I love my mom and adore the mother of my children. There’s no question about that. They know it, and I don’t need a special hallmark-sanctioned holiday to show them my appreciation and admiration of the amazing rock-star things they do for their kids. However, I will go out of my way to make them both feel loved and honored this Sunday. Okay, now that that’s all cleared up, we can get to the topic at hand.
Mother’s Day is one of those holidays that is really hard to ignore, especially for those of us in church-land who are likely to see moms honored this Sunday in a myriad of ways. For most people this seems like an entirely appropriate thing do and other than thinking through what card or flowers to get, don’t give it too much thought. However, there are many people for whom Mother’s Day evokes painful memories and a sense of loss or longing that many of us simply forget to acknowledge. Some women have no desire to have children yet on this day feel as though there is something wrong with them for lacking a desire that so many of their peers have. Some women have been longing to have children of their own but for whatever reason haven’t been blessed with kids. Others have dealt with painful losses of children to miscarriage or other circumstances. Still others come from broken homes where memories of mom are either non-existent or painful at best. A few years this was made more real to me as my wife, who had recently lost a baby, was both proud and thankful to be a mom of a beautiful little girl but stricken with grief over the child who we would never come to know in this life.
As someone who has some say in how our community celebrates these holidays, I feel the tension of wanting to truly celebrate and make much of our awesome moms, but not wanting make a painful day for some women even more painful. If my social media feeds are any indication, I’m not the only one trying to work out this issue . As I’ve had time to reflect this week and observe various responses, I’ve become convinced that much of the church (myself included) have forgotten how to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn- that there is a time to weep and time to laugh.
The default position of most churches and church leaders is celebration and rejoicing. And why not? It’s much easier to recruit people and keep people around when you keep things light and positive, right? And, we have so much we are called to celebrate! However, the pages of scripture are filled with lament, longing, repentance, questioning, anguish, yearning and so forth. As human beings living in a broken world, there isn’t any way to avoid experiencing pain, loss and suffering that cause us to weep and mourn.
But these are not realities and practices we readily embrace in much of the evangelical world. I suspect that much of the contempt for celebrating mom’s on Mother’s Day is because those who are longing or hurting have been ignored or forgotten. Our attitude seems to be, why can’t you just get over it and move on to something more happy? We’ve fallen into the trap of the world that says our primary goal is elimination of any discomfort as soon as possible. Often times, we want people get over things, not because we care about their healing, but because their pain makes us feel uncomfortable and helpless.
I’m not exactly sure what the answer is to the problem, but it certainly isn’t canceling Mother’s Day. To me, that ignores the call to rejoice with those who rejoice. No, somehow we must move toward authentic community where we are just as likely to enter into a person’s brokenness as we are to celebrate with them: where people are willing to celebrate with us, even if they don’t feel like it, because we’ve stood beside them when they were hurting. If not, we offering counterfeit biblical community... and the world which needs Jesus desperately can sniff out our shallowness.
So this Sunday, let’s make much of our moms, and tell the world how awesome they are! But let’s remember to help heal the wounds of those who won’t be celebrating.
What do you think? How can you do justice to both rejoicing and weeping in our community?
2 comments:
Thank you for speaking up for those of us that will be struggling with Mother's Day - to know that we are not alone in our struggles.
maybe mention that women become mom's from the day of conception. Jur because some of us had them taken back doesn't mean we aren't moms. I think people have the mentality that people aren't parents unless the child is physically here, but that would mean a baby isn't a baby until it is born. I would think to put more emphasis and focus on those who lost their children to honor and acnowledge them.
Post a Comment