On Language

I love my mother. Back in grade school, I would study homework, albeit often sidetracked, and my mother would walk into the room doing whatever a mother of seven children does. Then, quite randomly, she would turn to us children, look deeply into our eyes and say “my children, that you would know God, that you would know God.” Even now, it freezes me where I sit. That phrase continues to inspire me to live my life a certain way - with a yearning for God.

Some things take time to sink into one’s head. I once heard one must hear something seventeen times to remember it. Before high school, I had not heard this phrase from my mother seventeen times yet. It just confused me. Why does she say it with such passion? Why do her knuckles turn white and her tone serious? I could not grasp it. I would work on math, rather struggle with math, and in the middle of teaching me she would stop, and her attitude would grow serious. “Charles, that you would know God, that you would know God.” I would sit still and swallow hard, struck with an emotion I did not fully understand. It seemed as if something attacked me forcefully on all sides amidst a stream of almost painful love.

I finally heard it the “seventeenth” time as a junior in high school. My younger brother struggled with math like me. I noticed my mother push the math homework aside and bend down close to my brothers despairing face. The room fell silent and the air heavy by the strain of the pivotal movement. “Joseph, that you would know God... that you would know God.” The sweetest arrow tore open my heart. Her reality shocked me: seven children to raise in a world teeming with doubt, darkness, and death where, at the end of the day, knowing 2 + 2 was not near as important as knowing Him who gave us 2 + 2. In that moment, life made such dreaded and wonderful sense, and my mothers inner longings became my own through one small, simple phrase.