My mom and dad were childhood friends. And like most farm kids in rural Ohio during the 1920’s and 30’s, they never wandered too far from home, often marrying from within the neighborhood. Marvin and Carrie Mae attended the same one-room school house early on and later graduated together from Pleasantville High School. They worshipped at the same church and their parents attended Grange Hall meetings and shared gossip around Pleasantville Hardware’s pot bellied stove.
Shoot, my parents are related to one another not many generations back…after all, my great-grandparents’ only means of transportation was horse drawn. Back then, you simply didn’t get too far from home.
At barely five feet tall, Mom played Varsity basketball for Pleasantville High School in 38’ and 39’. “The shortest one on the floor, but completely in charge,” Dad often boasted. Once, around the time they were in the fourth grade during a makeshift softball game, Mom was catching and Dad was at bat. As Dad swung for the fence, Mom reached in just a bit too closely and the bat clipped her nose, laying it over to one side. Mom still winced years later as she recalled how the school teacher simply reset it with a crunch and unsympathetically offered “You may sit at your desk with your head back…it’ll be fine.”
Whenever I think of mom and dad as a couple, I recall an old photograph. It has become my forever image of them. There they are…arms around one another, openly smiling, obviously in love—Dad, tall and thin; Mom, short and shapely—leaning into one another as mere teenagers. It’s remarkable really, to see them like that. Their future impossible to know then but now fully known. That sunny day they had no idea how their life would play out. First the war—Dad shipped off into the Marine Corp while Mom became a bandanna-haired factory worker at Wright Patterson. Because of her tiny stature, she was commissioned to crawl deep into the nose of heavy bombers under construction. As a riveter, even as they constructed war’s machinery, she’d pray over each plane that it might be the one that winged Marvin safely home again. Following the war, they set up housekeeping in a tiny home on George Street.
Flashing forward ninety years, I watched as she lived out her final days resting uncommunicatively in a nursing home. I could still see the tiny scar and the slight crook on the bridge of her nose. The one Dad, gone now for thirty-five years, referred to as a love mark.
Mom’s last few years weren’t kind to her. She didn’t look the same. She looked tired, hardly recognizable—except for her distinctive nose. I can see it in that picture of her and Dad in 1938. I could see it then, and I can still see it in my mind today and I’m grateful for her scar, that slight crook in her nose that reminds me of a teenage Carrie Mae who selflessly spent the best days of her youth caring for four sons.
When we meet again, I won’t be surprised if she looks like she did in 1938—young, vibrant and attractive with a slight crook in the bridge of her nose. I hope, like me, you can reflect lovingly on your mother this Mother’s Day.
I’ve always been fascinated by the passage in Scripture in which Thomas notoriously doubted the possibility that the same Jesus he saw crucified and buried was now standing before him…that is until Jesus lovingly showed Thomas his scars; reminders to us all of the sacrifice He made on our behalf. Think of that…after this life we get new bodies, new abilities, but we keep our scars. I pray your scars remind you of His scars.
Just as we’ll recognize Jesus’ scars on that day, you can rest assured that He already knows you by your scars. The Bible says we’ll be known as we were known and we’ll all then fully realize that it’s by His wounds that we are healed.
“He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5
Read Ron’s column, Simple Faith, each Saturday on the Faith Page (page 3) of the Lancaster Eagle Gazette, or visit www.lancastereaglegazette.com.