Because You Carried Me

We celebrate this weekend, May 10,2020, Mother's Day.  It is not an easy time for some who are scarred and fragile when it comes to their mother, being a mother or never having but wanting to be a mother.  For others, it is a time celebrated with gifts and hugs and kisses.  Kids do their best art and moms coo and gush as if Davinci himself gave them a masterpiece made just for them.  We celebrate motherhood.

I have had the opportunity to sit in and even be a presenter for five days of exploring and expanding on the theme of "Because You Carried Me. Celebrating Motherhood."  It is in this forum of discussions I was reminded and learnt that we have something to celebrate no matter what our relationship is with our own mothers.  If she did nothing else worthy she carried you.  She laboured and delivered you when she could have opted out.  She could have chosen to abort and she did not.  She carried you to term and gave birth even when this world would have said to her, "it is alright if you don't.  It is after all your life, your body and your choice."   So there is a reason to celebrate.  You are the life that has been produced.

In addition to that, I can better appreciate Mothers who had to wait for a long time to even see the fruit of their prayers. Moms like Hanna who was barren but prayed without ceasing even while enduring the mocking jeers of her sister wife.  She was a mom who kept her vow to the Lord and gave her only son at that time back to the Lord.  We christen our children and we commit them to God but then we take them back to raise on our own and in futility.  We can learn from her life and her enduring spirit as well as her promise keeping example.  Moms like Jochebed, the mother of Moses, who made the choice to save her son however she could.  She gave birth to a beautiful boy but in a time of persecution for all Hebrew baby boys born.  She made a basket and placed him in a river where he was rescued by Pharaoh's daughter.  She found him and knew that he was not of her people but yet, she carried him into her home and her heart.  She called him her own and gave him what she had - the protection of her station and life when so many others died.  We can celebrate all the step moms and foster moms and spiritual moms and moms that are simply women who are in your life bearing and laboring with you.

Most importantly, we understand that God has carried us all along.  Oh, He is likened unto a mother hen that beckons her chicks to come under her wings. There they find warmth and protection.  The hen bonds with that chick before they hatch and they know her voice.  GOD has called us from the womb, named us and carries us.  We can celebrate because He has carried us; carried us when the Devil that dragon, wants to kill us after we have laboured and delivered.  He prepares a place of refuge for us and brings us to it when we are tired and vulnerable or rested and vibrant.  God has and is carrying us - all the way to the end.