My mother pointed me to Jesus

My mother, Maria Klassen, went to be with Jesus last year at the age of 95. Just as the highest peaks in a mountain range only stand out from the rest when surveyed from a distance, so it was with my mother’s life. When I look back at my mother’s life, I realize that without question the highest peak, the guiding point in her life, was her relationship with Jesus Christ. My mother was a Jesus person. She loved her husband, she loved her children and grandchildren, but she truly loved Jesus most of all.

One of the first ways that I became aware of my mother’s love for Jesus was through the numerous times she told me about how she became a Christian. My mother was not a woman of many words, and she seldom talked about her own life, not even how she met her husband, who became my father. But the story of how she experienced the love of God through Jesus Christ I heard many times. My mother would tell how in her early 20s she realized she needed the love and forgiveness that Jesus Christ offers. She said, “I simply took Jesus at His word in John 3:16, putting my name into the verse so it read ‘For God so loved Maria that He gave His one and only Son, that if Maria believes in Him, she shall not perish but have eternal life.’ ”

The depth of my mother’s experience of God’s unconditional love was quite often demonstrated around Easter time. She would read the Bible and pray with her four sons before they went off to school (my father having left for work earlier). My mother would read Isaiah 53, the graphic prophecy of the crucifixion of Jesus, and begin to weep to the point where she could not finish reading the chapter. As a non-Christian teenage boy, I was puzzled and even uncomfortable with what would happen to my mother when she read Isaiah 53. Those were the only times I remember my mother weeping. Yes, there were other times of tears, but nothing had an emotional impact on my mother like the story of the cross of Jesus and His love for her.

I believe my mother’s deep sense of Jesus being with her at all times grew out of her experience of His love. Never was this more clearly evident than at the time of the greatest human tragedy in her life and in the life of her family. She had a son whom she always described as her most beautiful baby. This son, Paul, grew into his teens. Unlike his three brothers, he was never openly rebellious but always seemed mature beyond his years. He was baptized at age 15 and seemed destined for something special. However, he loved to play basketball, and therein lies the tragedy. Paul had a heart defect, the seriousness of which no one was aware of, not even the doctors who had examined him. One day in the fall of 1965, at age 16, while playing basketball with his brothers at Sunset Community Centre in Vancouver, Paul fell to the floor unconscious. He was rushed to the hospital, where three hours later he was officially pronounced dead. It was my job as the oldest son to go home and tell my mother what had happened. As I came in through the kitchen door, there stood my mother with her hands in the kitchen sink washing dishes. I went to her, put my arms around her and told her what had happened. She lowered her head as if in prayer and then said these words from the Bible: “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD“ (Job 1:21). Nothing in the days and years that followed ever gave the slightest indication that she wavered from that declaration of confidence in the Lord Jesus.

Not even in her declining years, after my father had died and she had had to be placed in a care home because she was suffering from dementia, did she show any signs of wavering in her confidence in Jesus Christ. On one occasion when I went to visit her in the care home, I was feeling sorry for her and said, “Mom, it must be tough to be in here all alone.” She became quite indignant and said, “I am not here alone.” I asked her, “Who is with you?” expecting that in her confusion she might tell me Henry, her husband, was still with her. But her answer came back clear as a bell: “Jesus is with me!”

In fact, the last words my mother ever spoke, as far as anyone knows, were about Jesus.

When my wife went to collect my mother’s personal effects after she had died, one of the nurses at the care home told her, “The last thing Maria said was very interesting. She looked at me and said, ‘You need to pray to Jesus.’ ”

My mother was not perfect, but she knew Jesus was perfect and would never fail her or forsake her. This is what made her the person who pointed me to Jesus. Now I want to be a person whose life points others to Jesus!

Ted Klassen is senior pastor of Culloden MB Church in Vancouver.