Mother’s Day is filled with sentimentality; yet mothers well deserve recognition and gratitude for their indispensable contributions to our lives.

Booker T. Washington captures my sentiment: “If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother.”

When I think of my mother, Edith Walker Carder, I am confronted with the paradoxes of her remarkable influence on me and those who knew her.

• She had a sixth-grade formal education but excelled in wisdom,
• She was small of stature but big of heart,
• She never held an office in church but faithfully served God.
• She never taught a Sunday school class but knew the Bible thoroughly,
• I never heard her pray aloud, but she prayed without ceasing,
• She had strong moral values but never condemned others,
• She lived with constant physical pain but never complained,
• She knew poverty firsthand but was generous toward others,
• She grew up in a racially segregated world but welcomed ALL people,
• She never occupied a leadership position but influenced for good all who knew her,
• She never accumulated wealth but was rich in the “fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peach, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

Mom died in 2013 at the age of 95 but lives on in God’s eternal presence and in the lives of those who were fortunate enough to know her.