This is the first Mother’s Day I can’t call her.

My mom, Jean Barnes, died last June. She was 91. Dementia slowly took pieces of her, but it never took her spirit. She stayed scrappy to the end, which is exactly how she lived every chapter of her life. If you ever met her, you remember her.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to say this week. I wrote her a Mother’s Day letter years ago when she and Dad were still in their seventies and heading to Afghanistan on a month-long medical mission. Afghanistan. In their seventies. That was Mom.

But this year is different.

This year I can’t hand her the letter. I can’t watch her wave me off and say, “I’m wonderful, honey,” before asking if I’ve eaten. This year there’s just the absence. And the realization that so much of who I am traces back to her in ways I’m still uncovering.

The Woman Who Refused Small Living

Mom was born into the old West — open skies, prairie horizons, hard people. She met my dad one summer in Yosemite, and that collision launched everything.

When the Army sent us to Italy in 1960, something in her woke up. She ate gelato in piazzas. She watched opera in Rome. She skied the Alps. She discovered that life was meant to be embraced, not managed carefully from a distance.

But the real turning point came during Vietnam.

I was eight. My sister was five. Dad was gone, and every week letters or cassette tapes arrived from the war. Mom would gather us onto the couch and play them for us — stories about combat, loneliness, fear, and how much Dad loved us.

There was a hole in me during those years. No father to throw a football with. No fishing trips. Mom loved me fiercely, but she couldn’t give me a father’s love.

In that painful season, a widow named Shirley Wratten shared something with Mom that changed her life. She told her Jesus didn’t come to offer rules. He came to offer relationship.

That truth wrecked her in the best way.

From then on, she was all in.

The Kind of Faith I Tried to Avoid

Mom was a prayer warrior and disciple-maker. And honestly, for years, it scared me.

I never wanted to be a fanatic. Mom was intense. Unapologetic. Fully surrendered. I preferred safer religion — admiration from a distance. I wanted God without the wildfire.

But Mom kept praying.

She prayed early in the mornings on her knees for my dad to encounter Jesus the way she had. Eventually, he did.

She carried tracts in her purse and shared the Gospel with waitresses and parking attendants. She led Bible studies in neighborhoods other people avoided. She wasn’t polished about it. She wasn’t strategic. She was simply convinced that God had rescued her, and she couldn’t stay quiet about it.

When I was a junior in high school, she pushed me onto a two-month mission trip to Guatemala. I was shy and didn't want to go. She made me stand in front of her friends and ask for support.

I remember thinking, Why would anyone invest in me?

That trip changed my life.

Nobody in Columbia, Missouri was doing short-term missions in 1975. But Mom saw something in me I couldn’t yet see in myself, and she shoved me toward it.

The Invisible Thread

Years later, I wrote her a letter trying to explain what she had given me.

I thanked her for the hidden years — the homes in Guilford, Silver Spring, Columbia — where she quietly shaped our lives. Values, character, courage, faith — those things don’t appear overnight. They are formed slowly through the unseen labor of motherhood.

And I told her about people in Palenque, Mexico, who would never know her name, but whose lives she had touched because of what she planted in me.

That thread stretches much farther now.

It runs through the World Race. Through villages in Eswatini. Through disaster relief in Jamaica. Through Gap Year routes across continents. Through thousands of young people who said yes to God because one woman in Missouri believed a shy boy had more inside him than he knew.

She planted a seed in a reluctant teenager, and it became Adventures in Missions.

The Ending She Earned

At 60 — when most people start shrinking their lives — Mom and Dad expanded theirs. They became medical missionaries in Kenya and Vietnam, serving people who had no doctor, no help, and often no hope.

When Dad died several years ago, Mom held his hand, kissed him goodbye, and told him she’d see him in heaven.

It was tender. Holy. Hard-earned.

My parents loved each other for sixty years, but it wasn’t easy. We struggled mightily along the way. Mom learned forgiveness deeply and she traveled light because of it.

Even dementia couldn’t extinguish her joy. She still smiled. Still danced. Still cracked jokes. Still loved silly hats, charades, and making people laugh.

During the lockdowns, we would sit several feet apart outside her retirement center.

“How are you doing, Mom?” I would ask.

Her answer was always upbeat: “I’m wonderful, honey. They take good care of us here.”

That was her. Always smiling. Always grateful. Focused on prayer, relationships, and the things that actually matter.

What I Want to Say This Mother’s Day

Mom led me to Jesus when I was nine years old. She read me the story of a Father who loved me enough to send His Son for me. I remember hearing about Christ’s suffering and feeling cut to the heart.

That night, I gave my life to Jesus.

It took me decades to fully understand what Mom understood all along: God wasn’t looking for distance or performance. He wanted intimacy.

I spent years running from the intensity of her faith before finally discovering she had been right the whole time.

Recently, I reached back out to Shirley Wratten, the woman who led Mom to Christ during the Vietnam years. Shirley is now 89. I asked her who had led her to faith, and the thread stretched back again - through other faithful women whose names most people will never know.

God has been weaving this story for generations.

Mom became the knot that held my part of it together.

Her faith is my greatest inheritance. More than education. More than opportunity. More than the adventurous childhood she gave us.

Her faith - fierce. Vibrant. Impossible to ignore.

Mom, I miss you this Mother’s Day.

I miss your prayers. Your laughter. Your refusal to play it safe. You showed us how to live a life that interrupts the ordinary with heaven. You passed the best part of yourself on to your children. And we’ve spent our lives trying to pass it on to others.

I’m still doing that every day. Because years ago, you shoved a shy kid out the door and told him God had more for him.

You were right.