Mom, the change agent

If you’d ask the happiest moments I had as a mother, I’d include those weekly trips to the public library with two preschoolers. Each was allowed to check out ten Mom-approved books (meaning no witches). We’d spend hours reading together, scrunched together under an afghan in their Dad’s recliner. Among other fuzzy-warm memories (which, I admit, are getting fuzzy as I age): “Aggression Cookies” (kids mixing dough with their hands), “Tent City" (living room creativity with blankets and chairs), and bath time with a bucket of water toys.

 

I’m grateful I got in on motherhood.  I was 34 when I married and 35 when the first baby came along. This summer, after my 66^th birthday, I’m looking forward to holding my first grandchild. But maturity (read that: getting old) tends to make you philosophical about parenting and reproducing God’s image on earth.  What parent doesn’t want that child to succeed and honor God?

In her book The Resolution for Women (BPH, 2011, p. 207), Patricia Shirer addresses those sobering parenting fundamentals. There’s nothing wrong with playing on the floor, making homemade waffles, and snapping first-haircut photos, she says. But “we must remember that our principal charge and mission as parents is to send our boys and girls into the world as young people who bear God’s Spirit, who are purposeful about His mission for their lives, and who are intent on being His agent for change on the planet.”

It doesn’t happen on its own, she adds, as children naturally lean toward “the flesh” of selfishness, rebellion, and disrespect and disregard for others. Left to themselves, they’ll “invariably succumb to the subtle (and not so subtle) thrusts of the latest TV shows and cultural trends.”   Enter Christian mothers. “You are in position to intervene,” she adds. “You…have been placed specifically in your children’s lives to make them rebel against a culture that’s telling them to rebel against you.”

Even as I type her words, I pause and choke back some tears. I pray for several mothers whose children have rebelled in some way. For these women, there is no “Happy Mother’s Day.”

I have no pat answers for those sorrows. But as Corrie ten Boom often said, there is no sorrow so deep that our God is not deeper. When I embrace in prayer a difficult parenting issue for myself or someone else, if often goes into that wordless yielding that the Bible describes as this: “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26).

Other times there are words, simple ones, but faithfully lifted up. For years my prayers for my children, besides including specific needs, have included seven big areas of life, divided over the seven days of the week:

            Sunday: a growing faith and place of ministry.

            Monday: delight in God’s word.
            Tuesday: purity.
            Wednesday: health, safety.
            Thursday: careers, value system.
            Friday: positive attitude, gratitude.
            Saturday: true, godly friends.

            Any woman can bear a child. But to “mother” that child for God keeps us on our knees.