By JANET HART LEONARD
From the Hart
Could the prayers you hear your mother pray when you are a child echo for years to come?
“God is great, God is good.”
With those words, a meal was blessed. With those words, my life was blessed.
Those words were how my mother believed and how she lived her life.
Counting my blessings this week, the legacy of Faith that my mother left with me was at the top of my list.
I grew up hearing my mother pray. She prayed, not just at meals, but each night as she knelt beside my bed and helped me with my prayers. She would tiptoe back to her and Dad’s bedroom, next to mine, and I would hear her pray as she knelt beside her bed.
“Dear God, thank you for giving us Janet. Help us to love her well. Help me to show her who Jesus is and that He loves her. Help her to come to know Him as her personal Savior. Keep her safe from harm. Keep her healthy. Watch over her wherever she goes. Bless her life. Amen.”
As I grew older it wasn’t just my ears that heard those prayers … but my heart.
It wasn’t the sermons I heard on Sunday mornings, and Sunday nights, and Wednesday night prayer meetings, but the sermon my mother lived, daily, that showed me who Jesus could be in my life.
Mom loved and lived the scriptures. Love your neighbor as yourself. Be ye kind and forgiving. Love the Lord, your God with all your heart. Trust in the Lord and lean NOT unto your own understanding.
It’s more than obeying the Ten Commandments. It’s a way of living your life … and living it abundantly.
The first song she taught me to sing was “Jesus Loves Me.” I knew Jesus had to love me to give me the parents to whose home I had been delivered.
With fear and trepidation, Mom and Dad told me that I was adopted. It was right before I entered kindergarten. I was not bothered by it at all. I only knew that I was loved.
As a child, my mother and I attended a little Nazarene church, just two blocks from our home. I was about seven years old when the altar call was given. I had heard it many times before but this time I felt different, as I hear the words … Jesus is calling. My heart told me I needed Jesus in it. I really had no sins to confess, but I wanted to live for Jesus and let him come into my heart.
Softly and tenderly, Jesus was calling, and my mother walked with me to the altar. Her prayers had led me there. For this child she had prayed for God to bring to her to raise, and now, show her the way in which she should go.
Her prayers would be with me until the day she passed. They would echo, even after.
My mother’s Faith and her prayers are still so much a part of who I am today.
I was blessed and am still being blessed because of her legacy.
And yes, God is still great and God is still good!