A Mother’s Love

Looking at the cute face of 11-month old Kyson Stowell you’d never guess he had been torn out of his mother’s arms and thrown 150 yards into an open field by a tornado. Motherly love and self sacrifice reached its apogee arising from the depths of that tornado’s fury in Castalian Springs, Tennesee.

As the killer storm approached, Kyson’s mother Kerri was on the phone with her fiancé’s sister. She said that she was taking shelter in the bathtub clutching baby Kyson. Then she called her mother, and the cell phone went dead in the roar of the tornado. When rescuer’s arrived at the address they found only sparse rubble. Giving the nearby pasture a final search, they saw what appeared to be a doll. And then it moved. It was baby Kyson, lacerated but alive. His mother’s lifeless body was discovered nearby. Kerry Stowell’s fiancé believes she tried to keep her son safe as the storm closed. "She would have given her life to protect her baby," he said.

In the raw pain of death, a miracle has emerged. As I read this moving story, another account of an old minister came to mind. I pulled down the tattered 1923 "Cyclopedia of Religious Anecdotes" from my shelf and read again the illustration "from a sermon in the Brooklyn Eagle." I share it with you as an illustration of human self-sacrifice reflecting the greatest sacrifice of all.

"Do you not remember Norman McLeod’s story of the Highland mother? She was a widow; taking her babe she started to walk across the mountains, some ten miles, to the home of a relative. A terrible snowstorm suddenly fell upon the hills, and little by little the mother’s strength failed. Next day, when men found her body it was almost stripped of clothing. Her chilled and dying hands had wrapped her clothing about the child, which was found in a sheltering nook, safe and sound. Years afterward the son of the minister who had conducted the mother’s funeral went to Glasgow to preach a preparatory sermon. Somehow he was reminded of the story he had often heard his father tell. Instead of preaching the sermon he had prepared, he simply told the story of the Highland mother’s love. A few days later he was summoned to the bedside of a dying man. ‘You don’t know me,’ said the man. ‘Although I have lived in Glasgow many years, I have never attended a church. The other day I happened to pass your door as the snow came down. I heard the singing and slipped into a back seat. There I heard the story of the widow and her son.’ The man paused, his voice choking, his eyes were filling. ‘I am that son,’ he sobbed at last. ‘Never did I forget my mother’s love, but I never saw the love of God in giving Himself for me until now. It was God that made you tell that story. My mother did not die in vain. Her prayer is answered.’"

John 15:13 sums it up for all of us. "Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends."

Of Christ’s sacrifice, Galatians 1:3-5 says, "Grace be to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen."

David Virkler