Remembering My Mother

[Note:  I wrote this in 2011, a year before my mother passed away.  Photo above is from 1965.]

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This Mother’s Day, I’d like to offer a short bio of and tribute to my mom.  Grace Constance (“Connie”) Sjolund was born a “PK”—pastor’s kid.  Her mother was an artist (painter) and home­maker, and her father pastored the First Swedish Baptist Church of Minneapolis (now Bethlehem Baptist Church) from 1928 to 1948.  My mom came to faith in Christ at a young age and more or less grew up in the church.  She met her future husband in the 1940s in the church’s “young people’s group” (Ken Nelson, a farm boy from Wisconsin who came to the City for business school).  Ken and Connie were married in 1951.

I arrived in 1958, the third of four Nelson kids.  The most abiding memory I have of Mom from my childhood and the teen years is that she was always “there.”  When I got sick at school, she was there to come get me.  When the bus dropped me off down the block, she was waiting at home.  She sent Dad off to work each day and made dinner for the family each evening (we ate at 5:45).  When a neighbor boy dropped a hammer from a tree house that landed on my head and I got a nice gash, she was there to clean me up.  When the church youth group showed up to play hockey on our back yard ice rink, she made hot chocolate.  Mom made our house a “home”—though not in a way of claiming center stage.  We all found comfort in her steady presence and support.

I think it’s fair to say that my mom is a care-giver, a care-taker.  She looks out for those around her, always seeking ways to be help­ful.  Her aim is to see to it that others’ needs are met so they can flourish.  Her weakened condition today, due to the current bout with cancer and chemo, seems to aggravate her most because, as a result, she can’t be very “useful.”

My mom is content with simple things and a non-flashy lifestyle.  She and my dad clip coupons and hunt for bargains, and yet there’s no sense at all that they resent this or feel entitled to more.  Frugality and hard work the air they breathed growing up, and they breathe it still.

We Swedes aren’t always the most outwardly expressive folks on the planet, but my mom never fails to have hugs for her kids and grand­kids and the whole clan.  She makes it clear that we’re special to her.

I’ve always known Mom loved the Lord.  All my life she and my dad have been active in church, but it didn’t stop there:  God’s Word and strong faith convictions came home with them.  Mom’s spiritual zeal would seep out now and then—like on special occasions when it just wasn’t enough to recite the standard family table prayer:  she would cut in after “amen” and pray on for some special need or give thanks for a great blessing.  When I was about twelve, Mom found me in my bedroom reading my Bible, and she was quick to say how happy and thankful she was that I was learning God’s Word.

God made my mother with a steady equilibrium about her—so much so that she didn’t flinch in 1991 when Cheryl and I and our three-year-old Elliot moved in with them for four months while I com­pleted my Ph.D. and searched for work.  I look back on this and realize how I took her hospitality for granted at the time.  Perhaps she was too tolerant and patient with our vagabond visitation.

When Mom was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer this past winter, the doctors told her it was “treatable but not curable.”  Of course, we’ve prayed for her healing—God is able to do that, no doubt.  But until he heals her (whether that’s in this life or the next), the new normal is weakness from chemo and managing nausea.  “No fun” is a serious understatement.  Still, when we talk, she doesn’t care to spend too much time relaying all the medical details or rehearsing her woes, so after a bit it’s on to our lives—the kids, our church, how we’re all doing.  No wallowing in today’s trials.

When I think of my mom, there are certain Scriptures that come to mind and just seem to “fit.”  Like…

• Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves (Philippians 2:3).
• Jesus said, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
• Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

So today I thank the Lord for my mother!  He has blessed me richly through her spiritual support and steady encouragement.