The sins of mothers are on full display this week in the headlines, and reading them always makes me take a closer look at my own.
Every sin boils down to selfishness. All selfishness leads to death.
Selfishness drives mothers to be the center. We want to be needed, necessary, an integral part of our children’s lives. Even after we have weaned them, we desire to be the one who can meet every need, pacify every cry, bring happiness from every grief.
It sounds so altruistic and other-centered, but it isn’t. It is just another echo of Satan’s words in the beginning: “I will make myself like the Most High.”
Isn’t it He who should meet our children’s every need? Hear their cries? Give them joy in exchange for their grief?
When we desire to be the needed one for our children, we take the place of God.
That’s where the spiral begins. When we take the place of God, then the expectation to meet every need sits squarely on our own inadequate shoulders. We cannot meet all those needs, even of one child. We don’t want to see them suffer. We become exasperated, frustrated, over-wrought. Hormones do not help, but sin never came out of a hormone. Sin has always come crawling out of our own darkened hearts.
And it plays out as shouting, throwing things, manipulation, blaming, laziness, despair, fearfulness, and apathy. Selfishness, once again, has ended in death. By our own mother-hands, we have damaged the relationship we had with our child, the trust they had in us, and our relationship with our Maker.
What to do? How did we go from wanting to help them to wanting to hurt them?
Solomon dealt with this question of mothers, death of children, and selfishness thousands of years ago.
When the two prostitutes entered his throne room, they were already in the middle of their selfish argument. They had each given birth to a son, but one of the infants had died during the night. They snatched and pulled at the living infant.
Solomon issued his famous line: “Bring me a sword…. divide the living child in two.”
The two mothers had a decision to make. Either, they could allow their selfishness to result in death, or they could choose to lay down their own claims and choose life for the child.
One woman chose death. The other, because her heart yearned for her son, chose life, even if it meant bereaving herself.
When we look into the faces of our own children, we must make the same decision. Death by selfishness or life by selflessness?
When Simeon held the Christ-child in his arms, he looked at Mary and prophesied the crucifixion that neither one of them could understand or prevent, and he told her, “A sword will pierce through your own soul also.”
Mary, the mother of our Lord, was faced with this very same mother-dilemma. She would not be all that her son needed. She would have to suffer at a distance while He suffered, if she put it into God’s hands. Could she lay down her selfishness so that her Son could rely on His Father? She must. We must.
Only when Jesus is the center can we truly be the mothers that He has called us to be.
