Shelburne: Need new way to say I'm thankful for mother

I might as well confess: I like writing Mother’s Day columns and crafting Mother’s Day sermons almost as much as I like eating asparagus, broccoli, or cauliflower.

link Curtis Shelburne

I know those veggies are supposed to be good for you; I just have a hard time imagining the poor starving soul who first took a look at a cauliflower plant and said, “Hey, Billy Bob, you know what? I think you could eat that stuff.”

Yeah, you could probably eat milkweeds, dandelions, and crabgrass, too, but why would you really want to? If you toasted them long enough, you could probably make croutons out of grass burrs, but what’s the point?

Careful now. On the advice of my attorney, I should mention that nothing in this column should be taken to in any way imply, suggest, or indicate any smidgen of doubt or even any mental reservation regarding the advisability of a day set apart to honor those dear ladies hereinafter in this document referred to as mothers.

No kidding. Really.

I’m all for mothers and motherhood. And I think that setting a day aside to honor them in a special way is, yea, verily, a good idea. I even spent time one time co-authoring a gift book honoring mothers (and thereby learning that greeting card publishers pretty much have that base covered).

But though there are some heartwarming blessings that come to pastors who serve in one church for a long time (Easter Sunday — I can hardly believe this — marked my 30th year here), a preacher’s gotta be more creative than I am to come up with 30 new ways to say, “God loves moms, and I agree with him!”

But he does, and I do. I’d just like to be able to find a new and better way to say it.

What I need is a new way to say that I could spend my whole life praising God for his gift to me of a loving mother, and it wouldn’t be long enough to adequately thank him for such a blessing.

What I need is a new way to say that the poorest person on earth is still rich if he, like me, has never had to go to bed a single night wondering if his mother loves him.

What I need is a new way to say that I thank God with every breath of every day that my mother loved me enough to love God and my father even more than she loved me — and that’s saying a lot.

What I need is a new way to say that even though Mom’s been gone for almost 25 years, her laugh, her touch, and her love are as real to me as my next heartbeat.

What I need is a new way to say that my life, my children’s lives, my grandchildren’s lives, and the lives of generations yet unborn will be blessed because my mother was the right kind of lady, the right kind of mom.

I still need a sermon idea. But I thank God for giving me what I needed more — a great mom.

Curtis Shelburne is pastor of 16th & Ave. D. Church of Christ in Muleshoe. Contact him at:

[email protected]