Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

Back in 1908, Anna Jarvis wanted to celebrate her mother. She’s credited with establishing the holiday we just celebrated this past Sunday – Mother’s Day. Later in life, as retailers exploited the holiday, she wished she had just stuck with a card.

I’ve always found Mother’s Day to be a tricky tightrope kind of a day. A mixture of love and exasperation. Desire and longing. Hope and disappointment. Heartache for mamas of angels. Heartache for women longing for a child. Heartache for children of all ages who miss their mamas. Oh motherhood is special, and it is complicated.

I’ve known a lot of mamas. I’ve seen mamas who stayed and mamas who left and mamas who wanted to stay but couldn’t. Most often, motherhood looks nothing like a Hallmark card. But no other experience has challenged and deepened and honed my character to the same extent as total responsibility and complete commitment to unconditional love for another person.

This isn’t limited to moms. Or even dads. If you have nurtured anything, you know the tedium of mundane tasks. You know the exhaustion of tending to small, ungrateful things. You know that fruit takes a long time. None of it feels like the stuff of greatness.

Instead it’s constancy and self-sacrifice, pouring out and investing in day in and day out, whether you feel like it or not, when you’re just tired and want a break. That’s when something far greater is happening underneath the surface.

You are growing the deepest, strongest love. You’re taking on the character of God Himself.

He knows about putting the needs of someone else before His own wishes and wants (Philippians 2:8). He knows about taking the last place (Mark 9:35). He knows what it means to give up His own life so that someone else will live (John 15:13). I think the reason Jesus’ last command was “Love each other in the same way I have loved you” (John 15:12), is because He knows it will refine us and transform us in a way nothing else can.

What is the best thing, the most glorious thing about God?  It’s His love. His perfect, mind-boggling love. His enduring, never-ending, 100% commitment to His beloved children. His love is everlasting, unfailing (Jeremiah 31:3). It stays and stays and stays. It never stops. How can it stop? “Love never fails” (1 Corinthians 13:8).

I wouldn’t be who I am if it weren’t for the experience of mothering; I would be less without it. My rough edges are worn away, my selfishness is usurped by hearts that depend on me for tender care. I get to not just talk about love that lays down its life, but I get to do it. I get to be inconvenienced and stretched and poured out and it is all exhausting and overwhelming and wonderful.

Without love, I would be nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:2, paraphrase