Sometimes it isn’t such a Happy day….
Mother’s Day is a mixed bag, just saying.
From my personal experience, I have ……
<3 Read just about every card on the rack looking for one that is honest without being harsh, while envying the women who had such great relationships with their moms
<3 Cried and thanked God the last years of her life when I could buy a card that expressed how much she meant to us and what an example she was setting for our lives as she lived apart from her Alzheimer-ridden husband in our home town instead of hers.
<3 Been stunned by the first year I didn’t have her, the overwhelming sorrow when I walked past the first Mother’s Day card display of the season and realized I don’t have a mom anymore.
Without going in to psychoanalysis and exposing all the dark sides of a family tree, let me just say that God alone can bring healing and restoration to relationships that are less than perfect and riddled with generational sin and dysfunction.
So this year….if you are …..
<3 Just doing the Mother’s Day thing out of a sense of integrity
<3 Hiding a breaking heart because you want to be a mother (or your daughter, or granddaughter to be a mother, or wife for any guys out there)
<3 Feeling like a hypocrite when you receive that sweet handmade card and a tray of burnt toast as breakfast in bed from a giggling gaggle of young ones and all you can remember are the times you totally lost it this week and screamed things you wish you could take back
<3 Worn out and worn down from toting aging parents to doctors and getting prescriptions filled and feeling guilty because you can’t make time go backwards so they can still live the way they did 10 years ago
<3 Laying awake at night, in tears and prayers, surrendering your children and grandchildren and the generations to come for the zillionth time
Or any other of the real life situations that Hallmark just never has been able to adequately capture on paper….
God bless you.
Bring the hurting and the disappointments to the One who knows the bigger picture. Allow Him to work healing and forgiveness in to your heartaches.
I can assure you – you have not missed anything. He has not withheld any good thing from you. All that He has allowed in your life, He will use for your good and His glory.
Don’t run from your feelings, but don’t let them rule you. Acknowledge all that you feel to Him, and then LISTEN to what He would say to you. Bring your thoughts captive to Him. Allow Him to take the stirrings of your heart and work a new thing in YOU.
Now, one last comment – to address those of you who read the above thinking….HUH? I never felt any of those things. Then, please, humbly and with tears of JOY, acknowledge the wonderfully good works He has done in your life.
As you thank Him for the rich blessings of fullness of joy in all areas of being or having a mom – let Him work in you a compassion and understanding for those whose experience has been not so great.
God bless all of you – whoever reads this today – bless you if you are a mother – if you have a mother – if you have lost your mother in this life. Bless those of you who are waiting and those of you who are tending and those of you who are grieving.
May God bless you abundantly with a more tender, more thankful, more honest heart <3