This past weekend was Mother’s Day in the US (and a few other countries) and spending it with mom was definitely a treat. One of the things we did together was to attend her chruch (of which I was one-time a member) and just engage that time of fellowship and the Word together.

What I didn’t expect is to have another one of those inadvertant research sessions where I’d see and catalog a number of people and their mobile tech usage.

Mom’s church is a fairly large one (over 5000 people on just the main campus), and there’s a lot of technology that has been used there over the years. Before I left that church to center fellowships more around my college campus, I was seen there quite often with a Palm PDA in hand, reading the Word and engaging with others. It was a strange sight then, and I got dinged for “playing during service” many times before people understood that mobile was the way forward for many of us.

So this past Sunday, as we all stood to read chapter 2 of Exodus (the message was on the faith of a believing mother), I scanned the audience looking for familiar faces. Besides seeing a few, I noticed that there were a number of people reading the Bible on their mobile devices. Blackberries, iPhones, and a few others in cases where I couldn’t tell exactly the model. But this was neat. Mobile tech being used to read the Word. Totally not my experience of about a decade ago.

And then I saw a mother in front of me. She and her daughter were reading, but it wasn’t from a smartphone. They were using the Amazon Kindle and sharing the reading experience together. From my vantage point in the pew behind them, this was something they were both comfortable with. Even to the point of the mother highlighting and noting as the passage was being read.

I glanced over to my mom who had taken to looking at the Bible from my mobile device. I’ve had nothing short of trouble finding an easy to use Bible reader for her mobile device. And yet, there we were over the smaller screen (and larger text size than was in her printed version) engaging the Word in a public reading moment.

There are a lot of things that we can be thankful for mothers for. And on this past Mother’s Day, I noticed mothers playing a role of nuturing spiritual development while engaging within another stage of technology. Nothing really different, and at the same time, this marked a rose of a different kind showing its petals.