Mother’s Day

Last year, I wrote this in commemoration of Mother’s Day. It was an attempt to consider motherhood through the vehicle of Eve.

This year, we turn to another woman put forward in scripture is a portrait of Motherhood.

Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him.

Isaiah 51:2 (KJV)

The institution of motherhood and womanhood at large has come under the pressure of redefinition in the last few years, and has been reduced to a vague social and societal construct that crumbles under its own weight.

In the scripture above, Abraham is called ‘father’, so quite naturally, when we mentions Sarah, we’d expect him to call her ‘mother’—and that’s who she is. But I found it peculiar that he chose to describe her, rather than identify and label her. This warrants our contemplation. Obviously he means mother, but why did he choose to describe her the way that he did?

‘…and unto Sarah that bore thee’.

So immediately we learn that a mother is one that bears. What does this imply?

A closer look at the word bore gives us some help. The Hebrew word is chiyl: In simple terms, it means to twist or whirl, or to writhe in pain. It’s the idea of travailing. This means that, when the prophet thinks of Motherhood, the picture he paints is that of travailing in pain.

Whilst this is physically expressed as in childbirth, it speaks to something more; in Motherhood is the capacity and ability to bring forth results through the corridors of pain.

In a very real sense, a mother is unfazed in some sense in the face of pain, in the face of travail, if only to bring forth that which she has conceived. There is the risk I run in writing this to come across as though I think women should be subject to pain or should enjoy pain as a badge of honor. No, neither of those are my intentions.

The basic point is this; a defining trait of motherhood is the capacity and ability to bring forth, even in the presence of challenges and opposition. A mother is proof that pain is not the termination of the future, but that we can pass through pain and come out on the other side with our promised outcome.

So, in celebrating Mother’s day, we are celebrating women who are unfazed, unstoppable, who can twirl or be whirled by pain and still come out on top. Women who through the pain of death, endured, held on to faith and at the end received their dead back to life.

Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection:

Hebrews 11:35 (KJV)

We celebrate the women whose life demonstrate the weakness of pain, and the enormous capacity and strength embedded in them to push through, press on, shut the mouth of lions and obtained promises. This is Motherhood.

Happy Mother’s Day.