Mother’s Day

11
May
2025

Mother’s Day / Good Shepherd Sunday

A parent who does not forget us; a shepherd who walks beside us always

Thoughts on Mother’s Day / Good Shepherd Sunday


Mother’s day is not a joyful holiday for everyone. For some it is uneasy, or complicated, or painful. Some have had difficult relationships with their mothers—or mothers with their children. Some have lost their mothers or have lost a child. Some have wanted to become mothers and have been unable to do so. Some have never known their mothers and have been raised in foster care or group homes. Even for those in traditional family structures, mothering isn’t easy.  

Writing on Medium, Lauren H. Sweeney says, “Mother’s Day is hard for me because I am a mother and I have a mother. And we’re both inadequate. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, it wasn’t the plan. I was going to be everything she wasn’t. … The thing that makes mothering so hard (and consequently, a day about celebrating mothering so hard) is knowing that I don’t do it right, just as I wasn’t done right by. I mean, my mother tried. And I try.”  But life is hard and things don’t go painlessly.

Scripture says (Isaiah 49:15): “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?” In the next breath, that same scripture acknowledges that human parents may forget and neglect their children. I work in a human services agency, where child protection services and child support enforcement are ongoing concerns. We celebrate Mother’s Day for all the good that comes from mothers. We celebrate Father’s Day for all the good that comes from fathers. Yet we also acknowledge that there are no perfect parents in this world, nor any perfect children, and family life is frequently problematic.

Our heavenly Father assures us that even though earthly parents may fail to be mindful of their children, he will not forget us.“See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands,” he says (Isaiah 49:15-16). We wonder about that, though. We often cry out to God, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me” (Isaiah 49:14). We seek God, we thirst for him, wanting to know he is with us. We are like souls in a dry and weary land where there is no water (cf. Psalm 63:1). We feel like a man named Job felt long ago when his life fell apart. Whether we look ahead or behind or to the right or the left, we cannot perceive God’s presence. It seems God is hiding or has abandoned us (cf. Job 23:8-9).

Often, our problem with sensing God’s presence in our lives is we expect to find him only in obvious blessings, in pleasant and happy times, when we see signs of success. More often, God’s most noticeable presence with us is during times of strain and hurt and hardship. The LORD promises us, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isaiah 43:2). God does not promise that floods and fires and turmoil will not come our way. Rather, when the troubles of the world plague us, that is when we draw closest to him. 

Today is not only Mother’s Day. It is also Good Shepherd Sunday—a day to be reminded of how God cares for us and carries us. As the shepherd psalm (Psalm 23) assures us, even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we need no fear evil because the LORD is with us and comforts us (Psalm 23:4). In a sermon this weekend, a pastor echoed that word to congregation members, saying. “Our Shepherd walks with us and has always walked with us. No place is foreign to Jesus. All things are present to him, because he has defeated death.” Christ was and is and will be with us always—through life’s every trial, through death, and into eternity.

We will walk through troubles in this life. That doesn’t mean that God our Father has forsaken us. Rather, in times of trouble especially the Lord’s word rings true, telling us,  “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted” (Isaiah 66:13). We are assured that the Lord keeps track of all our sorrows, as if collecting all our tears in a bottle. He has recorded each one in his book (Psalm 56:1). We can take comfort in times of suffering, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5). 

It is best not to get too absorbed in our own pain and problems, but to connect with our fellow human beings in faith and hope. In a deeply personal book about the struggles of his own soul, Henri Nouwen wrote: “You will deceive yourself into believing that if the people, circumstances, and events [of your life] had been different, your pain would not exist. This might be partly true, but the deeper truth is that the situation which brought about your pain was simply the form in which you came in touch with the human condition of suffering. … Real healing comes from realizing that your own particular pain is a share in humanity’s pain. … Every time you can shift your attention away from the external situation that caused your pain and focus on the pain of humanity in which you participate, your suffering becomes easier to bear. It becomes a ‘light burden’ and an ‘easy yolk’ (Matthew 11:30). Once you discover that you are called to live in solidarity with the hungry, the homeless, the prisoners, the refugees, the sick, and the dying, your very personal pain begins to be converted into the pain [shared with all human beings], and you find new strength to live in it. Herein lies the hope of all Christians” (The Inner Voice of Love, 1996 – p. 103-104).

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  • For whatever reason God chose to make humans as we are—limited and suffering and subject to sorrow and death—God had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from humanity that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. 

-Novelist and Christian writer Dorothy Sayers

The Greatest Drama Ever Staged & The Triumph of Easter (1938)

Scripture quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Posted by David Sellnow
13
May
2024

Eve’s faith and ours

Faith made Eve a mother  … and faith carries each of us through our life in this world

The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living. … The Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.  He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord” (Genesis 3:20, 23; 4:1).

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You can’t help but know that Mother’s Day has arrived.  We’ve been bombarded with TV commercials, print ads in newspapers, flyers in our mailboxes, emails and texts and phone alerts – all wanting to make sure we buy plenty of stuff for our moms. For this edition of The Electric Gospel, I’d like to offer something different from the commercial and sentimental emphases of Mother’s Day. Let’s consider some spiritual thoughts about the first mother, our first mother, Eve. She and Adam provide a lesson for all of us, for it is by faith in God’s promises that they were and we are able to carry on in this world.

When the first man and woman were created, they were made in the image of God, perfect and holy like their creator. Life was flawless for them in the Garden of Eden, the wonderful paradise God made as their home. It was a place where they were to live in love and friendship toward God and toward one another.

But you know the story well – and you’ve felt the impact of what happened. The perfect life of the perfect couple in the perfect garden was spoiled. Eve took the first bite of forbidden fruit. Adam followed suit. They consciously disregarded a way they were to honor God. When they broke away from God in that way, everything became broken. Satan’s temptation had suggested they would be like divine beings, able to distinguish good from evil (Genesis 3:5). That was a devilish half-truth. Adam and Eve did come to know things in a way they hadn’t known before, but not really in the way that God knows good and evil. God knows evil as the opposite of his character, “for God cannot be tempted by evil” (James 1:13).  God knows good as what he is, fully and absolutely. As the Word attests, “The Lord is upright … there is no unrighteousness in him” (Psalm 92:15). Adam and Eve had come to know things from an opposite perspective. They knew good as what they used to have, as perfection they had lost. They knew evil as a force that now inhabited them, as something they were fatally attracted to.  This was the great tragedy of humanity’s fall into sin.

After Adam and Eve’s sin, God confronted them in the Garden. There would be consequences to what they had done. 

To Adam, God said, “Now by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken” (Genesis 3:19).  The Garden of Eden would be closed to them.  Life would change. There would be sweat and work and weeds and toil.  

To Eve, God said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). So now, to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), as God had instructed them, would be no easy task.  Bringing children into the world would be difficult from start to finish. Sin had changed things.   

But even with those announcements of pain and difficulty in life, what Adam and Eve were hearing from God was good news. They had disobeyed God. They had defied God. They knew God’s warning – “The day you eat [from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil], you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Quite likely, Adam and Eve had expected to die immediately, on that very day, because of what they had done. They hid from God, afraid (Genesis 3:8). But God didn’t put them to death on the spot. He was letting them know life would be full of sorrow and hurt – but that meant they still would be alive, they still had a future. 

And God made the point even more clear. He turned to the serpent, through whom Adam and Eve had been tempted. God said to him: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15). In those words Adam and Eve heard a promise of wonderful, renewed hope. A child born of woman would undo the damage that sin and the devil had done. God spoke of the woman’s offspring, so Eve and Adam knew that the future and God’s promise depended on her having offspring.

It was just then that the man (whom we know as “Adam”) gave his wife a name, Eve, which means life. “Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20 NIV). They were not dead but alive. They would have life, and their children would have life. There was hope for the whole human race. They did not give up in despair. They held onto hope and clung to God’s promise with faith. 

It was right after all that, right after being sent away from the Garden of Eden, that Adam and Eve began to have children. When they had their first child, they confessed their faith in what God had promised.  “With the Lord’s help I have had a baby boy,” Eve said (Genesis 4:1 NIrV).  In translating Eve’s words, it’s possible she was even thinking that this child, her first child, might already be the one that God meant in his promise – the one who would crush the serpent’s head and reverse the damage of sin. That wasn’t the case – the Promised One, Jesus Christ, wouldn’t arrive in the human story for several thousand years. But the hope and faith of Adam and Eve remained the same. God had given them promises on which to stake their faith. They grabbed onto those promises. Adam and Eve went forward to bring children into the world as an act of faith.

In my ministry days as a pastor in Texas, I met with young couples as they were planning for their weddings. In premarital counseling, I would ask couples about their plans as far as family, having children. I wanted to emphasize a reliance on God and being open to whatever blessings or challenges God might have in store. One young couple, when asked their plans regarding children, said, “Oh, we’re not planning to have children. We can’t imagine bringing children into this world. There’s just so much strife and pain – the crime and war and terrorism. And there’s already overpopulation. It just doesn’t seem right to subject children to a world full of as much trouble as this world.”

We spent some time talking that day. I talked with them about Adam and Eve. If there were ever a married couple on this planet who could say, “It doesn’t seem right bringing children into a world like this,” that would have been something fair for Adam and Eve to say. They had gone from absolute perfection in the Garden of Eden to a life of many pains. They knew that they and all their children would have to deal with sin and suffering and face death – all things they hadn’t known before.  It would have made perfect sense for Adam and Eve to say, “No. No way, no how are we going to have children. We will die for our sin, but we don’t need to subject any children to the same fate.” Yet that’s not at all what they said. They heard God’s mercy. They heard his words of promise. They went forward in hope, had children in hope, trusting God to give them life and redemption, to heal them from their sin.

And so it is with us today, not only for mothers but for every person of faith. Faith makes us ready to do whatever life asks of us. Faith in the promises of God, in the forgiveness of God, in the ultimate goodness of our God – that is what carries each of us through our life in this world. Consider the fact that Mother’s Day is not an easy day for many people. Many who have wanted to have children face the agony of infertility, or of a miscarriage, or the loss of a child. Families and individuals experience all sorts of strains and struggles in this world. As Christians, we live our lives as an act of faith, putting our trust in God to stay with us when times are dark and difficult. 

Faith made Eve a mother. Faith in Jesus gives us the strength to raise our children, to be families, to live our lives. God bless you on Mother’s Day and every day, in Jesus, born of Mary, descendant of Eve. In him we have life and hope forever. 


Scripture quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Posted by David Sellnow
08
May
2021

Remembering Mom

Mother’s Day 2021

A year ago, at the beginning of May, I was talking with my mother by phone. Shelter-in-place conditions had been in effect for over a month at that time, due to the spread of a new, dangerous coronavirus. My mother was frustrated by pandemic precautions. The beautician couldn’t come into her assisted living center, and she really wanted to get her hair done. She couldn’t gather in the dining room with friends. Social distancing meant they had to stay in their own rooms. 

Less than a week later, I was talking to a doctor at the hospital where my mother had been admitted. She had developed symptoms associated with COVID-19. Within a few days, the disease ravaged her circulatory system and took her out of this life. She passed away on Mother’s Day 2020. One day, being unable to sit in a salon seemed an important issue. A short time later, there were far more critical concerns.

My family’s story is not unique. Worldwide, over three million deaths have been attributed to COVID-19. In the United States alone, the number is nearing 600,000.  

We’ve learned again what has always been true, what prophets and poets have said from long ago:  

  • “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades” (Isaiah 40:6,7).
  • “Our years come to an end like a sigh. The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:9,10).

Life in this world isn’t easy. We’d like it to be smoother than it is. We wish we could predict and prevent problems, but we can’t. Life’s fragility gives us all the more reason to lean on each other and stand with one another. We need each other in good times and bad.

The pandemic of this past year has taught us to value one another more deeply, to treasure times we do have together with family, with friends, with those we care about. As we celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend, many are missing their mothers and grandmothers. Families may be appreciating one another more than ever this year. Others may be feeling family strain from all the difficulties the past year has brought about. In any case, words of wisdom call us to care for one another. “Listen to your father who begot you, and do not despise your mother when she is old. … Let your father and mother be glad; let her who bore you rejoice” (Proverbs. 23:22,25). 

Time is short. Relationships are precious. Today we remember those we’ve lost, who have gone on to eternity ahead of us. And today and tomorrow and for as many days as we have, we will nurture and tend to the ties that bind us to those we love. Love is more than sentimentality expressed through cards and flowers on special days. Love is a bond. Even when separated from family by many miles or many months since last seeing each other, the bond still calls us to hold onto each other and share our hearts.

Blessings to your family this Mother’s Day.

—- 

Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love ...

We share our mutual woes, our mutual burdens bear, 

and often for each other flows the sympathizing tear. 

When we are called to part, it gives us inward pain; 

but we shall still be joined in heart, and hope to meet again.

—

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Posted by David Sellnow