Roughly two weeks before Mother’s Day 2008. Sale flyers proclaim Mother’s Day specials. Mushy cards are lining the shelves. Commercials for jewelry stores try to convince us that we need to drop $100 or more on diamonds to show our moms how much we love them.

I’m standing in a small showroom with my Dad trying to decide what her headstone should look like.

It will be flat. Her name will be etched into the stone along with the date of her birth and the date of her death. Thirty-seven characters in all.

Thirty-seven.

Thirty-seven characters to capture a life.

Thirty-seven characters to remind us of the way she mangled the language from time to time. Just a few weeks before she died, she going past one of those immaculate homes. Shrubs were trimmed just so. Christmas lights were hung perfectly straight. Mom’s comment? “That’s nice, but it’s too pedicured for me.”

Thirty-seven characters that can’t begin to tell the story of one of our greatest adventures — a 1998 trip to Israel during which Mom asked what was being served at every single meal and ate around anything that remained suspiciously unfamiliar.

Thirty-seven characters can’t come close to describing how important her family was and the length to which she was prepared to go to stand up for them, from threatening to quit a job when a supervisor tried to make her work beyond the late afternoon on Christmas Eve (that’s time with the kids, she said) to running errands for her elderly mother in recent years (you took care of me, so I’ll take care of you, she said).

I suppose I could go on and on.

Thirty-seven characters. Sixty years. Neither were enough for me.

Yet, it was perfect for God. On this Mother’s Day, without her here to celebrate it, there’s one thing for which I will be forever grateful beyond the gifts we’ve exchanged, beyond the stories we shared, beyond the games we played, beyond anything that’s bound to this earth.

She always believed in — and taught me to believe in — the sovereignty of God. Of course, she never put it in such large words. Her version was more to the effect of, “Hey, that’s way God wanted it.”

So now Mother’s Day approaches. As hard as it is to understand, she is where she is supposed to be and I am where I am supposed to be. One day, thanks to the faith she passed along to me, we’ll be together again on Mother’s Day.

But, I suspect, on that day all attention will be on the Father.