What—or who—has made you the person you are today? A traumatic event? A Teacher? A relative? Parenthood? We are all shaped by events & people throughout our lives. Our relationship with God is influenced by these external stimuli.

Without question the biggest influence in my life was my mother. She was not only the homemaker in our family, but was the outspoken spiritual leader as well. She was known—to one degree or another—by every resident of the little desert town of Needles, California. In my adolescent world, she was famous.

Irene McCary was born in a 750 square foot house in 1925. Needles was a growing railroad town on the banks of the Colorado River. That little house on D street was like so many houses in Needles—plain, simple, small, functional, with cement steps leading up to a small wooden porch. Her parents were struggling to make ends meet like most families in the years just prior to the Great Depression.

Her father was a railroad man, and her mother was a nurse. When Irene was five, her father died of Tuberculoses, leaving her mother—Sarah—with three children and a mortgage. Somehow they survived.

When Irene was about 12 years of age, an Adventist evangelist held a series of meetings in a tent on the edge of town. Sarah and her children attended every night, and at the end of the meetings, a handful of adults were baptized, and the Needles Seventh-day Adventist Church was born. Sarah was the first charter member to be baptized in Needles.

My mother eventually graduated from Needles High School, married an SDA man from Washington D.C., settled in Orlando, Florida, and gave birth to me in 1952. When I was a little over a year old, the family moved from Orlando to Needles to get my Dad’s father out of the humidity and into a “dry” climate for his health.

Mother eventually had 3 children. She was a dynamo by nature. She taught the children’s division classes in Sabbath School. She led the “Harvest Ingathering” door-to-door ministry during the holidays. She organized the potlucks. She worked 14 hour days at the Drive-in restaurant named after her (Irene’s is now called “The Route 66 Café”).

She experienced a powerful conversion to Christ in the early 1960’s. She became an outspoken apologist for Jesus, the Sabbath, and Adventism in that order. Scores of Needles railroad workers joined the Adventist church as the result of mothers’ influence, prompting the Southeastern California Conference to pluck her away from time-to-time and make her a “poster-child” for evangelism. She travelled the Conference, then the state, then the country, sharing her “on fire” experience with others. Her enthusiasm was contagious. It was a joyful religion that she shared. People never forgot her once they heard her speak.

We had many long-into-the-night conversations once I became a minister. I bounced my theology off of hers, and the banter was exhilarating. She was a strong advocate for the proof-text method of interpreting the Bible, and I became a strong advocate for the historical-contextual method. You can imagine our conversations! Today I’m considered a “progressive” Adventist with a definite conservative strain, and that conservative element is the residue of my mothers’ influence. But it is her JOY—her unbridled joy for life—that makes me so much like her.

Though we disagreed on a few key things in Adventism, we remained close friends with a deep respect for each other. I was her child, so there was probably a favorable bias on her part, but I never felt as if she was looking down her nose at me. We respected each others’ positions.
And it is that RESPECT that has influenced me so deeply. We must respect the honest views of others. So many things shape our convictions, and to belittle anyone because they see things differently is to be naïve about how life works.

Mother died in the summer of 2001. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss her. She was the “leader of the band” in our family, and I’ll always be grateful to God for her wisdom and passion and love of life.