Mother's Day Honor

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Welcome to Masculine Journey. We're glad that you're with us this week, and this is a special week, right? Because we're at an eve.

Robby, can you tell us which eve that we're at? Mother's Day Eve. Mother's Day Eve, that's right.

So if you haven't shopped by now, you better get out there. I'm just saying, you know, for the mothers in your life, you fill in the blank on who that is, but yes. And sometimes it can be a daughter that's a mother, just saying.

Absolutely. The worst thing is having a wife who's a mother and thinks you should be giving her Mother's Day present. You're not my mother, but that's never worked. Does your wife listen to this show? I know I'm in trouble.

I'll be in trouble tomorrow anyway because I didn't get her anything for Mother's Day. I'm just saying, just saying. So Andy, as you try to pass the mic back to Robby, yeah, so the topic of this week's show is your idea. This is your show. It's Andy's show, so if you don't like it, write in, say, I didn't like Andy's show.

If you do like it, just say, Sam, thank you for the show. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. The love abounds today.

Exactly, yeah. So no, I was, it has been on my heart. I mean, I guess, you know, a lot of times we are talking about masculine things and a lot of times we talk about father wounds and connection to the Father and finding God as our Father, but sometimes I don't think we think about daily, you know, the impact our mothers had on us, even though, you know, my father's passed, but my mother's not. My mom has always played a big impact in my life and also my spiritual life. So I just thought it was, you know, it's Mother's Day, let's honor mothers. And I, you know, I just think it's, I think it will be good for our souls to articulate what our mothers have meant to us and to honor them.

I think it'll be good for us as well as we go through the show. Yeah. You know, there were two in the garden, Adam and Eve. And so Eve is made in God's image, right? And so our moms are made in God's image, right? And so how that plays out depends on like with us, it doesn't always play out the way God intended or maybe it does, right? But we are still made in that image.

And so, you know, this, some of this is part of just realizing, you know, God's image through our moms. Rodney, you actually, for the first time, I think ever? No, I've actually gone first before.

I've had a laugh. Was I here that week? You might not have been. You were at the beach a lot.

Probably a week I was gone, we actually got your clip even on the air, let alone first in the lineup. Yeah. Mother's Day. Mom, I love you. This is big.

I get to be first on the very first clip of the show. So this is for you, mom. She sent me a message. I appreciate that.

Yeah. It's like, you said to send her that message, masculinejourney.org. So, you know, but yeah, being an only child, I do get spoiled just, just a little bit, but so I was trying to think of, you know, what, what clips to go with and what was very interesting that we all came together at the end of this week to do the show. And we're all like, it's been really hard to find clips and what would really describe our mothers.

But my first thought went to June Cleaver with Leave it to Beaver and just kind of the homely, just bringing a home together type of thing, not only looking sorry, mom. We didn't mean homely. There was just back just, whoop, whoop, whoop.

I know you want to get off the first string right now. Just have a homey. I got homey.

That's the word I'm looking for. Homey atmosphere, you know? And I'm like, I didn't know what to, what I would find out there, but it's just, this was one, this was a clip where June kind of talks to Beaver about God. And it's kind of interesting in the clip where he was lying and, you know, June's like, well, you know, always tell the truth. But then in the middle of the clip, when he asked, well, was God there when daddy was talking to Mr. Rutherford is just after dad just got done kind of fibbing a little bit about not going over to Mr. Rutherford's house and you go ahead and play the clip and we'll come back. New house and you told those lies about the dog biting you.

I guess so. Beaver, it's telling lies that gets us into trouble. You'll always be safe if you tell the truth. And anyway, even when you think you're getting away with it, God knows you're lying. How? Oh, because God knows everything. He sees everything. He sees everything. Right through the roof? Right through the roof. Right through the ceiling?

And through the ceiling. Would God see me if I hid in the closet? Yes, Beaver.

You see, God is everywhere. Was God there when dad was talking to Mr. Rutherford on the telephone? Well, Beaver, that was a little bit different. You see, well, your father was tired and he didn't want to hurt Mr. Rutherford's feelings. Well, Beaver, I'm afraid sometimes your father and I make mistakes. And that's okay. I make myself sometimes, mom.

Well, you lie down now and take a nap. Okay, mom. Well, yeah, my mom was certainly the spiritual leader in our family. And, you know, we talked earlier about getting drugged to church and I didn't get dragged to church as much as I was told was. I was expected to go. And I went and it was something that never kicked in until much later in life as to what that really meant to me because I had this picture of just going to church. I didn't have a picture of Jesus and God and what he did for me personally. But me coming to Christ has just enriched my relationship with my mom so much more because now I can go talk to her about anything and feel comfortable where before I would not always shy away and not share.

But when, you know, there's certain moments in your life when you're like, oh my gosh, my mom loves me that much that she would do that for me. So I was just, my first time I was going to go up to Wisconsin with my buddy Larry and his family and go snowmobiling. And we're going to get picked up on the 26th of December at four in the morning and we're heading for Wisconsin.

Okay. I'm getting up and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is early. But then I'm like, oh yeah, what do I get to go do? This is great. So I'm kind of getting excited.

I walk out to the kitchen and I've got a full breakfast, sausage and eggs sitting there waiting for me at three 30 in the morning to have breakfast before I go on this trip. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I couldn't believe that she had done that for me. And then not only did she do it then, but she did it like every year. And then I got to rub it into my buddy's noses when I had a full belly and they were out starving in the morning when we were going up with them. That's cool. That's a great story. Thank you.

Robby, we've got probably four or five minutes. Do you want to go ahead and tell a little bit of your story and play your clip? Sure, sure.

Yeah. My mom went to be the Lord in 2016, same year as Sam's. It's kind of weird that we've done life through these things together, but I have just an awesome moment that my mom, you know, one of the last time she talked coherently because she died of bone cancer, was in a lot of pain.

So she was on heavy doses of morphine there in the last few days for life. And it just so happened that it was on the 10th anniversary show of The Christian Car Guy that she wanted to call in and share her feelings. And I'll just sort of make sure we get that in. Just go ahead and play what my mom, who called into the most Christian Car Guy shows prior to her death, so she was not any surprise to the listeners. Go ahead. And right now we have my mom live from Illinois.

Mom, you got something for us on our 10th anniversary? I'm not sure how live I am. I just had a terrible example for all you young people out there of trying to work a telephone and a computer all at one time when you're on morphine. I want to tell you, I could not find your station. I could not find it. Well, anyhow, I just wanted to say that everybody out there, that maybe he has changed a lot of lives, but The Christian Car Guy show has changed Robby Gilmore's life. And it could hardly get any better, but as his mom, I'm going to tell you, he's getting better and better. I love you all over there. Bye. I love you all over there.

Bye. So, yeah, that's a very precious few seconds that have meant a lot to me, but I was remembering the first time, you know, it's funny that I'm in public speaking because I ran for some student office in fourth grade, and I was terrified, terrified to go in front of the whole school and give this speech. And I can remember my mother just, you know, she was, my mother was a Latin major in college, and she was brilliant when it came to language and spelling and all the things I can't do. And she had it all lined out for me. Son, this is what you're going to do.

And you just remember, John Kennedy asked not what your student body could do, you know, whatever. I can remember the whole thing. She had it all lined out and she had me so pumped up because she had such faith in me, right? And you could hear in her voice. And there's so much my life that I think she instilled in me a certain amount of faith that, right, became faithful.

So beautiful stuff, you know, definitely hard to listen to though. Yeah, it is. You know, I had the honor of meeting your mom on the way back from NRB.

We stopped by and I was able to meet her and get to say hello and put a name with a face. And so that was really cool. And I think it's pretty interesting. Your mom was a Latin major and you become this Hebrew major. I mean, honestly, I mean, it's kind of continuing the tradition, right, that she was studying a language that a lot of people don't necessarily, unless you're into the medical field, really deal with. And you're very into a language unless you're in the theological field, you don't really spend a lot of time on it.

Yeah, it's kind of cool when you think about it. The word mom in Hebrew, since you brought it up. I knew it was there.

It's like Prego spaghetti sauce. I know it's there somewhere. It's all in there, whatever that is. So aleph bed is dad, abba, you can hear the sound of the B and the abba.

Am is mom. That's got the mem in there that is almost like inbred. That same concept of, but still the aleph, you know, you were talking about how your mom was a lion.

Well, you know, like Solomon would say that a woman of virtue who can find it begins with an aleph, that verse. Because the idea of the woman is also, you know, very much the idea of that, of that alpha like leadership role in the family that's so critical. Oh yeah. Just, you want to see a woman come alive, fully alive, just injure her child. Oh yeah.

Yeah, she'll tear you up. Right. So we're gonna come back.

We're gonna talk more about our mom's impact on our lives. We do have a bootcamp coming up, November 17th through 21st. Go to masculinejourney.org to register. We'd love to have you there. We know God would love to have you there.

For me, describing bootcamp, when I heard the stories from the stage that the other men had, and then during my prayer time, I'm getting a download from God on where my life is and how I have wounds and I have a place in his story, to know how I heard from God is one of those things. He really does communicate with us. Register today at masculinejourney.org. Order today at masculinejourney.org.

Take care. So that was Vinnie Menino for those long-time listeners, right, that used to be one of the regulars of our show. Vinnie went to be Lord a couple years after my mom, I guess at 2019. Yeah, during COVID. Yeah.

And so I did a Christian car guy show for mothers, probably that was 2015 or 2014, and was taking, you know, Vinnie had that gangster voice because he grew up in Manhattan, in that, we're not exactly sure what all he was involved in. In that arena. In that arena.

Yeah. And he had a way of saying that kind of stuff that really laid it on you. But certainly it's great to hear that voice. And my mom's voice in the same show, like, wow, it's really cool that we can have things like that to hear, you know? Yeah, Vinnie was raised in a time where, without a doubt, he respected his mom. You know, that was not an option not to for him. So Danny, we're going to move towards you and with your clip, if you want to talk to us a little about this journey for you.

Yeah, this has been a tough topic. Mom passed away in September last year. So I promised Andy I'd try to get through this and not wet any of the electronics in the studio. So I was looking for, you know, and everybody's already sitting, hardly any clips out there. And so I couldn't find anything. And so I started looking at songs and I'd play a little bit of a song and then cry a little bit and play a little bit of a song and then cry a little bit more.

And so I think my laptop's okay. I'm not sure. But I found a song and never heard this song. It's a country song.

I know that's going to shock a lot of you that I would pick a country song. And I never heard it and looked at the backstory. And this guy wrote this song for his mother on Mother's Day last year. And the chorus is what we cut out. And it it pretty much describes my mom.

And so we can play the clip. I asked my wife, I said, if you had to describe mom in one word, what would you say? She said loyal. And she was an amazing lady. And as she passed away, we went through some of the records she had kept. And Lord, she had the notes from my first sermon when I was 14. She had all kinds of dictation and stuff from the events in our lives of a bad divorce. But one of the things that my daughter found was the notes of all that stuff.

And my daughter, I won't ever forget her reading it. And she called me and she said, dad said, my whole life's a lie because her mother had told her a whole different story. But she knew when she found grandma's notebook, it was the truth. It was just like the King James version of the Bible lay in there.

There was no variance there. And to think about how mom did the thing she did, she worked full time. She raised two boys. I'm pretty sure that increased her prayer life quite a bit. I know my brother did.

It wasn't me, but I hope he listens. And to do all those things, to have supper on the table when everybody got home and everything still be hot. I don't know that the woman ever ate a hot meal because she was doing everything for everybody else. She was caretaker for both of my grandmothers. And she raised my daughter for most of her into her teenage years. And then she gave her to me and go, no, she didn't. But she did all those things.

She was a devoted wife, a mother, a church going lady, the whole nine yards worked and that kind of thing. And you go, how in the world did you pull all that off? That's why they call it retired.

I think because you've tired all over again. Exactly. Exactly. I just have a feeling that, you know, as you were growing up, your mom used to grab you by your hair to get your attention. Not for very long.

Okay. Well, I know meeting your brother, I was thinking she probably didn't grab his hair. He's bald too. That's funny. She probably had one under each arm. I'm pretty sure.

Or under each hand. Exactly. Exactly. Andy, you want to tell us a little bit about your clip and go ahead and play it?

Sure. So my mom's kind of a Walton's groupie. So this is kind of the honor with the clip first, but the content of it, I think really speaks to our relationship. In this clip, Olivia is the mom and John boy is the son. And there's a pastor and a school teacher who were getting married and they just had to book. They decided to leave and go book and they needed fill-ins for the pastor and for the school teacher. And John boy got the pastored and his mom got the school teacher. So it's been a rough week.

They've been really busy. So the family goes out to the mountain and have a picnic on the mountain and John boy notices that his mom's up there. And so he goes up to talk to her about her experience and she speaks into his experience as well. And this is a conversation. Mostly it's just the thoughts. You know, I've got to sift them out in my mind, sort them out and organize them.

I've got to have some reason to stand up there and talk to those people and they've got to have some reason to sit there and listen to me. It's coming. I knew it would. It's like him to think of coming up here for supper.

Yeah, he comes up here every chance he gets. Feel that breeze. I can feel the ragged edges just smoothing away. Land in the pine trees is a sermon in itself.

All right. So you hear there, excuse me, that, um, you know, his, uh, John boy's mother spoke into his life and just said, you know, I knew you could do it. And I always got that from my mom, whatever, whatever I took on sports, whatever. Um, she was there and she, she had that positive word. I mean, she was all about family and sadly our family broke up, but we had those good family times around the table and stuff, but I just think of her spiritual impact in my life. And, you know, it was kind of funny. She knew I was into sports and she was always trying to slough off these Christian athlete biographies and stuff like that.

And I wouldn't take the bait for a long time. And I kind of went my own way, saved when I was a young kid, but kind of took my own way. And in my twenties, you know, I was dating a girl and, you know, my mom was, she was really concerned about my spiritual life and she had her own spiritual walk that she was walking out. And at that time she really wanted to give up smoking.

And, um, but she felt like that was somewhat tied to where I was at that she needed to give up something to receive it. So speaker came to our church from Africa and he kind of prophesied over her that basically it was like the story from Isaiah about Hezekiah when Hezekiah was, you know, had a disease unto death and, you know, he had cried out to God about it. And Isaiah came and said, I've seen your tears.

Well, that prophet said, I've seen your tears. And shortly after that, I remember the exact timing. God got a hold of my heart. I began to start thinking about spiritual things again.

I can remember it was Easter of that year. I just remember reading the gospels or reading the Easter story and just sitting there weeping. And then, you know, shortly after that, you know, he got a hold of my heart really, really seriously. And, you know, just that she wasn't, she wouldn't give up on me spiritually. I know she prayed a lot, but just that story, that steadfastness that she had, it was really cool. We really got involved in the same church shortly after that. She ends up going, which, you know, this is my mom that's just worked in corporate America for all these years. She goes and takes a short-term mission trip for a year to El Salvador.

Yeah. It's just amazing how God led us through that. And we've been, stayed pretty close. Through my separation I went through, she's been there for me all that time. And, you know, I just, she's been a great blessing. I mean, she's had stuff from her past that has affected her life and all, but she's, we've walked through it together and it's just, that's one of the reasons I just, I felt like I really needed to honor my mom on the radio. Yeah.

And we got a chance to meet her. Yep. That was fun. Yep.

Absolutely. Got a story about me that you're not going to share, right? I'm not going to share. Robby's going to share.

I'm pretty certain he's going to share. Robby? I asked her, what was the Andy story that they always tell at the family? And she said, I'm going to give you a word and see if it's the same word. And the word was crawdad. And I said, crawdad. And then she, she goes, Andy, what's the word? And he said, you know, she had whispered it to me, crawdad.

I said, what in the world? Crawdad. Well, apparently Andy had been catching crawdads and they had a glass full of crawdads with water in it. And the other hand was a Pepsi and he was getting thirsty. Apparently he was parched and apparently had the crawdads in one hand and the Pepsi in the other and switched them, you know, for a moment enough to get a good swallow of crawdad water. And so if you ever wondered why Andy has a tendency to back up from things, you know, you see him doing the back step there, you know, they could be that crawdad waters got higher under rocks too.

I've wondered about that. It's all coming into focus now and it comes through in a pinch. Well, how do I follow that? All right. So one question I'm going to ask you guys in the after hours, right somewhere around the question is going to be something around, think about how your mom's put her fingerprints on your life. Now that's a little bit what you were sharing, Andy, but additional stories of her just impacting the way that you do things or the way that you see things or the way that you carry yourself. And the story everybody wants to hear that I'm hoping Danny will tell is what his mom had to say to his ex-wife on the phone. Classic. It's only be told after hours. There's nothing to be told and edited as well. There comes a point where mama bear does come out and you know, that was, that's quite the story.

It is told by the storyteller himself. Yeah. There's a few times I remember my mom getting angry and most of them had to do with things about her kids, you know, and so maybe I'll share some of that after, but this is the last day you had before mother's day. So if there are mothers in your life, if you're fortunate, your mother's still alive, you're still connected with her, make sure you get her something. If your wife and you have children, she's a mother, get her something.

If you have grandchildren, you know, somebody in that group is a mother. Take it from Vinnie. Take it from Vinnie. Show a little respect. Show a little respect. Get him something. Get him a card. Tell him you love him. Just do something for them. Honor them tomorrow, please. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the boot camp coming up November 17th through 21st. We'll talk to you next week. This is the Truth Network.