What’s the most valuable thing you learnt from your Mum? Many of us pick up indispensable life skills thanks to the patient teaching of our mothers. The list is endless: what day to day objects are called, how to brush your teeth, how to tie a tie, or do up your shoes, or tell the time and a thousand other things we need every day.
For lots of us, our Mums play a crucial role in forming our basic values and teaching us the difference between right and wrong. That might start with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ or the need to share and let people have their turn, but it often continues well into adulthood.
But Paul mentions something else that some of us learn from our Mums, ‘the training and instruction of the Lord.’ (Ephesians 6:4) Mums are often the first people to teach us to follow Jesus and to model it in our lives. And if we honour them in this area, God’s promise that we will enjoy long life on the earth takes on a whole new dimension.
Ed