Every Family Has Stories Worth Remembering

My Mother’s Smile

Every family has stories worth remembering. This is the story of my mother, Lelia Hilda McGill Pearson Wynn, a woman whose life taught me that love can bloom even after years of hardship.

Mother was born on November 20, 1913, in the Eucutta Community of Jones County, Mississippi, to James Samuel McGill and Floy Ann Walter Pryor. She was the fourth of seven children.

When Mother was only seven years old, tragedy changed everything. Her father died after a family dispute over a cow turned violent. An injury to his chest became infected, and before long he was gone. Overnight, my mother became a little girl without the security every child deserves.

Rather than growing up in one loving home, she was passed from one relative to another. Eventually, her relatives decided to send her to a reform school. Later, she found work as a maid in the home of an older couple. That is where my father met her. He came to visit the family, met my mother, and just three weeks later they were married.

Their first home wasn’t a house at all. It was a railroad car at the Warsaw Lumber Company camp in Wayne County, Mississippi, in 1933.

Together they raised five children, and I was the baby.

My father was twenty-one years older than Mother. Life was not easy. Daddy could be physically and verbally abusive, yet Mother endured because, in those days, she believed that was simply what a wife did. Looking back, I understand that she wasn’t weak. She was trying to keep a roof over her children’s heads.

When Daddy died in 1964, I was only fourteen years old.

After I left home at seventeen, Mother married five more times. Each husband passed away. Then something remarkable happened after the death of her last husband.

She changed.

When she spoke about him, her face would light up. She described him with warmth and tenderness unlike I had ever heard before. One day she quietly told me, “I believe he was the first man who ever truly loved me.”

Not long afterward, she apologized to me.

“Son,” she said, “I wasn’t a very good mother.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

“Mom,” I replied, “you were a wonderful mother. You loved us. You protected us. You worked hard. You cooked, cleaned, and taught us right from wrong. We never doubted that you loved us.”

In 1995, I moved back to Mississippi so I could help care for her during the last eight years of her life.

Those were some of the greatest gifts God ever gave me.

The woman I knew during those years seemed almost transformed. She laughed easily. She smiled constantly. She loved being surrounded by her children, grandchildren, and church family. There was a confidence and peace about her that I had never seen before.

She faithfully attended every church I pastored during those years.

Just before I walked into the pulpit each Sunday, she would hand me a peppermint.

“Put this in your mouth before you start preaching,” she’d say with a grin. “When it dissolves, it’s time to quit.”

The congregation never knew that every sermon I preached began with one of Mother’s peppermints.

She loved the Bible. We spent countless hours talking about Scripture. When I once bought my daughter a dog, Mother immediately smiled and reminded me of the verse that says you cannot bring “the price of a dog” into the house of the Lord. She had a verse for almost everything.

Today I still treasure her old C. I. Scofield Bible. Its pages are worn thin, the binding is taped together, and it bears the marks of a lifetime spent reading God’s Word.

One memory rises above all the others.

The day I was ordained into the ministry, Mother hugged me tightly. As she held me, she whispered words I have never forgotten:

“I always knew one of my sons would be a preacher. I gave each of you to God.”

When I think about my mother today, I don’t first remember the little orphan girl or the frightened young wife.

I remember her smile.

It reminds me that while we cannot always choose the story we begin with, by God’s grace we can become someone entirely different before the story ends.

Every family has stories worth remembering.

This is one I never want to forget.