“I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.” — 2 Timothy 1:5
Right at the outset of an urgent letter to a young pastor, Paul stops. He sets aside the theology, sets aside the instructions, and says something quiet and remarkable: I remember your tears, Timothy. And I remember the women whose faith shaped you.
Lois and Eunice, Timothy’s grandmother and a mother. Paul doesn’t list their accomplishments. He names their faith, a sincere, lived-out, passed-on faith, and he credits it as the very foundation of everything Timothy has become.
That passage has been sitting with me this week. Because it tells the truth about how faith moves from one generation to the next: often through the steady, unhurried witness of women. In our homes. In our Sunday school classrooms. In a hand reached across a pew. In someone who said, I’ll pray for you, and actually meant it. The women of Pittman Park have carried this family of faith in prayer for generations, and today I want to say plainly: we see you, and we are grateful.
But I also want to say something else, because Paul noticed Timothy’s tears before he mentioned anything else. And on a day like Mother’s day, not everyone walks through our doors with uncomplicated feelings.
Some of you are grieving a mother you’ve lost, and her absence feels sharper today than on most days. Some are grieving the mother you needed and never had. Some carry wounds from relationships that no greeting card quite knows what to do with. And some of you who are mothers yourselves are carrying more than anyone around you sees. You are not invisible here.
What moves me about Paul’s account is that it demonstrates how real faith travels through real people, people with real tears, real histories, real complexity, people like you and me. Lois and Eunice weren’t raising Timothy in easy times. But a genuine faith moved through them, and it changed the world through a boy who became a pastor, whose story we are still reading two thousand years later.
That same Spirit moves through the women of this church. Through faithfulness in hard seasons and presence in painful ones.
So, to every woman who has poured herself into a family, a congregation, a child, a neighbor, we honor you today. And to everyone for whom this Sunday is tender, you belong here too. Grief and gratitude can share the same pew. In this church, they often do.
God bless,
Jonathan Smith
For Jesus. For People. For Community.