I know, at first glance this appears to be a ridiculous question. We wouldn’t be here if our mothers hadn’t chosen to have us. In our world of rejected babies, we should never take this for granted. In fact, it wasn’t that many years ago before the advent of prevalent hospitals and modern medicine that a mother knew that she was risking her own life to bring another life into the world. If you can find a really really old cemetery, you will find a number of graves that mark the resting place of both mother and child who never made it through childbirth. But as painful, arduous, and difficult as pregnancy and labor are, they are not the biggest challenge of being of a mom. Getting us here was really the easiest part for most of our moms. It was the getting us to adulthood that was the real miracle.
Getting us to adulthood was the real miracle.
I don’t know if you have ever stopped to consider all the things you don’t have to think about that you do to keep you safe. They’re those habits, bits of common knowledge, and safeguards that got built into your system at a very early age. We learned those, most often, from our mother. Things like washing our hands, staying out of the street, not walking away with strangers, not dancing in the bathtub (or on top of the counter), not walking behind a car, holding hands in a crowd, stopping at red lights, not running up and petting every stray dog... In fact, there are so many things a child must learn from the birth to age 4 that it is simply amazing that we can actually do it all. No one has a bigger imprint on our lives than the one who teaches us those basic safety issues and life values when we are between the ages of 0 and 4! For most of us, our moms were our patient teachers!
And that was just the beginning. We could take a tour of our lives and would be dumbstruck with wonder at all they have done for us. So what’s the point? Mother’s Day was yesterday, isn’t it time to move on? Nope! That is my point.
Modern culture likes to wrap appreciation into nice little marketable holidays so they can make a buck, we can do our duty, everybody gets a little something out of it, and we can get back to the other things in our lives. But I want to challenge us to be a little different. Let’s mark a day or two on our calendars between now and next Mother’s Day. Put down a little reminder to send flowers, share a card, have a special dinner... for our moms and let them know that we truly love them and we don’t need a holiday to say “Thank you!” After all, when God told us that a worthy Christian woman’s “children rise up and call her blessed, and her husband praises her” he wasn’t talking about one day a year because “a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised!” (Proverbs 31:28-31)
Phil Ware is minister of the Word at Westover Hills Church of Christ in Austin, Texas. For the past 4 years, he has also been co-editor of HEARTLIGHT Magazine. For more details, click here.
Title: "Where Would We Be Without our Mothers?"
Author: Phil Ware
Publication Date: May 15, 2000
