In about 1920, when my dad was 16, he was walking or riding down a dirt road in the prairies of Kansas. As he approached the Miller farmstead, he saw a young girl riding a horse on the road and herding a small group of cattle. The young man’s arrival and the confusion of the animals scared the horse that the young girl was riding and the horse instinctively leaped over a tall hedge that grew in front of the house. Fourteen-year-old Alma never lost her seat on the horse. Young Eli said to himself, “I need to get to know a girl that can ride like that.” That’s how I recall the story.

A few years later, Eli and Alma were married, and soon began having children. Many, and with regularity. Eventually I was born number 14, out of 15 children.

My mother was in a culture and in a time in history that seems very odd and might seem almost wrong when compared to women, families, and society in 2022. She finished her education at Grade 8, and then joined her family full-time in the little world of their farm and church community. It was a world without any TV, radio, internet, phone, or even electricity and running water.

Many ideas about gender and roles were just assumed and expected in those days: Women had very different duties, roles, opportunities in comparison to men. Women were considered to have fulfilled their reason for being if they had found a husband, gave birth to children, and served their family well as a mother and grandmother. Any other way of being a woman was considered to have fallen short, or been allotted an unfortunate, unsatisfying life.

Mothers of families were considered normal women. In many homes these women were honoured and loved and appreciated by their husbands and by their sons. However, in too many cases these women were considered to be born into a class of people that were simply never going to have the freedoms and privileges of their brothers, their fathers, or their husbands. Their lot in life was to serve and to make others happy and successful. Husbands and sons had the right to take advantage of the place and status that God had apparently assigned to the women, even the mothers, in their world.

In my experience, Mother’s Day was a special day for showing appreciation for our mother and being verbal about our gratefulness for her love and selflessness. Because that’s who she was: loving and selfless.

I was very fortunate to have a mother who loved her husband and family with every cell in her body. She didn’t seem to feel trapped or robbed of fulfilling her life’s dream. She probably felt overwhelmed with managing and working out her role—managing the food, clothing, hygiene, and relationships of 15 kids and a husband. I remember a few times when I found her sitting by herself and crying. But that was rare. Mostly she sang and whistled as she worked so very hard and for very long hours each day.

Here’s the eternal effect, on me, of the impact and legacy that my mother lived and breathed and taught without fail: life has meaning; we live for a purpose with God as our God; we live by love for one another; being loved, and knowing we are loved enables us to love; we must have some fun, life is serious and life is an incredible amount of work, but we laugh and we make time to have fun; we sing, we make music; we read; we invite guests and we feed them lots of food; we enjoy and welcome our relatives; we live at peace with our world and with our neighbours.

So what’s a woman to do in our time, in our culture, in our world? How would someone like my mother have fit into the expectations and demands and roles and opportunities and stigmas and stereotypes that our culture describes for women. How would my mother respond to the expressions of pity and empathy and condescension she might feel from today’s self-determined woman?

I’ll start by saying that I’m not going to describe what that should look like for any woman. However, we can be inspired by the stories and lives of others, both women and men.

I believe that God didn’t intend that we use the Scriptures to create a box for anyone to fit into. I don’t believe that it’s God’s character or expression of love that we should define anyone by a list of restrictions. And I’m here to apologize and repent of being part of a system wherein we men used the Bible to describe the box into which women will be held, and by which a woman should be defined. That’s what happened a lot in the Christian tradition in which I grew up.

So the beginning point, in Christ, is that there is no restricted category defined by our birth and the features and circumstances of our birth.

As Paul says in Galations 3:23-29, you may have been born a Jew, a Gentile, to a slave family, to a free family, as indigenous or immigrant, as a female, as a male, but you are not defined by that birth status when you are baptized into Christ and are clothed in Christ.

In our world, we may have been born with an advantage or disadvantage because of how we are viewed by our culture. In Christ, we are not defined by our birth status, whether an advantage or disadvantage.

In Christ, we are not defined by our limitations or our privileges. And again, I am so sorry for how I have taken advantage of the status and opportunities I have as a male in the church, in the family. In the same way that I am sorry for taking advantage of my ethnicity and the power it has sometimes given me, I am sorry for taking advantage of the restrictions that have been used to define women.

No one will try to imitate my mother and wish for a way to do what she did–as she did it. However, her life can be an inspiration and a model in so many ways, and I want to repeat those lasting and life-altering messages that I carry with me to this day:

• Life has meaning: we live for a purpose with God as our God;
• We live by love for one another; being loved and knowing we are loved enables us to love;
• We must have some fun; life is serious and life is an incredible amount of work, but we laugh and we make time to have fun;
• We sing, we make music;
• We read;
• We invite guests and we feed them lots of food; we enjoy and welcome our relatives;
• We live at peace with our neighbours and with our world.

Happy Mother’s Day!

I added nine lifers to my list on this trip, my favourite being the Lucifer Hummingbird. All the photos are taken by me, and are not to be copied or reproduced without permission. Enjoy!