Every year as a child I would write you a message in your Mother’s Day card something to the effect of, “Thanks for all you do!” Back then, I did not fully understand the scope of “all you do.”
It was not until that first day when I brought our daughter home from the hospital that I began to receive a tiny glimpse of what motherhood meant. We are told that the Proverbs 31 woman looked well to the ways of her household and did not eat the bread of idleness. Every time you put another load of laundry in the washing machine, picked up a hungry baby to nurse, or made a meal for our family you did this. Spending every waking (and sleeping) moment with my infant child was a revelation that you had done the same for me, although, I did not remember those moments. There are years I have no recollection of but you do.
Proverbs 23:23 tells us to buy truth and do not sell it. Year after year you instilled this message in me, if you are going to be anything, be truthful; such a simple message but one that was particularly difficult for me to execute. Being truthful involves a level of vulnerability to which most are not willing to submit themselves. Thank you for sacrificing your time, money, and self to train me up in the way I should go (Proverbs 22:6). Although you were not given an example of holiness in your childhood, you created the wave which will affect generations of our family.
Many times in your years of mothering my four brothers and I at home were not easy. As Ann Voskamp says, “…God needed someone to love the least and the little into real whole people, and He knew that to love is to suffer so God made a mother.” The little years were hard when a child went into the hospital to have his heart sown up, when another broke her arm, yet another broke his collarbone, or when you and Dad realized the youngest of us would never be able to speak because of his disability. Then we grew up into little adults who were on the verge of graduating into the world. Words were yelled, lies were told, feelings were hurt and those wounds went much deeper.
While my daughter was living inside me I was concerned about birth plans and labor pains and it was not until she was here that I understood that was the easy part. The suffering, the sacrifice, and the sanctifying power of motherhood had only just begun. Nothing has caused me to cry out to God for His help more. The sin that lives inside me is being purified every time I die to self for the greater cause of raising the child He has placed in my care.
Mom, we know God wants for us to be conformed to the image of His Son. While we both pray over our children that they would not be satisfied with broken cisterns but would rather come only to the foot of the cross and find peace and contentment there, God is in the business of doing the same with us. In the daily minutiae of washing another dirty cup, cooking another pot of pasta, giving another reminder, and another, another, another…God is working in us. He is patient with us as we are patient with them. He is the only perfect parent who, through the power of the Holy Spirit, chooses to use our fragile abilities to convey His love. Thank you for allowing God to work through your life to change mine Mom. I love you.