The Woman Who Was My Spiritual Mentor

***Mother and Child in the Garden***, Virginie Demont-Breton (1859-1935)

Her name was Patricia Ann and she entered this world in unfortunate circumstances. Born in 1936 in the city of Toronto––she was the "illegitimate" child of a live-in maid for a wealthy family. Maids could sometimes be taken advantage of, and the well-to-do father of the baby arranged for the maid to be given a generous severance payment with the understanding that his name would be kept secret for the remainder of her life.

The prospects of a young, single mother and her illegitimate child in 1936 were dismal but a young man who had grown up with her in the rural Manitoba community she had eagerly left for the "big city," learned of the news and asked her to marry him. She accepted, they moved back to that community, and little Patricia, cut off from her biological father, grew up with her two half-sisters who came along soon after. At age thirteen her grandmother told her that the man she thought was her father, was not. No name was mentioned, and she left feeling disturbed and confused but said nothing more.

She had good parents who cared and provided for her, but religion consisted of attending the occasional Mass, little of which young Patricia understood. Consequently, she knew almost nothing about God until, as a young teenage girl, she attended a week-long Christian camp at the invitation of two of her closest school friends, Ruth and Evelyn. That week she learned how she could have a personal relationship with God by putting her faith in Jesus Christ for forgiveness of her own sin to receive the gift of eternal life.

She came home at the end of the week a totally changed person for the remainder of her life. Everything seemed clearer now, there was a higher purpose for living, and this life was no longer all there was––rather, it was only the beginning of forever.

Throughout her school years, Patricia showed unusual intelligence and maturity. By the time she was 15 years old, she was writing at an advanced university level and moved forward one grade level. At 16 she applied to a business school, was accepted, and notified on the basis of her academic performance that completion of her high school was not necessary.

But there was a young man in her life, the brother of her close friend Evelyn, five years her senior and attending university. His name was Barry and, at 17, Patricia married him.

I was born to Patricia and Barry ten months later.

At that time Mom was still a relatively new Christian, but from my earliest memories, she would spend an hour a day studying her Bible and praying. By the time she was 25, she had five children in tow, including me and four younger sisters. She put her business dreams on hold, temporarily, until her children were grown and on their own, pitching full-in to be a farmer's wife, working from morning to night in her home and garden, caring for the daily needs of her five children.

Throughout all the years of raising us, she continued to spend an hour a day alone with God, studying and writing in her Bible and praying earnestly for us. Sometimes we would hear her through her bedroom door, pouring out her heart to God, praying for her friends and neighours who did not know God or who were going through difficult times.

For the first six years of my life, we lived in a small house with no running water, no bathroom, and no central heating, but I will always fondly remember it as my first home. One night, as a small boy, I stepped out the kitchen door for a few minutes and was riveted by the enormity of the night sky. Our yard, surrounded by Aspens, was a hundred miles from the nearest city and about eight miles from the nearest town, so the night was velvet-black with millions of pinpoint stars strewn from horizon to horizon.

There was something so powerful that night in the universe that it felt like a grand orchestra that had been playing for thousands of years and where single notes could last decades. It was at that moment that I had my first experience of the presence of God––so strong that the memory and feeling of that night has stayed with me to this day.

He seemed to be everywhere, filling the universe, yet He felt immeasurably distant from me––there was a terrible void between me and God. It was deeply unsettling so I retreated into the house to escape from that awful feeling of separation from God... but it continued to haunt my thoughts and feelings.

Mom would read me stories about God each night before I went to bed and I thought she would know the answer to what disturbed me. Some days later, I can't recall exactly how many, I finally asked Mom about God and about that awful feeling of being cut off from Him. She, too, had known that same feeling throughout her childhood and explained to me that God was absolutely perfect and beautiful and the tiniest sin resulted in a permanent void between God and me that cannot be crossed by anything we do. But, she explained, God loved me and became a human being, Jesus Christ, and died and rose again to fully satisfy the demands of perfect justice for my sin and to make the gift of eternal life possible.

I knew about sin from lies I told my parents, and from fighting over toys with my sisters. Once, I had stomped on a frog for no reason at all while outside alone, and the moment I did it I felt I had done something so wrong that the memory stays with me after all these years. These were the sorts of things that my mother said were sins and, to be honest, they had a way of bothering me afterward. I wonder if when we are very young and relatively innocent, we better perceive the enormity and magnitude of moral violations but as we become desensitized and callosed to such things we lose that sensitivity and begin to wonder why God cannot just gloss over the things we do that so often fall short of perfection and purity. As a small boy, it made crystal-clear sense to me that it was these actions that made God seem so utterly far away.

She said I could have eternal life and all my sins removed from between God and me if I "asked Jesus into my heart," but then she said something that shocked me. She made it clear that neither she nor my father could tell me to do this––I would have to decide for myself, or it would not count. It was shocking because I was always expected to obey my parents and this seemed to be something that they should simply tell me to do. But she continued by stating to me that if I went ahead with this, I would "belong to God forever." In this way, she ensured that I understood both the magnitude of this decision as well as the personal nature of it even though I was only a preschool boy; no one else could decide for me.

I stood there, afraid to proceed. What could it really mean to "belong to God forever?" I was not ready yet; I wanted to think about it.

It was my knowledge of death that was instrumental in trusting God. I had seen dead frogs, dead cattle, and witnessed the last minutes of our dog killed out on the road. Death was my greatest fear, but I was also terrified of God; what I had experienced under that awesome night sky was enormously powerful, far bigger than anything else I could imagine. I remember lying in bed some nights, listening to the desolate cries of coyotes, knowing I was lost forever but still afraid of God. I was torn between eternal death and God.

One particular evening I had just settled into bed and was wrestling with this great decision yet again when it suddenly struck me that if Jesus died for me, (and death was the worst thing I could imagine), then he must truly love me and I didn't need to be afraid of God. I called out for Mom, she came into the room, and I told her I was ready to do what she had done only nine years earlier. I still remember that moment many decades later; it was the single largest turning point in my life, and my mother, in her wisdom, had ensured that it was 'real' and mine.

One evening when I was about eight and a half years of age, Mom asked me if I would like to start my own personal daily "devotions", as she called them. She said I was old enough and I assumed this was something that all children did when they reached my age. I was all ears. I knew she always spent time alone with God each day, but it had never crossed my mind that it might be something I might want to do as well.

Mom explained that each night before I went to sleep, I could spend a little time in prayer, followed by reading and thinking about a small passage in the Bible and then writing something in my journal. She handed me a small brown, coil-bound notebook to begin. Sixty years later, the cumulative effect has been massive. Looking back, I would have had a totally different life experience and it makes me shudder to think of the ignorance of God I would otherwise have had, and how the absence of daily devotions would have entailed very different life decisions both small and large. What she taught me, we taught our own six children in turn. Some of them now have children old enough to study on their own and so her spiritual legacy of mentorship continues.

Mom was always reading books on theology and on living a true, authentic Christian life. She instantly called out any hypocrisy she saw in us children and I greatly appreciate her mentorship in doing so, although it was always hard at the time. "A word to the wise is sufficient," was one of her sayings, which was an effective way to stop me from arguing back. I didn't like being corrected, but I didn't want to look like a fool who didn't recognize wisdom. She taught me there were two ways to learn. I could learn the hard way if I didn't listen, or the wise way if I took her advice to heart. It is with an enormous sense of relief that she taught me the difference between the hard way and the wise way when I was young. In retrospect, her teaching on a variety of life issues saved me from making some very foolish decisions that I could easily have made otherwise.

Sometime in my later teens, she obtained a suitcase full of cassette tapes full of lectures from Dallas Theological Seminary. As she sewed clothing for her children or made meals or canned fruits and vegetables in the kitchen, she listened to those taped lectures. She had no idea, but overhearing those tapes as she played them was instrumental in starting me in a lifetime love of studying and teaching the Bible. She kept me supplied with a steady fare of Christian books for me to read and work through. As I and my siblings became adults, left home, married, and scattered across Canada, each of us continued to see God as central to our lives, and we began to spiritually mentor our own children as our mother had us.

It was not just her children that Mom mentored. Throughout our childhood, she visited other farm wives who did not know God or who were experiencing difficulties, while we played outdoors in the farmyard.

In her last years of life, she lived a four-hour flight away, but I began to make several trips a year to see her. My last time with her, I sensed that she knew her life was in its final chapter and that she might wonder how fruitful her life had been after all. I wanted her to get just a small glimpse of how her spiritual mentorship in my life resulted in many thousands of people in more than 95 countries every month reading my articles or watching my videos. I told her that without her years of spiritual mentorship, this would never have happened. Her legacy was bearing fruit in my life and she had no idea of how many other lives around the world.

As I left the room I paused at the door and stood looked back at her wondering if I would ever see her again in this life. I wanted to imprint my last picture of her sitting in her wheelchair. ‘Only’ a hard-working housewife who mentored her five kids on a farm and other young women in that rural community, making an impact for all eternity far greater than what she ever thought, despite the initial dismal circumstances of her birth––I love how God often does things like that.

One beautiful autumn morning after returning home I received a text from one of my sisters. As I recall, it said simply, “Mom is gone.” She had entered the "valley of the shadow of death" and, there, the Good Shepherd whom she had clung to all her life, met her and carried her in his arms through that valley and into a world the likes of which God has said, “it has not even entered the heart of humanity.” I am so, so very grateful for her spiritual mentorship as I grew up. Her legacy will continue to ripple outward around the world, and forward in time through the lives of her children and the women she mentored, until the end of human history.

If you read other articles on this website, remember that each one is part of the legacy of Patricia Ann. Not one of them would have been produced had it not been for her spiritual mentorship in my life. One more thing ... let her memory be an encouragement to never underestimate what God can do through you, no matter how disadvantaged or insignificant you might think yourself to be. God is your adequacy.

What about you? If you would like to find out more about how to have eternal life and a relationship with God, you can read my own story here and it explains towards the end how you can take that step too. Or, if you would like to talk confidentially with an online mentor about how to grow closer to God, follow this link.