Mother’s Day 2016
It’s Mother’s Day weekend,
which has never been a huge celebration in my family. We have church, my kids give me some homemade
crafts and we go out to eat (instead of eating Taco Bell). That’s it.
And it’s good. Mother’s Day seems odd to me anyway. I think, like other holidays, it was invented
by the greeting card company. It just
seems artificial and obligatory. Our
family still celebrates a little bit; you can bet your farm and all its
chickens I’d be mad if my kids didn’t acknowledge it. But overall it’s just another day in
motherhood.
I am blessed by
motherhood. I am blessed by the
complexity and painful nature of it.
Nothing, other than marriage, has shaped me so much as being a mom. It has emptied me, ripped me apart, humbled
me, stretched me, broken me. Such is the
nature of love.
Ephesians 5:1-2
Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children,
and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an
offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
Giving yourself up for another is love. Giving
yourself up for a dirty-faced boy with sticky fingers and grass stained clothes
is motherhood.
Giving yourself to a child who is sick and may not
make it, who may not live the life you dreamed for her;
Giving yourself to a teenager who doesn’t appreciate
you, sometimes hates you and never thanks you but still needs you;
Giving yourself to carpools and soccer games and boy
scouts and baseball;
Giving yourself to a baby with colic who just doesn’t
respond to your attempts to comfort her;
Giving yourself to tantrums and tempers and fevers and
nightmares and tears;
Giving yourself to math homework and science projects
and picky eaters and dirty laundry and heartbreak and first love;
Giving yourself to your kids when they do stupid
things and get themselves into all kinds of trouble but you still see them as
the freckle-faced, cherub-cheeked angel of yesterday;
Giving yourself when your adult child leaves the nest
and you have to pretend to be happy because you know it is good for them, but
you are really heartbroken;
This is motherhood. This is sacrifice. It’s how we are shaped into better and more
holy people; more broken and more full.
This is love.