We are all called to "mother"

This weekend is Mother’s Day here. I can hear the voice of my dad saying that its a commercial holiday that is created to introduce sales, make cash registers ‘ting’ all the while having very little to do with mothers. Safe to conclude from this statement that we didn’t embrace this day of celebration. 

Sitting at the table with the Sisters over a cuppa, I mentioned about Mothers day asking dates as was not sure if same here as in NZ. The conversation went on to say the origin of the celebration was around the feast of Mary - WHAT! This is based on a christian celebration - just like easter, christmas, valentines day… *sigh* should have seen this coming…. 

Which left me yesterday plodding in the garden reflecting on mothers. I believe that we all are called to ‘mother’ another. We mother the world that shows up at our doorsteps whether we call it mothering or not. 

We mother whether we are married, or we have ever borne down in the battle cry of birth or not. 

We mother because we are called to it - this flinging a life preserved to a drowning sister, child, college student, teenager, grandmother…. 

We mother because we can’t not. 

This is what we women do. 

We give ourselves away - little bits and pieces of who we are, of our courage, of our deep faith even on the nights we’re the most afraid. We bear down and we find ways to bring life to people desperate for air. 

These are the women who remember to keep naming their progeny - joy and determination and grit and evangelisation and Psalms and prophecy and preaching all the time between the waves of all this life that sometimes we slip and call “ordinary” 

We mother and motherhood is its own mission field and no one is disqualified from serving. 

This feels little like a foreign concept or message at times - especially when the number one question people ask once their learn your religious is “but don’t you want to be a mum, have children?” 

My response is always why limit myself to my own children when I can gift so much to many more…. 

Some days we might not have the faith to believe it, after all its hard enough been a women in this world without adding in the call to journey beside another. 

Mothers day this year is felt with joy for me. The Lord has blessed and gifted me with gentle souls who embrace me like mothers. Taking me in as their own and nurturing me with the gift of life to shape me into the disciple Im called to be. 

While my own mother is also a gift, no Hallmark mother, yet none of us are, if we are really truth telling here. Those burnt dinners, yelling mornings and neck strained words over mix matched socks and scattered Lego, with unfinished homework, trumpet sounding more like a dying animal call at times, with the head spinning violin to add another dynamic … Not to mention the frozen chicken and no clean uniform; the wild words no one would want the cameras rolling for….. 

And the realisation - that mother’s labor and delivery never ends and you never stop having to remember to breath. 

The deal is - Motherhood isn’t sainthood - real womanhood isn’t a function of becoming a great mother, but of being loved by your Great Father. 

Some days there is no room big enough to find peace, no clock could tick fast enough to just get the day over with, and the truth is, facades only end up suffocating us all and its only telling the truth that lets you breathe - 

and there really were days that felt pretty bad and looked pretty ugly. 

The ugly beautiful of reality and love and humanity and what it means to become real. 

That was what happened - the stacks of dishes and everest of laundry and the tantrums of toddlers and teenagers for that fact - tired souls with scuffed marks up the pathways and through the heart, they were all wearing down the plastic pride, wearing down to the real wood of grace and the Cross. 

It really is okay. 

To lose it and be found, 

to be rubbed the wrong way, 

to be come the rightest way, 

to let all the hard times rub you down to real. 

That’s just the pretty ugly of us - we are not Hallmark women!! Thank God.

The angular, hard edges of perfection are being sanded down by all our scrapes and falls, till we are round and soft and can get close enough to each other to just embrace one another. 

This year, I say - let go of Hallmark Mother’s - bust the Balloon of Better Homes and Gardens - and live the Gospel of Grace -

We are done with perfection because we’re the Everyday Prodigals who are in love and extravagant in grace and recklessly spending our attention on the mercies of the Prodigal God. 

God wants Prodigal Parents - not perfect parents. 

Lavish in love, extravagant in truth, big spenders of grace. 

It won’t be perfect - but we’ll be prodigals.