My Mom

Since I did share the story on my old blog about how God saved my mom when I was 4 or 5 (you can find it under the very first post I made in Nov 2009), I thought I’d just share a brief synopsis. My mom graduated from an all-girls Catholic high school. She would have been considered a strong Catholic – she went to mass regularly and sent her kids to local Catholic schools. Then one day someone gave her this comic book:

What the booklet is about isn't as important as what God did in my mom's life through it. He gave her a desire to read the Bible and opened her eyes to what it said. She began to understand that she was "religious" but she didn't know God, didn't have a relationship with Him. She began to realize that true Christianity wasn't about church traditions and trying to be a good person in order to please God but was about the love of God toward her in sending his son, Jesus Christ, to live the perfect life she couldn't live and to suffer and die for the myriads of sins she committed that she could never atone for, no matter how much penance she did. It was at this time that my mom became a born-again Christian and put her faith in Jesus alone for the forgiveness of her sins. She left the church she was a member of and began to seek out a church which taught and held to these truths she was learning from the Bible. It was a weighty thing to leave the church in the late 60s to early 70s, but my mom was transformed and changed forever.

When she died 8 years ago, my mom had spent over 35 years getting to know the Father who had rescued her, the Savior who had died for her. She knew without a doubt where she was going and so did I. In the end, the cancer in her lungs metastasized to her brain. She had lost the ability to speak coherently and remembered very little, including her own daughter. Within the last week of her life, I remember sitting with her and singing Amazing Grace when all of a sudden she started singing the words right along with me.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost but now found, was blind but now I see...

God's grace truly is amazing.

"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast." - Ephesians 2:8-9

"I do not set aside grace, for if righteousness could be obtained through the law, Christ died for nothing," - Galatians 2:21

"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." - John 3:3