Wednesday’s Jewels: The Truth about Mother Love
I love it when I stumble upon words that quietly take up residence in my soul: a quote worth sharing, a question worth asking, a prayer worth repeating. I love it when another truth seeker’s reverent musings lift my thoughts above dirty diapers, dirty dishes and dirty laundry. I feel grateful when another seeker’s words chase me shamelessly to the Living Word. As the wise writer of Proverbs declares, “The right word at the right time is like a custom-made piece of jewelry…” (Proverbs 34:11).
I’m digging in somebody else’s jewelry box today. I think you’ll enjoy the poignant pearls of truth that accessorize this post. If you’ve found the “right word at the right time” this week, feel free to open up your box of jewels and share it here. I’d love to pick it up, polish it off and enjoy its beauty, too!
All my musing on “messy love” over the past week has reminded me just why loving my children well can feel so difficult on days. It reminds me why the oozy and gooey love that invaded my soul the moment I first laid eyes on my newborns doesn’t always carry me through a demanding day of toddler tantrums and pre-teen challenges. Quite honestly, God’s love isn’t merely a warm fuzzy that paints His Daddy heart in happy pastels of pleasure. And if I think about it, I’m glad. Warm fuzzies wouldn’t have kept my Savior on the cross- that took a love much deeper, stronger and more complex than any Hollywood romance can capture.
In her thought-provoking book, Parenting is Your Highest Calling and 8 other Myths that Trap Us into Worry and Guilt, mother Leslie Leyland Fields discusses the truth about loving our children God’s way. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the second chapter of her book:
“Somehow, against the backdrop of Scripture and the reality of life, we have woven images of parental love- especially mother-love- that look like a skip through a lovely park. Our culture depicts a “good mother” as an angel in the house who is naturally sweet, self-envying, and eternally loving. The media create expectations that mother-love, like our culturally formed vision of romantic love, is something you fall into, a delightful sinkhole that leaves you so sated that you don’t want to climb out…
In short, we expect to love our children easily. (The truth is) It can be hard to love our children, because biblical love calls us far beyond our own instincts and abilities. Biblical love challenges us at the very core of our being….
We need to stop pretending that loving our children as God requires is natural and instinctive. No. It’s messy. It’s arduous. It’s costly…
Our ability to love begins with understanding how radical the call to love is. God calls us to something only he can do in us…. Love will cost us our lives. If we expect otherwise we may be tempted to give up along the way… The love he calls us to, as hard as it is, is the love he himself unendingly supplies.”
Keep on loving, dear friends- in the middle of the night when the baby is screaming, at the day’s start when your school-ager wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, and in the evening when the bedtime stalling routine is driving you to madness. Keep loving. It’s messy. It’s humbling. And it’s God’s gift to us. There is no greater love than this…(John 15:13)
