I know it is not Mother’s Day, but this topic is heavy on my heart today, and for those who know why, I hope this will be a balm for you. Mothers and Fathers are both equal parts of God’s plan for the family. For those of you whose parents did not stay together, either through tragedy or divorce, this is not to say that you got a raw deal from God. The world is broken and it was not your fault. God is in the business of healing any hurt that any of us let him heal. I say all of this for qualification because I will be writing this from the framework of a loving mother in the context of a biblical family. I don’t want any of you who did not have this experience to think I am leaving you out. Quite the contrary and I hope that for the sake of this short essay, you can simply picture the godly mother you wish you had or are striving to be yourself. I too am writing this from a guy’s perspective, so I am sure I will miss so many nuances mothers or daughters would not. This is not exhaustive but hopefully edifying.
I grew up in the ’90s, a little in the ’80s, but my memory begins in the year 1989… Before that, I remember very little. So I, and rightfully so I think, consider myself a child of the ’90s. That decade has many things I love about it; the Chicago Bulls, pump shoes, and objectively the best music of any decade. Sorry for any of you that think I am biased… it’s not biased if I am right… One thing that is true, past any sarcasm I just wrote, is that in the 90s loving our mothers was the norm. TV commercials about soup with famous people and their moms, pop songs about men who loved their mothers, and even “your mom” jokes, which were negative but telling about our thought processes, all pointed to the fact that our culture was mom-centric. In the 90’s we loved our moms. It was socially acceptable to hate your dad or make fun of him but “don’t you be talkin’ ‘bout my momma” was used as no vain threat in schoolyards everywhere.
For many of us raised in loving Christian homes, we never did the dad bashing and those same dads would have never allowed us to disrespect our moms in any way. I remember distinctly the day in 5th or 6th grade when I looked over at my mom, eye to eye, and cracked a joke because I was now taller than her (she is a towering 5’3”)... With zero hesitation I heard my dad, using his deep “dad” voice, say “you may be bigger than her but I still enforce everything she says…” My dad is not 5’3”, in fact at that time he would have been 6’4” and about 250lbs of farm muscle and facial hair. My dad was kind and loving. So loving that when he set a boundary, a real one, I knew it was set in concrete, inside of bedrock, on a tectonic plate that all the other tectonic plates got out of the way of…
All that to say that I never remember disrespecting my mother. We had weaknesses though in the culture I grew up in and in the ‘90s too. As perfect as both of those things were, a weakness I had was being able to talk about my feelings with my dad or men in general. My dad was better than most, at drawing it out of me and not squirming too much when my emotions came out of me involuntarily, but it was a weakness I grew up with. That weakness isn’t worse or better than any other, it was just weakness. That means that my mother was an island of comfort, a safe haven of sweetness, and a refuge when my hormonally charged emotions raged.
I set this all up as color for this simple but stark truth. Mothers are like nobody else in our lives. They are specially designed by God to give us life itself. They are the first people to disciple us, before we are even conscious, in the womb. They love us and share their very life with us in that womb. We know their name (Mommy) before we ever know the name they have been called their whole lives (Debbie in my mom’s case). There is the imagery of God being like a mother to us in the Bible that does not contradict in the least a biblical, complementarian worldview that I hope we all share. For further reading check out Isaiah 49:15 and 66:13. My favorite, because chickens are also one of my favorite animals to raise, is Matthew 23:37. God is compared to a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wing. There are many reasons chicks go under their mother’s wings; to escape danger or perceived danger, to get shade from the sun or warmth from the cold, to hide from predators who are too small to attack the hen, and last but not least to simply snuggle with momma and build that familial flock bond. Our own mothers are no different and God’s design for them was the same. To be all of that and more for us. So show some love to your mom today (if that is appropriate and safe for you) but more importantly thank God for her (even if she is far away, even so far as heaven). This is for you, adult son of a wonderful mother: You are not just a son anymore but a godly man and by that a default leader in the world… Be the godly son that your momma needs, be a son and let her love you but also be a man… Love her well and lead her at times if she needs a helping hand... How you love your wife someday will be reflected by how you have loved your mother well in the here and now… Don’t shirk the hard stuff and don’t run from the sweet/mushy stuff… As much as God made her to be your mother, He called you to be her son.
- Will Regier