My Mama’s Journals

I had the extreme fortune of being raised by a truly amazing woman. She was little more than a girl herself when I was born, and in many ways we grew up together. But my mom excelled in certain ways that I may never match. She was an artist. Her primary medium was cloth. She made most of our clothes until I became a brand-conscious middle schooler, and she could take a pile of random scraps and create adorable dolls or stuffed animals. My mom sang beautifully and sketched realistic renditions of her creative ideas. My sister and brother respectively inherited these traits, while I shared her enthusiasm for the written word.

One of my favorite things about my mama was how she loved. She cared and sacrificed for us kids, even into our adulthoods. But the One she really loved was Jesus. This woman was gaga crazy over her Jesus. It was practically impossible to talk to her without His name coming up, not even as an intentional thing, but simply because of the depth of their relationship, it naturally sprang out of her. If you talked to Florence, you could know that some Jesus was going to overflow out of her and get splashed all over you. And that was a good thing.

In her latter years, one of the things Mama was famous for was her emails. Of course, as an older person just becoming savvy to the ways of technology, she forwarded every single remotely meaningful thing that someone else forwarded to her. I think perhaps there’s some sort of geriatric rite of passage involved in this. What she was most known for, however, were the emails she wrote herself. Have mercy, that woman was deep! I would grin every time her name appeared in my Inbox. I knew great wisdom was coming my way, but that I would have little or no idea what it really meant. This tiny, sassy yet meek woman understood things about God that few people ever will. She could take the most mediocre-seeming event or visual image and mine it for rich, impossibly deep truths about the heart of the Father and His great love for us. Nuggets, she called them. The words made sense, but the concepts were always juuuuuuuuust beyond my grasp.

When my mom passed away, almost two years ago now, my siblings and I each kept a few of her things that were most meaningful to us. I got her Bible, the one I remember from my childhood days, full of her notes and underlinings and personal reflections. Held together by love and duct tape, it remains the roadmap of a 50-year journey with her Savior and Best Friend. Just opening it up and catching a whiff of that soothing old leather smell brings a flood of happy memories. Seeing her familiar handwriting on the page is a bittersweet reminder of what a gift it was to have her as my mother. Reading her words never ceases to amaze me. There was more, so much more, to this brilliant, unassuming woman I thought I knew so well.

The other thing I kept was her box of journals. I’ve stored them in a closet for the past couple years, not quite ready to break open the seal and investigate the treasure inside. I knew that her deepest thoughts and a great deal of wisdom were residing inside a simple cardboard box. I haven’t felt strong enough to face it. There are so many things I wish I could talk to her about, so many things that just don’t make sense right now that I could really use her advice on, so many situations in which I wish I had the comfort of knowing my Mama was praying with me and for me. Yeah. I really miss her, ya know? So today I dug that box out of the closet and opened it up – not because I was strong enough to see what was in there, but oddly enough, because I wasn’t.

My heart was beating a little faster than normal as I lifted the lid. And I laughed. On the top was a huge binder – one of those five-inch monsters – full of pages that she had typed, and of course they were organized by date. Once I got past that, I laughed again. Underneath were probably 20 different books – legal pads, writing journals, steno pads, loose sheets of paper held together by clothespins – all filled with her comforting script. One of the legal pads had notes from a sermon on one page, tax information for her embroidery business on the next, followed by her Christmas shopping list for that year. My two favorites were some personal reflections scribbled on the back of a voter registration form, and notes on a passage of scripture that filled the front and back of a bank deposit slip. One thing that my brother, sister, and I determined after sorting through her important papers after my mother’s passing is that there most definitely was an intricate organizational system in place – we just had no idea what it might be. The same is true of this box. It is a most delightful hodgepodge if ever there was one.

I am still not quite ready to dive in and read all of her words just yet. That day will come, but this is not it. My spirits were lifted simply by sifting through the contents of her box. Today that was more than enough.

~~~~~

This picture by Egyptian artist Kerolos Safwat, entitled “First Day in Heaven”, immediately made me think of my Mom. This is how I envision the moment when she finally met Jesus.

Photo credit goo.gl/images/JUmrQT