A Mother's Legacy

Show Notes

Everyone is leaving a legacy to those who follow, for good or bad. And mothers are no exception. In this episode of the Barbara Rainey Podcast, Dennis, Barbara, and their daughter Ashley explore the powerful concept of the legacies moms pass on to their children and grandchildren.

What is The Barbara Rainey Podcast?

Barbara Rainey mentors women in their most important relationships. She loves encouraging women to believe God and experience Him in every area of their lives.

Announcer: As the old saying goes, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Barbara Rainey agrees.

Barbara: I think that moms who understand that they have a profound influence, a profound impact on their children, really are in fact ruling the world because those children, if they're invested in, will become stable, strong, and hopefully God-fearing adults, and that's what our world is in desperate need of.

Announcer: For Barbara’s daughter Ashley, becoming a mom for the first time was a revelation of sorts.

Ashley: Samuel is my first child, but I know that when he was born I began to grasp what was going to be required of me as a mom, and I began to see what my mom had given me and the impact she had had on my life up to that point. And so I guess that's when it became real to me that I do pass on a legacy to all my children, my daughters and my sons, in the kind of mom I'm going to be to them.

Announcer: We’ll take a closer look at the important legacy a mother can leave, today.

Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast, helping you be changed by Jesus which will, in turn, transform your home. Thanks for listening!

Today we’re reaching back in the archives to a day when Ashley Escue (pron.: ESS-cue) joined her mom and dad, Dennis and Barbara Rainey, in the studio to talk about some important concepts related to being a mother.

Barbara is the mother of six. Ashley,her oldest, has seven boys. But at the time of this conversation, she was a relatively young mom.

Here’s how Dennis kicked it off.

Dennis: I was thinking about how to introduce Barbara and Ashley. I thought immediately of Proverbs 31, a couple of passages in there. Verse 10, "An excellent wife who can find for her worth is far above jewels, the heart of her husband trusts in her and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life." Verse 28 says, "Her children rise up and bless her, her husband also, and he praises her saying many daughters have done nobly, but you excel them all, charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised."

And I'll tell you, I'm married to a woman who fears God, and who is a woman that I frequently praise, and I am watching a woman emerge in Ashley's life as she becomes a great wife and mother to our grandson, Samuel. And I wanted our listeners to know about a book that Barbara and Ashley have co-authored called A Mother's Legacy: Wisdom from Mothers to Daughters. And I thought right out of the bat I would throw them a curve and ask them both, Barbara, as you think about the term 'legacy' out of our more than 28 years together and raising a family of six, what one moment best captures the concept of legacy for you as a mother? Ashley, you can be thinking about this from being a daughter who grew up in this, what one moment with your mom captures the concept of legacy and the power of a mom in a daughter's life.

Ashley: Well, I think to me the defining moment as a mother's legacy was when my son was born, and mom came and spent a week with me just helping me with my newborn son, and I think I began to realize my importance as a mother and a significance of what she had given to me all through my life, and I was about to start that same process with my child. And Samuel's my first child, so I'm just beginning to understand it, but I know that when he was born I fully ... I began to fully grasp what was expected of me and what was going to be required of me as a mom, and I began to see what my mom had given me and the impact she had had on my life, the 25 years of my life up to that point. And so, I guess that's when it became real to me that I do pass on a legacy to all my children, my daughters and my sons, in the kind of mom that I'm going to be to them.

Dennis: Okay, Barbara, what one memory of an event really captures the concept of legacy?

Barbara: Well, this is going to sound like I'm cheating, but truly I'm going to piggy-back off of what Ashley said, because it was interesting, this morning I was having a conversation with about three other moms and we were talking about raising our children and how we have those difficult moments with our kids when we wonder if it's going to ever work, are they going to ever understand what we're trying to communicate, are they going to ever embrace and own what we want them to hear and to learn. And as we were talking, there were three of us who had married children, and we all said together that's when you begin to feel like you've been successful. That's when you begin to feel some payback and experience some payback.

So I guess I would have to say that if I had to keep one memory, it's of Ashley becoming a mother, because that was a thrill beyond her getting married. I mean, her marriage was wonderful. We had a ... we had a fabulous time as a family. But there was something about her having a child and being able to be there and experience that. It was much more profound than the marriage because it was a picture of that next generation and knowing that through her life I was going to influence this baby boy's life.

Dennis: I'm thinking about why it's so easy as a mom to get discouraged. That memory she's talking about, that truly brought it home to her that her life had had an impact and was truly coming full circle, took 25 years of investments, and sharing heartache, and bandaging knees, and wiping noses, and raising through the perilous teenage years before you get to that, that moment where you go "Ah-ha, it's finally beginning to occur." So, you know, this will be a great encouragement to moms who are in that runny nose phase, maybe dealing with the terrible twos, just to say it really is going to pay off.

Announcer: When Barbara and Ashley wrote the book A Mother's Legacy, they collected insights from women they know about the influence their mothers had had on them, or their own experience as moms relating to their children.

Ashley: We feel like so many women come from so many different backgrounds and different situations that in order for us to write this book we couldn't just write from our own experiences because that's not broad enough. And so we interviewed lots of different women and got their stories, because we have women whose mothers were alcoholics, we have women whose mothers were missing half the time. We have all types of different women that have contributed to this book to make it what it is.

Announcer: They talked to Dottie McDowell, to Jeannie Hendricks, to Alissa Morgan from MOPS, Vonette Bright, Brenda Hunter, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, and others. We asked Barbara, as she and Ashley talked to these different women, if their understanding of motherhood was confirmed or broadened.

Barbara: Both. Clearly. Because it was interesting, as we got their stories, and as we would read their own experience, I remember, for instance, with Dottie McDowell's I remember reading it and thinking, "Gosh, I wish I had known that. That would have been such an encouragement to me as a mom if I had heard her story and had that perspective that I could sort of refer back to and rely on while I was in the process of raising my kids." It's a wonderful perspective that her mother had toward Dottie and her siblings as they were growing up.

Her story basically is that her mother had grown up without a mother. Her mother died when she was very young, and for some reason, she had made this ... had come to this personal conclusion that she was going to enjoy her own children because she didn't have that experience. And so her whole goal in raising Dottie and Dottie's brother and sister, was that she was going to enjoy these children and delight in them. And she didn't not discipline them. She didn't ignore discipline and training, but she made sure that in the process of training and giving discipline for things that were misbehaviors, that she enjoyed, and encouraged, and delighted. And delighted is the word that Dottie uses. She delighted in her children. And she gives three or four examples in the story she wrote for her chapter of specific situations where her mother practiced delighting in her as a little girl. And it's so motivating and so inspirational, and I wish I'd had that example to sort of guide me as I was going through those difficult times when kids would make messes and do those kinds of things that are sometimes just childish and you don't know what to do with them.

Dennis: Yeah, you know, 2 Corinthians talks about because we've received a ministry, we don't lose heart. Being a mother is a great ministry to receive, and yet in the drudgery of the moment, it's so easy to lose perspective and to lose that delight that you're talking about.

Announcer: Maybe you’re a mom who’s in the thick of it. You can probably think of times you haven’t delighted in your children. And honestly, often the kids haven’t been very delightful! Barbara says it’s important to maintain the right perspective as a mom.

Barbara: I just think that it would help at some moments that the Lord would remind you and say "Remember the story of Dottie and how she grew up." I just think that it will be helpful. I think of Ashley and her having heard all of these stories, and other young moms like her, that they can have the reservoir to draw from. And it may not help in every situation, but because she has read this story, I know Ashley is going to remember that, and I know there will be times when she will apply it with her children. She won't do it every time, but there will be times when she will because she's heard that story.

Ashley: Yeah, Dottie gives three different illustrations of how her mother delighted in her, but one really sticks out to me. She was talking about how one day she was down in her basement and she loved Peter Pan and she was pretending to be the pixie fairy and so she had gotten a whole box of the Ivory Snow detergent and sprinkled it all over the basement, you know, as she was sprinkling pixie dust everywhere. And her mother came down and just laughed and said, "Why don't you tell me the story of Peter Pan." And I can just imagine, as a mom, imagine the mother's horror as she walks down seeing all this Ivory Snow flakes all over the floor thinking "I'm going to have to clean up this mess," and this is probably not on her agenda for the day.

And I just thought, you know what, though? That's a great perspective, because Dottie was just using her imagination and she was just playing. I mean, she wasn't thinking, "Oh, this is going to be a mess for my mom to clean up." So, it was clearly just childishness and not misbehavior and not defiance of her mother, and that really sticks out of my mind of just really saying, you know, that's funny and why don't you tell me your story again, and then they cleaned it up together. But she didn't come down and say "Why did you do this?" and just get on her case immediately. She just enjoyed Dottie for who she was as a child.

Barbara: And the response many times is for moms is to go "Look what you've done. Look what kind of mess you've made that I've got to clean up." It's to become self-focused and to look at what it's going to cost me rather than enjoying the creativity, the spontaneity, the ingenuity of your child. And it's all about having the right kind of perspective. And granted, we're not going to always have it, but just hearing that story, that's the one that I remember hearing that I thought, "Gosh, I wish I had known that when my kids were little." I think it would have helped me to keep the right perspective at certain times.

Dennis: And that's a part of what makes this book not only unique but also powerful because you have stories where a mother's impact is encapsulated in a chapter. History is really good for us to visit and go back and feel the values that have been passed on and passed down to generations in someone else's life.

Ashley: I think that's so important today, because I feel like we have a shortage of mentors. I know as a new mom I was wondering who could mentor me, and there just wasn't anybody to volunteer for that. And so as we began to collect these stories, it was really encouraging to me, and fun for me to really kind of capture the vision of what I wanted to teach my children.

Dennis: Barbara, you shared about the impact of your mom in your life and the legacy she passed on to you. What would you say is the essence of what Jeanne Petersen did for you as a woman, wife and mother?

Barbara: Well, the word that sticks out to me right now is the word stability. My mother was not easily ruffled. She was not easily upset or ... she was just a real steady influence in my life. And that's the word that I think of when I think of the impact that she had on my life. I don't know that it was something that she did on purpose. I don't know that she said "This is going to be my goal as a mom is to provide a steady influence." I don't think it was. I think it was a combination of her personality and the way she handled life.

But as I thought back over her life, there were lots of things that could have caused her to be upset. There were lots of things that she could have been angry about, could have taken out on us as kids, and she didn't choose to do that. She chose instead to provide a real calm, safe, secure environment for us, and that's the legacy that I received from her, is just a real confident stability about life.

Dennis: Yeah. One of those things that could have been a destabilizing factor in her life was her own mother's divorce when your mom was an adult.

Barbara: Yeah, when my mother was newly married, her own parents decided to get a divorce. And that can cause ... even though we tend to think it's more harmful on young children, it's just as impacting on an older child too, and as an adult, my mother had to deal with that. She could have become bitter. She could have been angry and taken that out on me and my brother when he was born, and my dad, but she didn't. She accepted that, and she had with her quiet serenity accepted the status in life that God had given her, and she went on and raised us with great peace and security in our home. And it didn't have to be that way.

Dennis: That's one of the things in this book that I really like is, it's not some kind of warm, fuzzy book about ideal homes and from these ideal homes the people that emerged from them. No, in certain circumstances, it's about some pretty ugly homes, some situations that occurred where you would wonder how a daughter would emerge with any kind of positive feeling about her mother. And yet, that's where a lot of our listeners live. They're wondering "How do I deal with my mom who is a controller, a manipulator, an alcoholic." And it helps give a Biblical response and a God-centered look at circumstances that are less than ideal.

Announcer: In 1865, William Wallace wrote a poem in praise of motherhood. And while most of his poem has been forgotten, the refrain at the end of each stanza lives on. It says,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Here’s Barbara.

Barbara: Yeah, I really think there's a lot of truth in that. I think that moms who understand that they have a profound influence, a profound impact on their children, really are in fact ruling the world because those children, if they're invested in, will become stable, strong, and hopefully God-fearing adults who will then take important positions around the world, whether it's a teacher or whether it's some kind of political or business field, it doesn't really matter, but moms can produce children who are stable and responsible human beings and that's what our world is in desperate need of.

Announcer: New mom Ashley said that instead of feeling like she was ruling the world, her new baby made her feel like she was being ruled… by HIM!

Ashley: I'm like "What time can I leave tonight when he goes to bed. And I have to be here because it's his lunch time." And I said, "You know, this little baby pretty much dictates my life, even though he doesn't know it right now."

I am reminded of a quote that my dad said actually to my mom that she wrote in this book that I just think is so wonderfully stated. He said, "Motherhood is the journey that begins but never ends." And I just think that is so true. I mean, I will never stop being my son's mother. And I just think, even though I'm a mom now, and my mom is a grandmother, she is still my mother, and there is no end. You don't cash in those bonds, like you say, at the end of three years. There is no end to motherhood.

Barbara: Yeah, and you know, I was thinking about that just today because I kept the baby this morning for a couple of hours and Ashley picked him up and went on to something that she had to do. And as she was driving away, I was thinking about how busy our day has been today and yesterday. And I thought she's going to get in the car tonight at 7:00 when he goes to sleep and she's going to drive home on the freeway, and there's going to be a lot of traffic, and I started worrying about her driving home on the freeway for two hours and thinking, Gosh, what if there's a wreck, and, you know, what would I do, and your mind just starts going down those trails. And all of a sudden I had to kind of stop and go "Now wait a minute. I don't need to go there. I need to just pray and give it to the Lord and trust him with it." But that's an illustration of how we as moms are still, even though Ashley is married and living on her own, and she's a mother, I am still thinking of her as a mother, and I'm projecting what, you know, those things that go on, and I just ... I can't give that up yet.

Dennis: I really believe the hand that rocks the cradle does shape the conscience, the relational capacity of the next generation. The deposits of love that are made into a baby, a toddler, a young boy, a young girl, a teenager, and in an adult ... there's nothing like your mother's love.

Announcer: Dennis reflected on a time he went to visit his own mother. She was 87 years old at the time.

Dennis: And hugging my mom ... there's nothing like that. I mean, she's lost a lot of weight and yet she's ... she's with me. She's still here. And she still loves me. And we kid each other. And we love each other. And in a tender moment you can see that mother's love in the form of a tear. And she cares. She'll never stop worrying about me. She's called me her worry wart. I caused great deals of worry in her life.

But this is ... this is the great mantle, the high and holy calling and privilege of being a mother. And a man can never know that. Now, a man has got his privileges, and God's got his calling for him, but there's something profoundly high and holy and such a privilege in being a mom. And I just know that I look into it from a very close proximity with Barbara and with Ashley and with our other children, and the more I watch it occurring, the more I appreciate it.

Announcer: With Mother’s Day just around the corner, it’s healthy for you to think carefully about whatever positive aspects there are of the legacy your own mother left for you and generations to come. And if you’re a mom yourself, think about the legacy you’re leaving to your own children.

We asked Barbara if Ashley was a hard child to raise.

Barbara: No, actually she wasn't. In fact, the other day Dennis and I had a conversation and I said, "You know, I think Ashley was probably the easiest one of the bunch." Because, you remember we had that conversation and I said I think all of our kids have been difficult kids, but Ashley was probably the easiest. Now there you go. How about that for a compliment?

Ashley: That makes me feel so good. Thank you.

Barbara: But she really was. She ...

Dennis: We were evaluating whether we had any strong-willed children.

Barbara: We decided they all were.

Dennis: They all were.

Barbara: Still all are.

Dennis: Yeah, present tense.

Barbara: Well, one of the memories that I wrote about in the book, that it's an endearing memory but it's also one of those memories when I remember questioning myself and wondering if I had done this right. But as a college student, I made several sort of resolutions to myself that someday when I'm a mother, I will ... whatever. And I had lots of them. There were some little picky ones like "I'm never going to take my kids to the grocery store with dirty faces and runny noses." Those kinds of things.

Dennis: And then we had two children.

Barbara: Yeah, then we had two ...

Dennis: And those went out the window.

Barbara: Uh-huh. Yeah, those minor ones kind of disappear in a big hurry. But I made some other resolutions to myself that when I'm a mother I will ... and one of them was is I really wanted to impart spiritual truth to my children in a different way than I had received it, because the generation that I grew up in, that Dennis grew up in, it was more of a private generation about our faith. We didn't talk about it a lot. It wasn't brought up in casual conversation in the '50s and '60s when I grew up and was a kid. So we began, when they were very young we began talking to them about spiritual things. And, of course, we read Bible story books. But we also began talking to them about owning their faith.

I remember one night when Ashley was five years old, we had already put our two boys to bed because they were younger and they went to bed earlier, and because she was the oldest, she was last to be tucked in. And as I went into the room, she started talking to me. And kids do this all the time because they know that now I've got mom's undivided attention ...

But as the conversation continued, she started talking about wanting to invite Jesus into her heart. And I thought, "Oh, this is the moment I've waited for all these years as a mom, and I need to seize the opportunity." So, we began to talk, and she seemed genuinely interested, so I began to talk to her about what that meant, how you invite Jesus into your heart, and walked her through the process. And I said, "Do you want to do that tonight?" And she said, "Yeah, I want to do that. I want to invite Jesus into my heart." And I said, "Okay. Well, then I'm going to pray, and I want you to pray after me." So, I walked through the prayer, and she prayed after me. And she said, "Amen."

And I kissed her and hugged her and told her how pleased I was and how excited I was that she had decided that she wanted to become a Christian. And I stood up and walked to the door and turned out the light. And as I was closing the door and walking out of her room, she said, "Mom, one other thing." She said, "You know what? This is really funny, but when I prayed, I saw pink elephants."

And I thought, "Oh my gosh, she saw pink elephants." Okay, then that means she didn't mean it. And she just conned me into staying up for 45 minutes. And oh gosh, it was one of those moments where I thought "what happened?"

Dennis: Do you remember that ... that incident, Ashley. I do. I remember the pink elephants. [Laughter.]

Barbara: And I thought, okay, it wasn't a sincere decision, we're going to have to go through this all over again some other time.

Ashley: I think I had either seen a cartoon recently or something, and I don't know ... I was closing my eyes really tight because I was really trying hard to concentrate, and you know how your eyes get a little blurry or blotchy or something.

Barbara: And you see spots and stuff.

Ashley: You see spots. And I think in my childlike mind, I just was making shapes out of them, and I think that's what it was. But I remember when we finished praying and I remember telling my dad that I had accepted the Lord.

Barbara: That's right ...

Ashley: And I remember thinking the next day, waking up thinking "The Lord is in my heart today." And I remember, I mean, I remember the decision being real in my heart, and I really felt serious about it, but I think as a child you just ... you make a decision or you do something, and then you move right on to the next thing and you're not connecting those things. So when mom wrote that story and I read it in the book, and I thought, "Oh gosh, that makes me look like a dud, you know, or whatever," but I just think that, even again it's a picture of children and how simplistic we are in our minds, just in thinking, or in just the way we communicate things, because I really feel like that decision was true and real, and it's been lasting. So, I think that they've seen fruit since then, and I think it was a decision for the Lord at that point.

Dennis: And therein lies a part of the problem in being a mom. You don't always see the fruit of decisions like this for years to come. But you've got to keep sowing. You've got to keep implanting the Scriptures in children's lives because what you're building is you're building a moral base, a conscience. You're creating an awareness of who God is in children's lives, and that's why being a mom is so important, and really why perseverance is such an integral part of being a mother, especially in today's culture. It's such an instant culture. You know, we've got things that we can cook in 60 seconds, and we don't have to wait on anything anymore except growing children into adults.

Announcer: As Barbara and Ashley gathered stories from moms, one that pastor’s wife Susan Yates shared stood out to Ashley.

Ashley: She tells a story about how she and her mom went to the store and she was wandering around while her mom made her purchases or whatever. And she just saw some rubber bands, and she talks about how brightly colored they were and how there were so many packs of rubber bands, and surely the store didn't need all those rubber bands, you know, and how she took one pack and put it in her pocket.

And they walked out to the car and her mom said, "You know, is everything okay, Susan." And she's like "Oh yeah, it's fine." You know, whatever. And finally she said, "You need to show me what you have in your pocket." And so she pulled it out, and her mom said, "You know, that's stealing, and you need to go back in and return that, and we're going to go to the manager and you have to tell them what you've done." And Susan talks about now as a grown woman, now that she's a mom, the feelings that her mom must have felt, of embarrassment that her child had done that, maybe Susan's mom had other places to be but she took the time to go back in and take care of the issue then. She took that moment to really teach her daughter about right from wrong and taking responsibility for that action.

And I just thought, you know, as a child, you don't think about what it means to the parents to have to take that time to teach you what's right, but it gave me good perspective on what the mom felt and how important it is and the lasting impact it made on Susan's life.

Dennis: Isn't it good to hear a story like that and hear a mom affirmed for teaching right and wrong?

And yet in Susan Yates' life, as a little girl growing up, what more important value could be taught to a little girl who is going to make tons and tons of choices over her lifetime that were choices of right and wrong, life and death. That's why being a mom is so important.

Barbara: You know, doing this book was really in a way like going on a treasure hunt, because every one of these stories we discovered something new that was really fun. But one of the ones that I want to share is Vonette Bright's story.

Announcer: Vonette has been with the Lord for a few years now, but she and her husband, Bill Bright, founded the organization now known as Cru, ministering to millions worldwide.

Barbara: And she writes about how when she was a teenager, not a little girl but when she was a teenager in junior high, she and some of her friends decided to create this club, and the club they called "the kissing club." And the goal of the club was to get kisses from the boys in their class. And she writes about how her mom was not at home when they came to her house that afternoon to have the first meeting of the kissing club in Vonette's back yard, and how shortly after the meeting started and they had kind of picked who they were going to give their first kiss to and all this, all of a sudden her mom shows up and she goes "What in the world is going on in the backyard?" And she says it's kind of like one of those ... those systems that moms have of finding out what's going on, and you wonder "How in the world did she figure that out?" But she figured it out and she showed up and dismissed the club. And Vonette writes that that was the first and last meeting of the kissing club. [Laughter.] And she said "My mother realized that she had some teaching to do in my life about what was right and wrong in relationships with boys." And she said, "From then on, my mother took the opportunity at every occasion that she could to instruct me on how to relate to the opposite sex." And she said, "We had many, many talks about what's right behavior and what's not, and how close to get and how to keep your distance, and how to be friends with them but not get involved physically." And she said, "My mother taught me that that was not appropriate behavior." And she said that ... and the line she used in the story is "Sometimes love says no." And it was a great encouragement to me even though we've already been through a lot of that with our kids, to go "Yeah, we're doing the right thing by telling them to say no" even though I know it's the right thing. Sometimes your emotions go "Gosh, are we just being too hard on the kids?" But when you read a story like that, you say, "No, we're not being too hard. This is the right thing to do."

Dennis: Well, and the reason they're losing heart is because so much of the Christian community has dropped its standards, and there's not a lot of reinforcement to give moms the courage to step into their lives. And that's one of the reasons why stories like this are so important to tell. Not everybody, however, in this book that you wrote shared stories that came out of this perfect circumstance.

Barbara: That's right. And that to me is also a very encouraging part of the book, because there are several moms who have written in this who did not have strong mothers, or did not have Christian mothers. One of the ones that is my favorites for several reasons is the Karen Loritts story. And part of the reason I love Karen's story is because I love Karen.

Announcer: Crawford and Karen Loritts have served on the FamilyLife Weekend to Remember speaker team. Crawford was the senior pastor of a large church in suburban Atlanta for many years. He also is the host of the daily radio program called "Legacy Moment."

Barbara: And Karen tells her story in our book about growing up with a single mom. Karen's mother was a single, unwed, teenage mother, and Karen and her brother grew up in the projects of Philadelphia. And she writes about all of the things that we imagine and we've seen pictures of about some of these high-rise project government housing buildings, about the trash, about the broken bottles. And she talks about people being drunk in the hallways and how her mother wouldn't let her and her brother out to play very often because she knew it wasn't safe. And her goal was to get a good enough paying job that she could move out with her daughter and her son to a safer place. But that's the environment that she grew up in. And yet, out of that environment, even though she grew up in what we would say is a horrible situation for a child to have to grow up in ... none of us want children to grow up in those kinds of circumstances, and yet Karen says it was because of those circumstances, and because of the situation that my mother was in, that I was ready to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And I love that statement, because we tend to look at our circumstances and blame our parents, or blame whoever because we say we didn't ... it's not fair that I had that kind of background, rather than saying, "God is sovereign and he allowed me to grow up in that situation because he has a plan for my life." And she writes about going to the church nearby and dragging her brother with her. She said every time the doors were open I was there with my little brother, because they had words of hope and words of life. And she said, "I was desperate to hear them."

Dennis: Karen's story illustrates Romans 8:28, "All things work together for good to those who love God, and to those who are called according to his purpose." And that Scripture is a promise that we don't have to do it perfectly, we just have to hang in there and not quit, and attempt to be God's woman, God's mom, in a tough circumstance, and God will even use the circumstances that are beyond your control to impact your child's life in ways that you can't even begin to fathom.

Barbara: And to me, that was the hardest part of being a mother is maintaining my perspective and trusting the Lord in all of those nasty little situations that you run into with kids. So that's the real perspective that we need to have, but it's the most difficult thing to do.

Dennis: Ashley, we asked you for the one snapshot of your mom that best encapsulated her legacy, and you picked one as an adult, actually sharing the week after our grandson Samuel's birth, when you and your mom got together and she began to mentor you and train you in being a new mom. Is there a moment when you were a little girl, a time when you were beginning to shape your own value system of what it meant to be a woman, a wife, a mom, where you looked at your mom and the light went on and you said, "This really is a picture of what I want to be when I grow up."

Ashley: Well, I think that time just occurred over the years of growing up. But what comes to mind, I guess an answer of that question would be my senior trip that I took after I went to college. And it was the time when mom and I just spent it together for a week, and I write about it in the book, about just kind of looking back, I guess, and really saying, "What have you learned? What have I taught you? What are you going to take from what you've learned growing up and apply it to your life now? Because I think that even though I might try to pick one moment or a few memories, it wasn't made up of those one or two times, it's made up of a lifetime of learning, and a lifetime of watching my mother. And then, when I'm about to go out and be a woman on my own, taking all of those things together and making it to be who I am going to be, and then applying that to my new status as a wife for a few years, and now again as a mother. So, I guess there's not one particular instance that stands out. I guess it would just be the day in and day out consistency of mom being there to teach me those lessons every day.

Announcer: Ashley points out one way she hopes her mothering will be different because of her interaction with other moms in researching and writing the book A Mother’s Legacy.

Ashley: Well, I think my tendency is going to be to have fun with my kids, you know, have a good time, enjoy things. Okay, the dishes can wait. But I think what I really want to do that I saw in the book was just be consistent with my children in the truth of the Lord. And I think that's something my mom modeled to me, and that's something that some of these Christian women whose moms were believers wrote about. And I really want to be consistent with my children and model that truth for them day in and day out. And I think that's going to be my challenge as a mom, more so than enjoying the snow flakes on the basement floor like we talked about. I think that will be easier for me than providing that consistency every day that some of these women illustrate.

Announcer: You may want to glean wisdom from the stories of other women as they reflect on things their mothers did well (or not so well), and as they relate lessons they’ve learned as moms themselves. The book by Barbara Rainey and Ashley Escue is titled A Mother’s Legacy. We have a limited number of copies left. We’d love to send you one for a donation of $50 or more. The best way to contact us is through our website, EverThineHome.com. Be sure and request Barbara and Ashley’s book A Mother’s Legacy when you make your donation. It makes a wonderful Mother’s Day gift for a special mom in your life. Once again, the web address is EverThineHome.com.

Thanks for listening today. May you find joy and meaning in the various roles you play and hats you wear! And, if you’re a mom, I want to say, “Happy Mother’s Day” to you, even if it’s not quite Mother’s Day yet.

I’m Samantha, inviting you back for another edition of the Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home.