On Mother’s Day
On Mother’s Day
It’s Mothering Sunday this weekend, so a massive, digital hi-five and well done to all those hard-working mums out there!
But I also know that for many women, today will be a date that they have been dreading, or that perhaps just feels a bit bittersweet.
So to all those women who have recently lost mothers, who have absent mothers, who have lost babies, or are still waiting to become mothers, or perhaps dealing with the grief of infertility right now, know that I am writing this blog for you.
May you simply know God’s grace and the peace of his presence today.
A mix of bittersweet
This Mother’s Day, we were due to be spending some quality time with extended family and friends, and celebrating life with our little boy. But instead, like most families, we’ll be socially distancing and staying at home instead.
What’s more, for yet another year, we’ll also be letting this date pass by without a much longed-for second child and sibling for our son, so this year will be a real mixture of emotions for me, just as it has been every year since recurrent miscarriage first entered my story.
But isn’t that so often how life can be? Moments of gratitude for what we have, alongside disappointment over what has been lost…
Moments of joy, and moments of sadness.
Moments of abundance, and moments of longing.
Moments of beauty, and moments of brokenness.
The bitter and the sweet, co-existing side by side.
When I was younger I used to think that being a christian would somehow magically exempt me from experiencing most of life’s troubles, as if my faith acted as some kind of fast-pass through pain.
But that’s simply not the deal…
The Bible is just full of stories about ordinary people who found the courage to endure awful troubles and hardships as they put their hope in an extraordinary God.
And in fact, in Hebrews 11:39 we can read a long roll-call of many great heroes of the faith, only to larn in the the final line that although ‘each of them were commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised.’
Did you catch that? A life of faith doesn’t guarantee the outcome or answer that you want. And it doesn’t always lead to full healing or wholeness this side of heaven either. Instead, we continue to live in the tension space between the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’ of God’s coming kingdom.
So I’m slowly learning to make space for acknowledging those bitter things and honouring those points of pain and grief in my story, alongside the sweeter parts of my life.
And as much as I would prefer that they didn’t exist, they often act as a painful yet urgent reminder that my ‘here and now’ is not my ‘forever home’. Perhaps this is true of my difficult journey through motherhood more than anything else I have experienced during life so far.
Loss in motherhood has left me undone in a way that nothing else has. But it has also left me more certain than ever that life here isn’t all as it should be, and with a much deeper longing for my true heavenly ‘home’ with God, when I will finally feel that ache no more.
Making space for lament
It’s one thing learning to make space for times of lament and making peace with the sadness in our own souls, but what about everyone else?
The truth is that grief and lament are not thing that our culture tends to be very comfortable with either.
We tend to be much better at marking moments of happiness, and celebrating with people in their success, than sitting with people in their pain. We tend to want to cheer people up, find solutions to help fix things, and hurry people into healing. And sadly, that even tends to be true of faith communities too.
So where does that leave those of us who are facing difficult emotions about Mother’s day this year?
I don’t have all the answers, but as a person of faith I do know this. The Jesus that I follow was ‘a man of suffering, acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53:3) - which means that there’s space for you here as his table.
Even today.
There is space for your anger and frustration and tears today.
I can’t promise that he will remove your infertility or take away the pain of loss or give you the family that your heart longs for, at least not in this lifetime anyway. But I can promise that he offer his presence, his present-ness in your pain.
Faith is not just about having some future, distant hope in his promise that He is making all things new again and that one day the brokenness we experience in this world will be no more. It is all of that, but it is also so much more. It is solidarity for today.
We follow a saviour who knows how it feels to hurt, and who doesn’t look away. Instead, he promises to draw near.
Psalm 34:18 says that ‘The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit’ and“ who says that ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” ( Matthew 5:4 ).
So if Mother’s Day feels hard for you this year, I simply pray that you would know that his presence with you in a new and deeper way.