My lovely mother, Alice Muriel Graham and me at 8 yrs. old.

A (belated) Tribute on Mother’s Day!

By Helen Jesze, 19^th March 2021

“Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you,”

Exodus 20:12 NIV

“Listen to your father, who gave you life, and do not despise your mother when she is old,”

Proverbs 23:22

Last weekend was really “my mother’s weekend”, for on Friday 12th March would have been her birthday, and Sunday was Mothering Sunday in England. Unfortunately I did not get it written in time, so this week I want to pay a tribute to her and share some memories. Named after her aunt Alice and because she did not like this name, Mum liked to be known as “Muriel”. Her childhood was quite turbulent, for her father, Grandad Gabriel, restless and running from God, moved the family 35 times! Mum never had a childhood friend and attended 14 schools because of this. She was a bit of a tear-away, riding the old horse bare back and hanging upside down from a high window, terrorising the neighbours! She witnessed how God healed her dying mother from Tuberculosis and came to faith in Jesus as a young teenager.

After Mum’s mother, a Methodist, was filled with the Holy Spirit, Muriel and her sister, Greta, started to attend cottage meetings. That was where she met my father, Harry, at age 14. They started courting shortly after, but at 19, he was involved in a hit and run accident and was off work for one year, with a fractured skull. Harry and Muriel married, but he was often ill and could not keep a job. She shared how hard it was as a young wife and mother, to never know when her husband would be brought home unconscious again. There was very little money and one day, Mum prayed, “Lord, send me a bag of flour and one pound of jam today. Thank you, Amen.” Later there was a knock at the door; it was a Christian man who apologetically handed her a bag with flour and jam in it. Mum said, “O please don’t apologise, I prayed for that today!” He looked astonished, as that had not happened to him before, and the church he attended did not believe that this type of thing could happen!

After 3 years Harry was healed by the power of God and their lives grew better. I was born in 1943 and one of my first memories of my mother was when I was 4 years old. One day I came home with a branch of beautiful purple lilac. “Where did you get that?” my mother asked. “It fell off Mrs. Jones’ tree,” I replied. “It’s not fair, she’s got purple lilac and we’ve only got white lilac in our garden!” “But that is stealing! You must take it back and say you’re sorry!” Now Mrs Jones had red hair and a fiery temper which they say goes with it, so I was afraid, but I had to take it back. Mum wanted to teach me honesty! Another time, Mum felt the Lord tell her to run upstairs to look for me. She was just in time to stop me falling out of a window, as I had climbed up on a box and was looking out.

My mother had compassion for people who were ill and used to take me to visit a teenage boy who was bedridden after Rheumatic Fever. She herself, had heart trouble, and sometimes lost the use of her legs. I distinctly remember her trying to polish the floor on her hands and knees, and me at 6 years old, laying hands on her and praying that Jesus would help Mummy “to get up again”.

When I was 9, the landlord of our rented house told us he wanted to live there and that we must leave. Not being able to find another house, he took my parents to Court. My mother stayed home and when Dad returned, she said to him, “We’ve got to go, haven’t we?” “Yes, but how did you know?” Dad asked. “The Lord spoke to me in my Bible reading from Ezekiel this morning,” Mum replied, “’Prepare your stuff for removing…’”

Dad had taken over a pioneer church 3 years before, and some kind-hearted members took us into their already overcrowded house. After some months the local Council gave us a wooden hut to live in. Left over from the war, it had one large room with 2 small bedrooms and was mounted on cement blocks, with nests of rats underneath. One of them bit our beautiful cream and ginger Persian cat, Thomas, and because we had no money for vets’ bills, he had to be put down. Mum and I cried a long time, for we had loved him very much.

One day Mum met a very proud, high-falluting lady who said, “Oh, Mrs Graham, I hear you have moved. Is it a house or a bungalow?” “A bungalow.” “And do you have central heating?” “Oh, yes,” Mum answered, thinking of the cast-iron stove in the middle of the room, and how the wind blew the smoke back down when it was in a certain direction! She wasn’t going to let this lady know what kind of place we lived in now!

But Mum was determined to get us out of the hut and almost every day she went to the Council offices, to demand they do something for us. There were over 3000 families on the list before us, to get a house, so they ignored her. But God answerd in a better way. Grandad Gabriel died, and Grandma came to live with us. The money she and Mum received, was put down as a deposit to buy a house. So this put Mum and Dad on the Property Ladder.

Muriel had a scar on her wrist and she told me it happened on the morning she and Dad had their first quarrel. He went off to work, but Mum cried all day and cut her wrist when cutting bread. They were opposites in nature, Mum was fiery and Dad would give you “the silent treatment”!

It always impressed me how my mother read her Bible and her devotional book “Streams in the Desert” and prayed every morning. She also gave me a love for reading books. With the heart trouble and not being too strong, it was often with great difficulty she and Dad walked to the train-station, travelled to the next town, then walked from the station again to the hall where we had our church meetings, for we had no car. After the meeting there was the whole journey home again. But those were some of the sacrifices of being in ministry.

When I grew up and left home, going to work in Birmingham, I had a badly infected mouth after a teeth extraction. Mum came to stay a few days with me and was concerned as my mouth was very swollen and painful, and I could not go to work. In her prayer time, Mum read about Jeremiah the prophet, and the words “…the Lord touched my mouth…” leapt out at her. “Helen, let’s pray again for you. If the Lord can touch Jeremiah’s mouth, he can touch yours!” she said. Sure enough, from that day, my mouth began to heal.

In June 1965, Mum came to stay with me again and on a Wednesday night, a Bulgarian Pastor, Haralan Popoff, came to the church to tell how God had brought him through almost 14 years of imprisonment by the Communists. He could not speak much English and had a young man with him to interpret from Russian into English. On the way home, Mum said to me, “You know, that young interpreter would make a nice son-in-law!” I stared at her, for I hadn’t taken much notice of him. The young interpreter was George! That is how God brought us together and we married one year later! I think Mum had some prophetic insight there!

Later in life, through a medical mistake, unfortunately my mother became an invalid. We were living in Germany, and my brother Douglas and his wife, Davina, looked after her for a while. Later she went into a Care Home.

I had always been closer to my father when growing up, but as I have got older, I have come to understand Mother better. It is too late to tell her that now, but I thank the Lord for the mother he gave me, for her care and prayers, for the many challenges she fought through which I can’t go into now, and that she and my father taught me to love Jesus!

Thank you for coming with me on a trip down Memory Lane, or for meeting “Muriel” for the first time, and pray you were blessed in doing so!