Love | Money | Mother | Risk | Servanthood

THE SELF-GIVING MOTHER
A few years ago I read an account of the extreme sacrifice of a mother’s love in a newspaper in Southern California. About 6:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning James Lawson of Running Springs (in the San Bernardino mountains) left home to apply for a job. About an hour later his 36 year old wife Patsy left for her 5th grade teaching job down the mountain in Riverside — accompanied by her two children, Susan 5 and Gerald 2 — to be dropped off at the baby sitters. Unfortunately, they never got that far. Eight and one-half hours later the father found his wife and daughter dead in their wrecked car, upside down in a cold mountain stream. His two-year-old son was just barely alive in the 48 degree water. But in that death — the character of a mother was revealed in a most dramatic and heart-rending way. For as the father scrambled down the cliff to what he was…