A Mother’s Love

Happy week after Mother’s Day. Sorry that I’m a day late with this post. I was celebrating with my kids this weekend and just let the computer rest for a couple of days. And now I need to get to work on editing my next  year’s book. (This year’s book is releasing next week. Yay! Hoping readers will like reading A Chance for Kallie Mae.) \Back to my post. Here’s a slightly edited tribute to Moms from back in 2009. I’ve shared the picture since then. It’s one of my favorites since it’s me wanting to be right with my beautiful mother. I’m guessing I might have been two, maybe three.

On to my repost celebration of Mother’s Day.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you mothers out there and to all of you who had a mama. I’ll wager that gets you all. Except maybe for Wes in my Hollyhill books. He always claimed to be from Jupiter and Jupiterians probably come from magic beans that old Mr. Jupiter throws on the ground and out pops a Jupiterian, each in various states of maturity. That’s so things won’t get boring. At least that would be how Wes would explain it to Jocie in Hollyhill. He liked coming up with crazy Jupiterian scenarios.

Back to earth, I hope you had a good mama who loved you without boundaries. Who loved you so much she made you act right and wash behind your ears and pick up your stuff and weed the garden or mow the lawn. I’m sure you can think of at least one thing you hated to do but that your mama made you do anyway and now you can see it was because she loved you and wanted you to grow up to be a responsible, strong adult able to do the things you should. That’s why we have mamas. (And Dads too, of course, but their day is in June.)

It’s not always that easy to be one of those mamas. I pulled this about what second graders said about why God made Moms from one of those internet pass-along messages a few years ago. One questions was “What are Mamas made of?” One kid gave a pretty good answer.  “Clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.”

Sometimes moms need that one dab of mean. At least in so far as proper discipline goes. I hope you had a mom with the right balance of all the things that make a great mom, and even more, I hope you are managing the same balancing act if you’re a mom now. One thing sure, a mom never retires from loving her children. Then, if you’re truly blessed, grandkids come along and your love keeps growing and spreading.

Moms can run low on energy with all they have to do. I’ve done that plenty. But it seems the more you dip into your well of love, the deeper and fuller it gets. Sort of like that story in the Old Testament where the widow had no money to pay her creditors and they planned to take her children as slaves in payment of the debt. When she goes to the prophet Elisha for help, he asks her what she has. She say all she has is one small bottle of oil. The prophet tells her to collect pots and pitchers and every type of container she can find or borrow from her neighbors. Then she is to go inside her house and after shutting the doors and windows, she is to pour the oil from her bottle into those containers. She kept pouring the oil until she had filled every container she had. When there were no more containers, the oil stopped. When she went back to the prophet to tell him what had happened, he told her to sell the oil and pay her debts. (2 Kings 4:1-7)

The woman was rewarded in direct proportion to how many containers she gathered in faith. I’ve never heard a preacher use that Bible story for a Mother’s Day sermon, but I think it would be a good one. A mother’s love combined with faith and trust in the Lord’s providence can be powerful.

So if you’re a mom, I hope you had a beautiful Sunday. And if you still have your mom with you, I hope you were able to see her to give her a hug or talk to her on the phone to send her love.  If she’s gone on to be with the Lord, take time a few times this week to remember some of the best times and the everyday times and the “I know I was loved” times and savor those memories.

“God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.”— Jewish proverb

“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don’t mean a thing.” — Toni Morrison

What was something your mother did to make you feel loved?