Ah, Mother’s Day. That day in May where we all get to boast about how great our mothers are. How loving and necessary to our lives they have been. That day we celebrate all their hard work. Celebrate family. Children. Love. After all, a mother is the heart of the home.
Unless she’s not. Unless she hasn’t been. Unless there’s a gaping hole where that solid bedrock of a family’s foundation should have been.
I’d never really thought too much about this day – just another Hallmark holiday, really - until I lost my mom at the age of eleven. Then Mother’s Day seemed more like a neon sign glaring down the road at me from ten long miles away. Much like that cluster of tacky shops and signs known as ‘South of the Border’; that supposed respite along the way to Florida on I-95, just across the state line in South Carolina. There’s a gaudy billboard every mile announcing what’s ahead, just in case for one brief moment you might have forgotten.
Mother’s Day, just ten days ahead: “Look who’s not here. Look what you’re missing.”
For many, this day is a giant exclamation point of pain. Of loss and heartache. For the motherless, for the couple struggling with infertility, for the child who never knew his mother’s love but only her failures and for the mothers who have buried their children, the invisible thread that tethers the two now unbearably severed.
But maybe there is something at the heart of all this. Maybe when something causes so much pain it means that it’s pretty vital to our existence. It’s at the core of who we are, the role of a mother.
We were walking the other day, my family and I, with my oldest daughter and husband walking a few paces ahead. (Hang with me here) And I noticed for the hundredth time how her legs had begun to stretch tall, how her head now reached her daddy’s shoulder. She’s not a little girl anymore. I look at her now, on the brink of womanhood, I look into her bright blue eyes and I don’t see what she was (a baby) or what she is (a girl on the brink), I see what she will be. What she’s aimed for – her trajectory. I see someone else’s mother, someone else’s wife. A woman with her own calling and identity, separate from my own. But vital to someone else. Maybe vital to many others. I don’t know what her path will be, but I know this is my chance. My chance to speak love into her heart, to point her to the only Anchor there is in this stormy life. To hold her up when she feels weak and unsure. To heap grace upon grace upon grace into her life, so that she loves the One from whom grace flows.
And then for the first time it occurred to me (I know, I’m pretty slow) that in the absence of my mother there had been other women who’d done the same for me. Women who laughed with me when I needed to laugh, who cried with me when I needed to cry. Who looked into my eyes and saw my trajectory and not the broken girl I was. Who knew that I was like an arrow that needed aiming before the bow string was released. Who knew there was a calling on my life though they could not guess what that would be. Who heaped grace upon grace upon grace into my life so that I could do nothing else but fall head over heels in love with the One from whom all grace flows.
I’ve had so many mothers. Mothers for a moment. Mothers for a season. Women who looked at me and loved me in spite of myself. (Because isn’t that what a mother does?)
And here is the truth of it, for those of us who are hurting today – we need to remember that we are all nurturing something. Each and every one of us is nurturing someone in some way. You may not even realize it, but you are vital to someone else’s trajectory. Each of us is a mother - that bedrock role God created in order to use our hands as His.
And maybe this South of the Border rest stop is just a reminder of the real destination. We’re halfway there, I think, as the blinking lights and bright colors trying to grab my attention flash by the car window. But it doesn’t hold my attention. I’ve got my mind and my heart set on another place.
May 11, 2014
Apr 18, 2014
A Woman's Worth
The cursor blinks at me questioningly. My fingers rest on the keys waiting for some fleeting thought of inspiration to flow through them and randomly press this indecipherable arrangement of letters into meaning. I once imagined that I could harness some kind of power in organizing my thoughts and translating them onto a page. Some kind of satisfaction, at least. Perhaps I even thought I might shed some light on the darkness within – in emptying it all out, spreading it thin, trudging through the mess and attempting to arrange it all in a way that might make more sense to me. But at the end of the page the mess remains, behind or in front, and the cursor still blinks. There are no answers, no explanations that satisfy it; it always wants more.
It’s how I’ve come to view life, I think: A giant, blinking cursor, waiting for me to do something profound and meaningful, waiting for me to make something of it. To fill in the blank, so to speak. Sort it all out. Weighty expectation, that may have either been instilled by the world or self perpetuated from youth.
Meaning. Where is the meaning in all of this - this one life, one page, I have to write on?
When someone puts it like that I start to panic, quite honestly. Because for some reason I have always been acutely aware of the brevity and constraint of my own humanity. And suddenly I become like Alice’s rabbit, with a clock in my hand and the mantra, “Late! There’s not enough time!” or “I’m missing it!” Though if you pressed me I couldn’t quite articulate just what it is I’ve missed exactly. I am only scrambling through Wonderland convinced that I’m missing the party. It’s urgency and aimlessness, bound together as one. I know I have something to do but I haven’t figured out what it is just yet. Someone I am supposed to be. But I’m certain I’m not her.
A blinking cursor that might as well be a looming question mark.
In my younger years I would look in the mirror and wonder if the magazines and television shows were right. Was there meaning for a woman in her beauty? If I put all of my energy into appearing lovely on the outside, would that satisfy? What if I were beautiful enough to turn every head in a room, or simply attract the man I longed to be with? If he were to find me physically beautiful, more beautiful than any other woman in the world, would that fulfill?
Perhaps for a moment, or even a year. Perhaps for several. But I would inevitably find myself left clinging to something that is more like a tattered rag. It would unavoidably become like a child’s silk blankie - worn thin, like lines across a once smooth face or silvery strings of grey hair through a once rich brunette. If that was all that drew him, it will not keep him.
A middle-aged woman knows for certain that her worth and her meaning cannot be found in outward appearances. For, like Marmee warns Jo in Little Women:
“If you feel your value lies in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that’s all that you really are. Time erodes all such beauty, but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind: Your humor, your kindness, and your moral courage. These are the things I cherish so in you.”
Best not to wait and discover this until we are halfway through life. So in urgency we warn the younger woman not to fall into this ‘beauty trap’, not to set any hope on the standard that fails us every time. Do not be deceived, we warn them. It is what you do that defines you. Who you are on the inside. What you achieve with that inner person of yours. Even in the faith we are encouraged to labor in the fields of ministry and weave a legacy for the generations that come. Do something!
What are you doing?
Well would you think less of me if in my rabbit-y way I am still left scurrying with an anxiously thumping foot - surely it’s become a tick at this point - and a spinning clock in hand? It’s in this trap that I have lingered the longest, and often return to whenever I am unsure. This blinking cursor is the biggest: What have you done that’s worthwhile? Worthy of a legacy? Worthy of remembrance?
A very wise man recently told me that a legacy is fleeting and that I shouldn’t put my stock in that either. For one day your great-grandchildren may wander through a cemetery and see their last name on a stone and wonder for a brief moment if the dust beneath the ground they stand on used to be a man or woman that was somehow related to them. And then they’ll walk on.
Let that sink in for a moment.
It all becomes dust – not just the outer appearances but the deeds as well. And I will be forgotten, perhaps completely, within a few short generations of man, which are like a breath in the span of eternity. Here and gone and forgotten in one exhale.
Some may feel deeply concerned at this thought, but somehow I feel deeply peaceful. It’s the same kind of peace I sense when I look up at a starry sky or a radiant sunrise and know for sure just how small I am. Because none of this universe’s function is dependent on me. (And I’m exceedingly thankful that it isn’t.)
So if worth and meaning are not on the outside and not on the inside either, then they must be something of another substance altogether. Something – Someone – outside of myself. My thumping foot at last takes a rest and the clock stops spinning in my tightly clenched hand. I am reminded now of Cori Ten Boom’s mantra instead of Alice’s rabbit's: “Hold everything in your hands lightly, lest God pry them open.”
Open hands. Relaxed fingers that aren’t clawing for something to hold on to, something to be, something to achieve. Some kind of purpose to call my own.
Give it all to Him.
This is beauty. Incorruptible beauty, Scripture tells us, because our hands aren’t open to a universe established from chaos. They are open and submitted to a God of purpose and order who means to use that single exhale of ours for His glory.
“The principle runs through all of life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end…and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; repr., New York: Harper Collins, 1980), 226-27.
Suddenly in the meaninglessness, the urgency and aimlessness, there is purpose, a purpose that did not initiate within, from a place that is rapidly decaying, but one that initiated from without. And if those great-grandchildren who are wandering through the cemetery a hundred years from now know Christ then they have received the only Thing there is of worth in this world. It does not matter if I am remembered or if I did all the right things. Even great things.
He is the only legacy. The only meaning. And better still – it is only by His power that this will be accomplished.
Ah. Rest.
That’s what rest feels like.
As it turns out, I come to the end of the page and discover that my fingertips didn’t fill it in with words or the aimless prattling of keystrokes. He had been the One writing the story all along. The blinking cursor was answered, but not by me. Like Solomon in Ecclesiastes, I come to the end of an anxious rabbit’s journey, of searching every alleyway and briar bush for meaning, every narrow path through the woods for purpose and worth. And after finding nothing at the end of these roads I look up to the Source of it all and I open my hands.
It’s how I’ve come to view life, I think: A giant, blinking cursor, waiting for me to do something profound and meaningful, waiting for me to make something of it. To fill in the blank, so to speak. Sort it all out. Weighty expectation, that may have either been instilled by the world or self perpetuated from youth.
Meaning. Where is the meaning in all of this - this one life, one page, I have to write on?
When someone puts it like that I start to panic, quite honestly. Because for some reason I have always been acutely aware of the brevity and constraint of my own humanity. And suddenly I become like Alice’s rabbit, with a clock in my hand and the mantra, “Late! There’s not enough time!” or “I’m missing it!” Though if you pressed me I couldn’t quite articulate just what it is I’ve missed exactly. I am only scrambling through Wonderland convinced that I’m missing the party. It’s urgency and aimlessness, bound together as one. I know I have something to do but I haven’t figured out what it is just yet. Someone I am supposed to be. But I’m certain I’m not her.
A blinking cursor that might as well be a looming question mark.
In my younger years I would look in the mirror and wonder if the magazines and television shows were right. Was there meaning for a woman in her beauty? If I put all of my energy into appearing lovely on the outside, would that satisfy? What if I were beautiful enough to turn every head in a room, or simply attract the man I longed to be with? If he were to find me physically beautiful, more beautiful than any other woman in the world, would that fulfill?
Perhaps for a moment, or even a year. Perhaps for several. But I would inevitably find myself left clinging to something that is more like a tattered rag. It would unavoidably become like a child’s silk blankie - worn thin, like lines across a once smooth face or silvery strings of grey hair through a once rich brunette. If that was all that drew him, it will not keep him.
A middle-aged woman knows for certain that her worth and her meaning cannot be found in outward appearances. For, like Marmee warns Jo in Little Women:
“If you feel your value lies in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that’s all that you really are. Time erodes all such beauty, but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind: Your humor, your kindness, and your moral courage. These are the things I cherish so in you.”
Best not to wait and discover this until we are halfway through life. So in urgency we warn the younger woman not to fall into this ‘beauty trap’, not to set any hope on the standard that fails us every time. Do not be deceived, we warn them. It is what you do that defines you. Who you are on the inside. What you achieve with that inner person of yours. Even in the faith we are encouraged to labor in the fields of ministry and weave a legacy for the generations that come. Do something!
What are you doing?
Well would you think less of me if in my rabbit-y way I am still left scurrying with an anxiously thumping foot - surely it’s become a tick at this point - and a spinning clock in hand? It’s in this trap that I have lingered the longest, and often return to whenever I am unsure. This blinking cursor is the biggest: What have you done that’s worthwhile? Worthy of a legacy? Worthy of remembrance?
A very wise man recently told me that a legacy is fleeting and that I shouldn’t put my stock in that either. For one day your great-grandchildren may wander through a cemetery and see their last name on a stone and wonder for a brief moment if the dust beneath the ground they stand on used to be a man or woman that was somehow related to them. And then they’ll walk on.
Let that sink in for a moment.
It all becomes dust – not just the outer appearances but the deeds as well. And I will be forgotten, perhaps completely, within a few short generations of man, which are like a breath in the span of eternity. Here and gone and forgotten in one exhale.
Some may feel deeply concerned at this thought, but somehow I feel deeply peaceful. It’s the same kind of peace I sense when I look up at a starry sky or a radiant sunrise and know for sure just how small I am. Because none of this universe’s function is dependent on me. (And I’m exceedingly thankful that it isn’t.)
So if worth and meaning are not on the outside and not on the inside either, then they must be something of another substance altogether. Something – Someone – outside of myself. My thumping foot at last takes a rest and the clock stops spinning in my tightly clenched hand. I am reminded now of Cori Ten Boom’s mantra instead of Alice’s rabbit's: “Hold everything in your hands lightly, lest God pry them open.”
Open hands. Relaxed fingers that aren’t clawing for something to hold on to, something to be, something to achieve. Some kind of purpose to call my own.
Give it all to Him.
This is beauty. Incorruptible beauty, Scripture tells us, because our hands aren’t open to a universe established from chaos. They are open and submitted to a God of purpose and order who means to use that single exhale of ours for His glory.
“The principle runs through all of life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end…and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; repr., New York: Harper Collins, 1980), 226-27.
Suddenly in the meaninglessness, the urgency and aimlessness, there is purpose, a purpose that did not initiate within, from a place that is rapidly decaying, but one that initiated from without. And if those great-grandchildren who are wandering through the cemetery a hundred years from now know Christ then they have received the only Thing there is of worth in this world. It does not matter if I am remembered or if I did all the right things. Even great things.
He is the only legacy. The only meaning. And better still – it is only by His power that this will be accomplished.
Ah. Rest.
That’s what rest feels like.
As it turns out, I come to the end of the page and discover that my fingertips didn’t fill it in with words or the aimless prattling of keystrokes. He had been the One writing the story all along. The blinking cursor was answered, but not by me. Like Solomon in Ecclesiastes, I come to the end of an anxious rabbit’s journey, of searching every alleyway and briar bush for meaning, every narrow path through the woods for purpose and worth. And after finding nothing at the end of these roads I look up to the Source of it all and I open my hands.
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