Over this summer, I decided to spend a lot of time with my family. When my freshmen year was coming to an end, I realized that if I didn’t spend this summer with my family, then it will become increasingly difficult to see them as I progress into my college years and beyond. I am so glad that I made this decision.
I have a special relationship with my mother. I am basically the exact copy of her; her way of speaking, thinking, eating, sleeping, and other manners are mine. We even make the same expression when we cry, the brows between our eyebrows furrowing into three deep lines. When we laugh, we can’t stop. When I was young, my mom used to say, “Look, you got air in your lungs!” as I writhed on the floor, clutching my shaking belly, and gasping for breath, pain and merriness oozing out of my eyes and mouth. She laughed with me as she was telling me this, and I took this as permission to laugh some more until tears sprang to my eyes.
I don’t recall the exact moment, but some-when in our relationship, Mom and I became friends. Best, best friends. I never hid anything from her; I told her about all of my boy crushes, the deepest philosophical turmoil that kept me awake at nights, and even jokes I had picked up in school. I did my best to make my life hers in every way, to give her the joy and the freedom of living vicariously through me. I made sure that my childhood and my teenage years paralleled hers… except the family tragedies which kept her from pursuing her dreams. There was this understanding between us that we knew each other best, although my mom used her stories sparingly and took more joy in my adventures than in hers. I think it was because I knew this that I did all I could to make her happy.
It is a great joke in our family. When we are watching T.V. and something even in the slightest sad comes up, Mom and I tear up immediately. Our chins quiver and our eyes squint together to keep the tears back. My dad and my brother know to instantly turn their heads and look at us and laugh. It’s so funny, really. We are crying about this guy who is selling away his puppy. We never owned a pet with the exception of the few goldfish that always ran away from us when we used to press our faces and fingers against the fish bowl.
One night, while Mom and I were talking into the late night lying down on my bed, this realization struck me: no one can know me without knowing my mom, and if anyone knows one of us, he or she knows both of us. This was the moment when I finally grasped the meaning of John 14 : 5-7
“Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?’ Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.’” (NIV)
This is the passage where Jesus is comforting the disciples about His leaving soon. Before, I had understood this passage matter-of-factly. Yeah, the Trinity. Jesus is the son of God. God speaks through Jesus, and Jesus does everything that pleases God…But at that moment, I understood it through my relationship with my mom. Indeed, God and Jesus’s relationship is incomparably greater and deeper, but the concept of Them sharing one thought, one mind, and one heart through an unbreakable bond of harmony, struck me as no longer a mystifying concept of the Trinity but as an example of the greatest love. If I know Jesus, I know God. If I know God, I know Jesus. And of course, God and Jesus live in us through the Holy Spirit, who gives us the knowledge of God and the heart to seek Him and love Him.
God is love, and He exists individually in my heart and in my mom’s heart yet also exists in the love between my mother and me. I can feel the depth, the telepathic bond that unites me to her, and to Him. This mystifying truth dawned upon me that night, the night like any other night when my mom and I were talking about nothing special, but crying nonetheless.
