This is a piece I typed up to share with my church’s moms’ gathering that met at my home yesterday. It started out as a response to a post my friend, Miranda, put on Facebook. She was asking if any mothers ever felt like they flourished during the child-raising years. My answer grew as time went on. Here is the basic text from what I said during that gathering.
For Miranda:
I’m not sure you’re gonna like my answer…but after 18 years and four children here’s what I think I’ve seen. Growth is a long, slow process. I have seen renovation happen in my home, reconstruction and planting in my yard and around my house. There is always this “disruption” phase that happens in the beginning. Everything is broken down, bared, messy, even sometimes toxic (like finding mold or lead or leaks or asbestos, or needing to dig away to the foundation). The flourishing we so desire to feel doesn’t always produce evidence at every phase. And just like in the beginning phases of a big project it can look like DEstruction at first glance. But the breaking down, the disruption, the moving aside of the old for change is most definitely the beginning of something Very Good. If you feel overwhelmed at saying, “No” to a tiny rebellious human for the thousandth time or cleaning up the floor for the millionth time…it’s because what you’re seeing is just the beginning phases of a Thing of Beauty for your child and for you. The planting season in the farming world looks pretty bleak. Nothing is green yet. Winter is still in the air. It’s brown everywhere. Your children are still young and just storing away all the information and habits you are planting in them. What’s being grown in you and what you are growing is still very small. Jesus’ parable of soils lies in my mind’s eye and I see him talking to crowds of farmers probably. But we forget that in his 5 minute dissertation he’s covering months and months of waiting. Harvest is far away from planting. If there is one solitary thing about growth/flourishing to embrace in these early days where things look bleak, it’s TIME. God is not slow as some count slowness….but patient. His patience is slowly, slowly, like leaven in dough, growing and filling the corners of your heart and the spaces of your children’s lives. The fruit of it takes many years to see.
But how to survive til the end? Well, like the Raffi song, “…inch by inch, row by row.” Daily saying, “No” with love. Daily dusting off hands, daily cleaning up floors, daily teaching smiles and hugs. The planting season is wearying and long. Let’s call it what it is. Can mothers flourish while doing these tiny things that walk us step by step to harvest? In my experience, no, not like you’re thinking of flourishing, not like you WILL flourish in the end. Just like planting season is its own thing, a lean, winter season, with only a dream of fruitful harvest, these early years are lean and full of humbling tasks. But they can still be done before the face of Jesus. We can feel him beside us as we plant. In every inch of floor you wipe up after mealtime and every diaper you change there is Love, there is a Planting, and there will absolutely be fruit from that. And let us also remember that Jesus is instantly near to those deeds…the fragrance of those offerings are sweet, so sweet to him. Washing the disciples’ feet as our example can give us mothers a sense of kinship with Jesus. How we wash feet as mothers!!
One more word on suffering. If it feels like you’re not so much gliding along planting seeds with Jesus, but rather drowning in mess and grief and loneliness, there is another grace for you. Crying out to the Lord in the midst of this creates something precious…I found that crying out and crying out and crying out IN ITSELF gave me a new strength. I found out I was good at calling on Him! Jeremiah 33:3 “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things which you do not know!” That is the most incredible reward for someone in the depths of despair who cries out to God. Women in the Bible who called out to God had the reward of being ANSWERED. God showed them great and unsearchable things. They came away changed…..many of them giving God a new name after they encountered him. Hagar in the wilderness, in despair called out. God answered and told her great and unsearchable things. He gave her a future and a vision and a promise. And she named him, The God Who Sees. And if you can find it within yourself to cry out to God like Hagar, to lift up your voice, you will find that he hears. Hannah, who was barren for years, humiliated by lack of offspring…she cried aloud to God and when he heard her and answered and gave her a baby, she named him Samuel, “God has answered.” Then there are the stories of Ruth and Naomi, who cried bitterly to God, and he gave them Boaz, who fathered Obed, the forerunner of King David; of the mother of Samson, to whom the angel of the Lord appeared three times to make sure she understood she was no longer barren…the small whispered prayers, the bitter longings expressed, the weary-hearted mothers tired of the foot-washing, the big and the little, small and great calls of women go before the throne of God…He hears and he answers. And we flourish therein. This scripture may be oft-poorly-quoted to suffering people, but it is true….that…our light, momentary affliction (this slight distress of the passing hour) is ever more and more abundantly preparing and producing and achieving for us an everlasting weight of glory [beyond all measure, excessively surpassing all comparisons and all calculations, a vast and transcendent glory and blessedness never to cease!],
So motherhood is Suffering. Suffering is holy, if we cry out to God, if we nurture a sense of calling out. And holiness is flourishing. And in the end, we do see perfection and paradise!
It’s worthy of remembering that yesterday we talked about the beautiful picture that labor and birth give to us, where “we break the veil between life and death,” as I think Emily commented. Reminds me of the veil that was torn as Jesus breathed his last and gave up his body for us on the cross. I wrote about birth in a post here a while back, remembering my last baby being born. I swiftly approached the moment of crowning, and all my body and mind told me to run from the pain. Some part of me knew there was only one way through, and it was through a veil or a curtain. That curtain was pain and death. I put my head down and said to myself, “Alrighty, I’ll just die, then.” And I pushed out my fourth child into life in that moment. I love the picture this gives us of the rest of the life of mothers, where we put our heads down into the veil between death and life, we momentarily give ourselves over to death (the diapers, the laundry, the dishes, the cleaning, the wiping, the discipline, the tears) and we cry out to God (remembering that he hears us BECAUSE the rejection of our cry that we deserve He poured out on His son, who, when he cried out on the cross, there was no answer! Chilling, but life-giving!), he answers us, and we find ourselves on the other side, ready to Harvest, looking around at Bounty, at Paradise, at Fruit, at Shalom, at life!