My mother was a praying woman. We would find her praying in the morning, in the evening, and always  whenever we left the house to travel whenever we were faced with trials in our lives. She even prayed  when we told her about some triumphant moments that occurred in our lives.  We knew that no matter what,  our prayer lives were covered and we felt safe because our mother prayed for us.  Recently I read somewhere that ‘Faith is like a toothbrush:  use it every day but don’t use someone else’s.”  John Mason

We depended on those prayers of our mother and when she died we were in a panic because we were thinking about ‘who did we have to pray for us now?‘  Many of us based our faith on what our mom believed instead of having that faith in God for ourselves. We had to quickly learn that faith  works  when we believe.  It’s kind of like allowing someone else to eat something and tell us how good it was. We can take their word for it that it is good,  but unless we taste it too, we will never really know just how good it really was.

The Bible says, ‘Oh taste and see for it is so good!’ God can certainly use other people to  reach out to us and lead us to Him,  but we must believe in Him because we have been convicted in our own hearts that He is who He is.  He wants to have a personal relationship with us.

We had to learn how to pray for ourselves and for each other.  As the oldest sibling,  I promised my siblings that I would hold us together and do whatever I needed to do to keep us together.  I had to learn how to have that vertical relationship with Christ in order to stand in the gap just like my mother did all through the years.  I find that I am in constant prayer and I am praying even now as I am writing this article because there are issues that I need Him to handle.  I have found that all of us have developed a stronger prayer life and we learned that from our mother.  We have found that it keeps our bond strong.  It does not mean that we never have issues by no means.  But it does mean that when problems arise we know that there is a God that is bigger than us who can handle our problems.