A boy and his mother's nightly liturgy.

Our Lady of Vladimir, the icon is displayed in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

To anyone who has spoken to me about my understanding of worship, you can't get out of the conversation without me speaking about liturgy. It is powerful y'all, for many reasons. I could get into how it connects us Christians to our church fathers, or how it unites us across all cultural, political, or economic lines, but I'm going to save that for another blog post. Today I am going to tell a story about my mama.

My mother grew up in a middle class Polish and Italian Catholic family. As a child liturgy was always a part of her life, and as a young Catholic myself it became part of my life before I could even speak. As I grew up I could recite the Lord's Pray, Hail Mary, and Grace all off the top of my head. These become important to me from a young age. Rather recently, one pray in particular, my mother's prayer, has proven to make me ball my eyes out. Here it is.

"Goodnight,

I love you,

God bless you,

Angels watch over you,

we thank the Lord for you and your brother,

Amen."

Simple, repetitive, and spoken daily as my mother faithfully prayed this over me. I don't know if she realized how impactful it would be. Looking back on it I realized that over the years those words would become precious to me.

As a missionary who lives a full day of flights away from my family, speaking with my parents isn't easy. The other day I spoke with my mom on the phone, and it had been around three months since we had a conversation longer than five minutes. We spoke about North Carolina, Christmas, Uganda, just about anything on my mind on a daily basis. When the call was coming to an end I said to her, "could you pray that prayer you always said to me?" as she spoke those words over me I began to uncontrollably weep. I haven’t cried like that for year. Childhood memories of my mother and I flooded over me and I went from being a twenty-one-year-old man living on his own who thinks he has it all together, to a five-year-old boy who is lying in bed, being kissed goodnight. I was overwhelmed with emotions and I couldn't help but cry, and cry, and cry. These words have encapsulated a love so deep that a mother and son share.

Jesus was born as a baby, sinless and blameless. That being said, Jesus had to learn that he was God, like everything else he learned. Like all babies, they can't comprehend much outside of who mom is and when they're hungry. If God really became fully human, he had to become fully baby. I would like to believe that Mary, like my mother, had to help teach Jesus how to pray. As any loving Godly mother would, I am sure she prayed for Jesus every day. I often wonder if she had a goodnight prayer like my mom did. As God grew in his understanding of his Lordship and started his years of ministry, I often wonder if he ever missed his family. I can't image how he couldn't.

Liturgy is powerful for many reasons, and the reason my mother taught me was faithful consistency. With faithful, consistent prayers the Lord works in amazing ways, and he honors them. Just today a Nigerian colleague of mine told me how in 1919 missionaries felt a call to share the gospel with a tribe of people who didn't have any idea who Jesus was, and my colleagues father was one of the people who started to follow Christ. Because of those men my colleague knows the Lord, I find that to be incredible! That calling was revealed to these missionaries in a prayer meeting. They prayed faithfully, and consistently, and were obedient to their calling. That is the power I keep talking about.

My encouragement to everyone and myself is to pray faithfully, and consistently. It can change your life, if not someone else's.