Remembering Mom

“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”

Thomas Edison, the great American inventor said this about his mother:

“I did not have my mother long, but she cast over me an influence which has lasted all my life. If it had not been for her appreciation and her faith in me at a critical time in my experience, I should never likely have become an inventor. I was always a careless boy, and with a mother of different mental caliber, I should have turned out badly. But her firmness, her sweetness, her goodness, were potent powers to keep me in the right path. My mother was the making of me. The memory of her will always be a blessing to me.”

Sometimes we look at famous or great people and look for a single episode in their life that is the turning point for them. But if you look at the lives of truly great people more often than not you find not so much a significant turning point, as a consistent molding. True greatness starts with the molding of character by the most influential person in a life. For most people that person is their mother. Keeping children on the right path isn’t necessarily exciting, it usually doesn’t make the news, but what it does do is mold character.  And that is what Mother’s Day is all about, remembering a Mom who has shaped and molded our character.