Courage to be a Mother

It takes courage today to be a mother.  It takes extraordinary courage today to be a mother who is joyful, content, God-thanking, standing in the face of a culture that slanders your calling or considers it not at a calling at all.

It takes courage to be a mother and entrust God with your body as you bring forth another life into the world.  It takes tremendous courage to lay your life down for that child for the next 20 years or so.  It takes extraordinary courage to do that several times if the Lord calls you to such a work.  And it takes enormous and extraordinary courage to then turn to your husband and, trusting God, entrust your man with leading you and those little ones while encouraging him to also pursue his other very important and intertwined callings God has placed upon his shoulders.

It takes courage to talk to God about your children far more and first before you talk to your children.  It takes great courage to get up, having renewed your faith in God’s perfect timing, and do all the works He has now prepared for you to walk in – countless works that no one will ever see, no one will ever notice – unless of course you didn’t do them.  It takes courage to keep going night after sleepless night with a little one knowing that the day will come still full of all of its requirements.

It takes courage to be a mother who commands her son to wear her wisdom around his neck when he has grown taller than her even though he is still just a boy.  It takes courage to trust that God has given you that wisdom and that position of authority – and it takes courage to balance that with showing respect to that adolescent son so that his tank is filled in ways only a mother can fill it.

It takes courage to be the physical representation of our Mother the church, who is our place of birth, nurture, discipline and growth, who is the one that leads us to our heavenly Father.  But these are the things you have been called to do – these are the things God has graciously equipped you to do and be – and these are the things for which we rise up and call you, mothers, blessed.  Happy mother’s day.