Nancy was told that her son, Tom, wouldn’t make it in school. They called him addled or mentally ill.
One day Tom overheard the teacher talking about his deficiencies to another teacher and relayed the information to his mother with a broken spirit. She fiercely defended him and went to the school to be his advocate. It wasn’t long after that she took matters into her own hands and brought him home to school him.
His schooling was different than others. It was unstructured and involved hands-on learning. He loved to experiment with new ideas. She instilled in him the value of persistence and not being afraid to fail, but to learn from it.
Soon after her death, Tom worked for two years tinkering on a project. Even after multiple failures, he never gave up. He tried 2,000 different materials to try to make it work. Then one night, the light bulb came on — and he lit up the world.
Nancy Edison would go down in history as the mother who inspired the most prolific inventor of our recent history: Thomas Edison.
Mother’s Day is a time to celebrate the ones who love us the most. My greatest prayer warrior is my mother, Lexie Clamp. She instilled traits in me at an early age that have helped me minister to others. I now watch my wife, Leisa, do the same for our boys, and I am indebted to her sacrifice and love for them. If you want to get to know her, read Proverbs 31.
The first commandment with a promise is to “honor your father and your mother (Ephesians 6:2). Honoring includes obedience but goes beyond that to respect, admiration, and thoughtfulness. The promise extends to us, “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on earth.”
Edison may have harnessed the power of light to light up the world, but he didn’t invent it. Jesus has the patent on that. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. … let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14a, 16b).
So go and do what Jesus’s mother Mary said to the servants at the wedding of Cana. She said, “Do whatever He tells you” (John 2:5). Go light up the world.