Learning from mum

It’s two years today since mum went home to be with Jesus.  Recently I attended a course where we were asked to talk about the messages that our parents had passed on to us through our upbringing.  This might have been things they said but also things thy did and the values they lived when we were young.  Again, we were expected to come up with both positive and negative things.

One thing I picked up from my mum and dad was the value of having a home that was both secure, it was our family home, we were safe but it was also an open house, mum and dad were committed to hospitality. This wasn’t just about the physical house but about our home, wherever we were.  For example, each year we would go on holiday to Filey Butlins for the Christian convention week there and we always had at least one other person with us.  In fact, I reckon there must have been at least 5 different people who came on holiday with us, possibly more. 

Then there were the different people who stayed with mum and dad as lodgers that they took in when they needed somewhere to stay although this happened before I was born.  They didn’t have space for long term lodgers with a full family home but we often had guests and visitors, especially people from overseas, a professor from Wuhan, a Government minister from Nepal

The stand out thing was that looking back, this extended family was diverse, different ethnic backgrounds, different life circumstances, from students to former Hells Angels, all were welcome.

This continued when mum and dad lived in China for ten years, whenever I visited, there were groups of people coming to their apartment to learn about Jesus. And like I said, it wasn’t just about the physical home but the sense that people were drawn to mum and mum to them wherever she went, the shopkeeper, or the waitress at the café, the security guard at their complex, the old ladies at church who spoke about as much English as mum spoke Chinese. 

In one of those strange coincidences, my mum died on her own mum’s birthday. I think in many ways, you can see how these were values that had been passed on from nanna to mum

This is something that we have sought to continue and hope to keep doing and encouraging others to.