A few years ago, ChristianityToday.com asked readers to share how much their mothers and grandmothers meant to them. In response, Bill Fix, of Taylor, Michigan, shared a moving testimony about his mother's faithful witness:

[Mom] grew up around the coal mines where her daddy worked, deep in the mountainous regions of Virginia. She came from a large, poverty-stricken family, so she learned how to be content with little. Dad and Mom were poor by the world's standards, but as a kid growing up, I did not know it. We were rich in so many other ways. Dad had two—sometimes three—jobs, so Mom could stay home and be a full-time mommy to her five children.

She hummed softly as she went about her work. It was as if she had blocked all the bad news out and was contemplating what was good and right and lovely. She was always living in the present, fondly reflecting [on] the past, and looking forward to the future. She found that in the present there was love, in the past there was joy, and in the future there was hope.

I will not forget the day the doctors told us that Mom had terminal cancer. I was devastated by [the] news. Things did not seem to change for Mom, though. Whenever I visited her, she was busy cooking or baking, doing a load of clothes, or sewing or working on something else. As she worked, she hummed a tune that seemed so beautiful to me.

[When I spoke with her about the cancer, she was calm.] She told me that this was not really her home. She said she had a home in heaven and that she would be going there soon. She told me not to worry, that she would be all right. Although that brought tears to my eyes, she continued to hum. I saw a beauty in my mother that I had never seen before. In her affliction she had become radiant. When she died, she was 59-years-old. I have replayed her words many times: "This is not my home. I have a home in heaven. I'll be all right." She is at her eternal home today.

Since that time I have become a pastor of a church where I have had an opportunity to see many people, like Mom, go to another home. As I minister to many of them, I am reminded of her—afflicted, yet radiant.