt Lizzie had moved in with them earlier that year and between her dementia and my father’s downward spiral into the beginning of the long end of Alzheimers, my mom had suffered a nervous and physical breakdown.

I had gone and rescued the trio and as much of their home as I could squeeze into the back of our minivan and the story of that trip is for another day. We brought them all to our house to begin the process of finding care facilities to meet each of the need levels.

The first night, my mom was already in the hospital courtesy of a 911 call to our front porch, my dad was pacing and venting and trying to figure out where his car was and I was helping my aunt get settled in Sarah’s room for the night. I was beyond overwhelmed, to say the least.

As I tucked her into bed, she began to pray for me and my family. Each of our names rolled off her tongue as she asked God to take care of us and protect us and bless us. Then she prayed for all the other nieces and nephews and their children.

It dawned on me that every night, our names had been lifted by my aunt in prayer for all those years. I wondered how many times the blessings, near misses, turnarounds of fortune were ushered in by her faithful prayers.

My mom, too, would pray for us. I realized as we got her back to health and got her settled and various things would be happening, she would check in with me and tell me she had her Bible on her lap and was praying for this or that.

When these two left us, I felt a pang of void realizing their prayers would no longer carry us.

I am so thankful for the many friends and adopted family we have been blessed with who continue to pray for our family.

I think of our own children and grandchildren and that someday, the prayers of their four grandparents and great grandma will no longer be lifted here on earth. And I have added to my prayers a request for God to raise up prayer warriors for them besides us.

But one thing about prayer, it carries on.

I think of the prayers of Jesus before He left this earth. He prayed for His disciples around Him but also for all of us who would believe because of them.

That’s us.

He prayed for us and His prayers continue.

I am so thankful to be living in the answers of prayers prayed for me and to see the fruit of them in the lives of those I love.

I don’t feel mighty when I pray, for sure. But I have seen God change things and I believe in the power of God to work in answer to our prayers <3

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