Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!

 

Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! sounds more entrancing than a mere "hear ye, hear ye, hear ye," which used to be the alert.  At least it does to me.  An attention-getter, "Oyez" simply asks a person to pay attention to what is about to be shared. Here goes.  

A theorist may offer thoughts on life that teach. uplift, defer, or deter. "It's a free country!" has been a citizen's refrain for decades.  Certainly, "pie in the sky" responses may constitute acceptable behaviors and reactions.  Religious leaders often admonish us to "eat the meat and spit out the bones," intimating a smidgen of truth resides in just about everything spoken or written.

People of my mother's generation (a mere four generations "freed" from slavery), with lives firmly rooted in the apartheid of racial separation, heard oratory that caused them to smile sardonically.  The truth of their present and future sounded a trumpet: "Life ain't fair, never has been and never will be!"  Or, they went to church services and sang "And we'll understand it better by and by."  Looking to the author and finisher of their faith encouraged them to sing,

"When we all get to heaven,
What a day of rejoicing that will be
When we all see Jesus,
We'll sing and shout the victory!"

Not I! The scales of innocence that may have blinded me or caused myopia ended with just a glance at Mother's hands; they mirrored her life.  TMI,  or "Too Much Information" emerged for an impressionable kid to handle.  Langston Hughes penned the language of Mother's generation when he wrote, 

"I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I've known rivers"
Ancient, dusky rivers,

My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Mother's hands marked tributaries and sang ballads of too many years of washing---clothes, dishes, pots and pans, sheets, towels, floors,  blankets, and even faces.  They sang of the crevasses of sewing, canning, baking, and cooking; of soothing and tending broken bones and shattered hearts.  They spoke the prose of creeks that had never known Jergens lotion or even petroleum jelly but prayed nonetheless.  

Mother's hands knew when to rest; the Holy Bible informed,

"Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God.  In it you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates" (Exodus 23: 12).

A closer examination of Mother's generation reveals what it took her "college-graduated" daughter at least two decades to understand intuitively and embrace spiritually.  In a word, "Faith." Mother knew the Hebrews' 11 faith and lived it!  So often now I whisper, "I apologize, Mother.  Forgive me for the times I disdainfully dismissed your counsel with, "Mother, please! There's no devil! How can you even believe one exists?"

"Just live a little longer, Girl, and let me hear you say that ten years from now," came her soft reply.

 It's "true confession" time now:  "You were absolutely right Mother,! Not only about 'the accuser of the brethren,' but about every other pearl of wisdom and nugget of advice you freely gave."

Now decades past the "Spring of my life," mixed emotions rock me! I bemoan years of abject ignorance when I basked without question in beliefs that served only to imprison me more.  Ignorantly, I overlooked blessings and missed opportunities that had my name on them! Thank you, Mother, for introducing me to the Word.  Now, Scripture bursts past the dam of ignorance and the abyss of unbelief. 

Thank You, Father God, for gifting Velma Beatrice Taylor, aka Mother, to me.  "In every thing give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you" (1 Thessalonians 5: 18, KJV).