All the Ways Her Savior Lead Her

My mum's life was irrevocably shaped by the abuse and neglect she suffered, and mine with it. And yet, my mum's life was most defined by all the ways her Savior lead her through it. Mine has been too.

Of all the life events that have catalyzed seasons of growth and healing in my life (as I described in my last post), the one that has felt the most significant is the most recent - the death of my mother. It was out of a desire to honor her that I limited what I shared about her story on public platforms while she was still alive. And yet, it was out of that same desire to honor her, and honor the God she so faithfully followed, that once she was safely home with the Lord, I knew I would begin to say more.

I’d always known what I wanted to say. But what I was less sure of was what kind of gospel lens to apply to it all. There had been as much darkness as there was light in my mum’s life, and in mine because of it. How could I bear witness to what had been true and good about my mom’s life, while still being truthful about what was not? The providential timing of reading this post by Dr. Sandra Glahn, and a phone conversation with my writer friend and mentor Michelle Van Loon, just a week before mum’s funeral, gave me the insight I needed.

The text of what I shared follows. If you prefer to watch/listen, the link to the beginning of my portion of the service is here. It’s about 12 minutes long.

There’s so much more that I could, and eventually will, want to say. But the most essential parts of it are all here.

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It’s so fitting that we’re starting, and ending, our service with singing. My mum had a beautiful voice, and she loved to sing. In the days since mom’s homegoing, the hymn that has come to mind most often that I remember her singing has been “All the Way my Savior Leads Me,” by Fanny Crosby. I think you’re going to hear it later during the video montage.

The opening verse goes like this:

All the way my Savior leads me,
What have I to ask beside?
Can I doubt His tender mercy,
Who through life has been my Guide?
Heav’nly peace, divinest comfort,
Here by faith in Him to dwell!
For I know, whate’er befall me,
Jesus doeth all things well.

There’s a beautiful and holy irony in my mum’s love of that hymn, and honestly in my mother’s whole life. If anyone I know had ever had the right to ask God for more than she’d been given - to deeply doubt God’s mercy, to question what had befallen her - it was my mother.

Mom came to faith in Jesus when she was just 9 years old, and if memory serves me, that hymn was the one her church congregation sang when she was baptized. The timing of my mother’s conversion is significant because it preceded all of the suffering that would befall her- the suffering of the terrible sin committed against her, and the suffering inside her mind as she wrestled with the weight of shame she carried over it throughout her life.

From the late 1950s to sometime in the 1960s, my mother’s father, George Fox Holmes, a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Military and a Christian medical missionary, committed horrific acts of sexual abuse against her, and trafficked her to his friends and associates. When Mom finally mustered the courage to disclose what was happening to her, instead of being believed, and rescued, and the perpetrators sent to prison, she was disbelieved, She was hospitalized, subjected to electroshock therapy and all manner of medical interventions that were common in the 60s.

Whether her mental afflictions began before her disclosure, or after she was hospitalized, is shrouded in mystery. But the outcome is not.

As a result of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father and others, and the denial of it by those closest to her, Mum battled schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and bouts of severe depression throughout her entire adult life.

Mum with her family, sometime around 1950. She’s standing between her mother and father.

One of the many ways sexual abuse destroys a person’s understanding of themselves is in their misappropriation of shame. The abuser is the one who has earned it, but the victim is the one who carries it. When she gets up the courage to bring her experience into the light, she is looking for vindication, for the guilt of what’s been done to her to be taken from her and placed on the one who did it. But when she is disbelieved, or accused of wrongdoing, the shame stays with her. It festers, and it spreads, just like gangrene spreads across skin.

This is what happened to my mother.

After my mother’s initial hospitalization, in God’s kindness, she stabilized for a while. She went to school to become a nurse.She met and married our father, and just before Dad graduated from Seminary, she gave birth to me. The cycles of psychosis,hospitalization, medicalization, stabilization and began very shortly after my birth, and they continued throughout the majority of her life, and my sister’s and mine.

Mum on her wedding day, 1969

Mum and me, 1972

I have happy memories of my mom - hearing her sing along to George Beverly Shea, or listening to JV Vernon McGee on the radio as she worked around the house. I remember one day barging into her room without knocking to ask for something, as kids do, to find her kneeling by her bed reading her Bible. She was so startled that she yelled at me for disturbing her, and then she apologized. :) She taught me how to make a bed with knife-straight hospital corners, something I do to this day and judge my husband fiercely for because he doesn’t. Whenever I was sick, she got such pleasure out of deploying all of her nursing skills in making me these pillow walls against my bed, bringing me meals on a tray. (I remember the first time I got really sick in college and my mom wasn’t there to take care of me. I never missed her so much as I did that day.)

But the much harder times are what defined my experience of her and what I’ve struggled to not dominate my memory.

If my father had ever reconsidered his conviction in his call to ministry, in the light of what unfolded with our Mom when we were very young, many things might have been different. But he never did, not even when our situation was so impossible to hide that people in whatever church Dad was pastoring at the time would try to intervene on our behalf. This happened regularly. And every time it did, my dad would suddenly feel “led” to leave that church, and start over somewhere else - somewhere where he could keep the knowledge and the perceived shame over mom’s condition contained - to himself, to my sister, and to me. He said he did this to protect her, but he readily acknowledged he was really doing it to protect his ministry and himself.

And so because of my Dad’s choices, my dominant memories of my mom aren’t primarily about what it was like to be cared for by her, but what it was like to care for her, especially when my father left us alone for ministry engagements for days, or sometimes weeks. When that happened, mom’s condition would inevitably deteriorate and she was admitted to hospital. And I remember times I would take the bus to visit her, all by myself, not telling even my Dad or my sister that I’d gone. And I would sit by her side as she slept, or just stared.

And I carried the weight of those experiences - the fear, the sadness, the shame - all the way into adulthood.

It wasn’t easy to disentangle my understanding of the God my dad preached about on Sundays or that my mother read about in her Bible from what our home life told me He was like, and so for long time the dissonance in those experiences kept me far from any relationship with God of my own. But God’s voice broke through all that noise during my freshman year at the Master’s College on March 29, 1990, almost exactly 35 years ago. While I laid the burdens of my sin and my unbelief in God at the cross that day,

I kept many other burdens of shame and other types of unbelief close by. I couldn’t see them, and I wouldn’t have known how to name them if I did. But eventually the weight of those burdens lead me into my own dark season of suffering and deep depression.

What I experienced was far smaller in degree than anything my mother had suffered, although it was similar in kind. But in God’s kindness He lead me to counselling that helped me look back at what my mom had been carrying and what we were asked to carry alongside her at such a young age. With older, Holy-Sprit-empowered eyes, I began to be able to better comprehend how little agency my mom, my sister and I had had over our life, and how that must have affected her, and us. And I began to be able to see all the ways Jesus had been with her, leading her and caring for her, each step of the way.

Every time our father uprooted us, God would lead her (and us) to resources, relationships and communities of care, where she, and we, were seen and loved and helped. When we had no food - foodstamps fed us. When we had no clothes that fit, charity drives and donations clothed us. When we needed scholarships to pay for school, we received them. When Mom needed healthcare and medications to stabilize her mind and body, Medicaid covered it. God lead her to friendships like Luann Bennett, Christian communities, like the one here at Cornerstone, and eventually to Billings Skilled Nursing facility. Over and over again, Jesus provided for, and cared for my Mum. And in ways different in kind yet very similar in degree, Jesus provided for and cared for my sister, and for me.

My father’s death just over a year ago, marked the beginning of my quest to determine just how God wanted me to think about, and especially talk about, the story of my family. What does honoring our father and our mothers look like when there is so much dishonor -so much shame - woven throughout their story?

The first place God lead me to was Moses’ genealogy in Exodus 6. Right in the middle of it, Moses writes with matter of fact honesty of his father’s incestuous relationship that lead to his and his brother’s birth. Moses doesn’t erase his origin story from the story of Israel’s redemption, - he writes it into it.

The other place God led me to was Jesus' genealogy in Matthew 1 - And there’s a long list of men - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, David, Solomon - who treat women in incredibly damaging, dishonoring ways. And yet from those very men a different kind of man was born - a man who would perfectly protect, honor and care for women. Each of these stories of the shameful, destructive actions of men against women are inverted in the story of the perfect righteous actions of a man on behalf of women- the man named Jesus.

And so, when my mother passed away a few weeks ago, I went back to that same genealogy in Matthew 1, but this time I looked at the stories of the women - the mothers. There are five of them. All of these women have something in common: they were all burdened by the weight of some kind of sexual shame. Tamar was falsely accused of being a prostitute by her father-in-law. Rahab was a prostitute, likely at the behest of her parents. Ruth was a widow with a kinsman redeemer who refused to do it, Bathsheba was sexually violated and widowed because of it, and Mary was engaged to be married and pregnant with a baby that was not her fiance’s.

Each of these women was living under a shadow of shame. And yet, each of them would experience something remarkable and beautiful: a man would come into their life who would cover over that shame, - atone for it with his own life. In some cases - like Tamar and Bathsheba - the man who atoned for their shame was the one who had perpetrated it. But in other cases - Rahab’s, Ruth’s, Mary’s - the man who atoned for their shame was not the cause of it. And yet they sacrificially bore the cost of shame and the redemption for it, onto themselves, giving these women a family and a future they otherwise never would have had. These are stories of vindication - of atonement - and each of them have their apex in the story of the atoning work of the man named Jesus.

And all of these stories in the genealogy of Jesus - of the mother, and the fathers, have parallels in the life of my mother.

My mother experienced profound abuse, and deep neglect, at the hands of men who were covenantally committed to care for her. She also experienced remarkable acts of costly, atoning love by men who claimed her as their family. Men like my sister’s second husband Robb and his son Jordan, my sister’s son Josiah and, very recently, my second husband Tim. I couldn’t help but think of this yesterday as I watched all four of these men literally lift and carry my mom to her final resting place- her waiting place.

With my sister and brother in-law, meeting Tim for the first time, in 2023.

There’s one final relevant point I should make about the women - the mothers in Jesus’ genealogy. Given all of their experiences, it might be tempting to paint a more rosy picture of these women than they would of themselves - to turn them into sinless victims, as it were, and Jesus’ mother Mary most of all. But Mary herself belies that idea “Magnificat” where she is intentional in calling God her Savior. While all of the women named in the genealogy of Jesus’ were sinned against, they too were sinners in need of a Savior. So was my mother. So am I. For all of us, salvation from the sin that was committed against us, and the sin we ourselves have committed, has been accomplished by the atoning work of a man named Jesus-God in human flesh - the one who himself never knew sin, but who became sin for us - who took the shame of all of it on himself and gives us his perfect righteousness in exchange, and who made us the beloved daughters of his perfect Father in Heaven.

My last visit with Mum, February 2025

This is the story of the gospel. And you can only see the redemptive beauty in this story if you first look squarely into the darkness from which the beauty bursts forth, and you apprehend the price that was paid to atone for all of the darkness, and bring the beauty to life. And it’s only in doing all of that, that you can see the doorway it offers, that invites you into a life of peace, of belovedness , a life that lasts forever.

The final verse of the hymn I mentioned at the beginning goes like this:

“All the way my Savior leads me,

Oh, the fullness of His love!

Perfect rest to me is promised

In my Father’s house above.

When my spirit, clothed immortal,

Wings its flight to realms of day

This my song through endless ages:

Jesus led me all the way.”

This was the song my mother sang throughout her life. And this is the song she’s singing now.

And one day, this is the song my Mother and I will sing together.