Mother of the Year - Not!

Mother of the Year - Not!

Recently, our older son Scott and his family met us at church and came home with us for lunch.  Afterward, he walked outside and began working the magic he does as a landscape designer.  With pride, I watched him shape a tree into a thing of beauty with a cut here and a snip there.  My heart was overwhelmed with love for the strong man he has become.

He was our first child - the answer to the desperate prayer that only those who are childless can know.  Our firstborn was a precious daughter, born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus.  She lived a very short time before the Lord took her home with Him, healing her precious, little broken body for eternity.  During the next few years, I had several miscarriages, taking a toll emotionally, as well as physically.

Finally, I had yielded the burning desire for a child to the Lord, praying Psalm 37:4 – Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.  I had begun to pray:  Lord, I want a baby.  However, I delight in You and Your will for my life.  If You do not want me to have a baby, then, I don’t want to want one.  However, I can’t change my heart.  Therefore, Father, I trust you to do one of two things, based upon your word:  Either give me a baby, or change my heart.  It makes me no difference which You do, as long as it is You, and You only, who shapes the desires of my heart.  I only want to want what You want for me.

God, in His great mercy and infinite grace, chose to give us this first son, as well as our precious younger son two years later, through His miraculous love.  For our older son Scott, adopted when he was five days old on my twenty-third birthday, God chose to use a dog, a poodle-clipper, and a plan that could only have been orchestrated by Him.  Our younger son Jamie was a wonderful surprise to us, born five weeks early, but nine days before my precious pastor father went home to be with the Lord.  Truly, both of our sons are treasured gifts from our Heavenly Father, reminding me that, as their mother, they are the heritage of the Lord, entrusted to us as mothers as stewards of God’s greatest joy and most awesome responsibility (Psalm 127:3).

With each son, I just knew that we would take home this tiny bundle of joy and raise him to be the perfect son.  Their hair would always be combed; their faces, clean; their hearts, pure; and their actions, beyond reproach.  Didn’t happen.  Scott’s kindergarten picture is complete with a cow’s lick in his hair, a bruise on one side of his face from falling into the coffee table, and a look on his face that says, “Obviously, my mom forgot that this was picture day.”  Jamie’s favorite tale of his childhood is one of the few times he ever went to a Mother’s Morning Out when he stepped in camel droppings on the playground (a leftover from the live nativity scene), the teacher made him eat a raw carrot (which he hated), and I was ten minutes late picking him up.  I was never nominated for Mother of the Year. 

Children make us laugh; they bring us to tears.  They keep us up late at night; they wake us up early.  They occupy our every waking moment; their choices can give us nightmares when, finally, we sleep.  They give us weeds for flowers, which we dutifully put in vases; they destroy the real flowers by either picking every bloom that appears or by playing ball in the flower garden.  They lose their jackets; they bring home stray people and pets.  They embarrass us at their worst; they make our hearts swell until nearly bursting with pride when they are at their best. 

We want only the best for them, while we fear the worst can happen to them.  They can irritate us, they can frustrate us, and they can exhaust us; yet, we would die for them.  Most of all, however, they teach us the power of prayer in holy desperation as we, faithfully, carry them back to their Heavenly Father as His heritage. 

I confess that, through God’s great call as a mother, I learned lessons of humility that I would never have learned.  No mother does a good enough job that she deserves a perfect child.  God Himself is the perfect Father; yet, Adam and Eve, his first two human children, made wrong choices.  However, we know that God did not fail them.  Neither did He create them to fail.  He knew that, as a mother, I would make mistakes; still, He gave me two precious sons, and God makes no mistakes. 

If the only hope my sons had in this world was a perfect mother, they were doomed from the start.  Instead, they had a perfect heavenly Father who created them to be His heritage.  My job was never to be a perfect mother; it was only to point them to a perfect Father.  The love of God and the blood of Jesus are stronger than the mistakes of parenting that this imperfect mother could ever make!  Praise His name for giving the ultimate hope to every mother this blessed Mother’s Day!  Faithful is He who calls you, who also will do it…  1 Thessalonians 5:24.  God loves His children, His heritage, and He loves you – the women to whom He entrusted that heritage.  To Him, every mother has the potential to be God’s nominee for Mother of the Year.

© 2011 Gerry Sisk

(05/04/11)