Thank you for joining us! Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
On our devotional last week, Mal Whitehorn wrote:
“Joy! Amen. Though the soil is hostile and dismissive, I am planted in my Inheritance. I bloom through discomfort into pleasure. All my desire is before God and my sighing is not hidden from Him ♥️”
Thank you so much for that beautiful reminder, Mal!
If you want to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
I keep returning to that vision: of a bird on her nest encircled by all of her hard work and warming the soft circles of her eggs; in a sense, she is raising little images of herself incarnations who will go on to have their own experiences; her only teacher the God Who Raises little images of Himself and watches over them as they fly.
Each of us is being mothered by a good and gracious God. God our Father, who is also God our Mother. We are often so preoccupied with His Fatherhood that we neglect His Motherhood, throughout Scripture: the way He chooses to present Himself as a mother hen, sets the table for us before our enemies, and raises His beloved to his cheek. So many images of God as a mothering, nurturing presence.
In the United States, Mother’s Day is often fraught with complexity. We celebrate motherhood, but we recognize its nuance. The grief associated with loss, yearning, and disappointment. The pain attached to trauma, abuse, and estrangement. The understanding that there are many kinds of mothers, some of them unexpected: relatives, friends, siblings, teachers, mentors, neighbors, and more. And the knowledge that some choose not to mother at all, or to mother someone they did not bear, or to nurture a beloved pet or plants or something else that needs to be tended and cared for.
Regardless: motherhood is of God, and each of us—no matter what we believe of ourselves—is being perfectly mothered. Surrounded, as by a nest that He labors on so that we don’t have to. Each of us is an image of Him, separate yet always sheltered under His wings. All of us alive with His desire to nurture, to build, to act, to create.
But here is the difference between our mothering God and that little bird who learned from Him:
When her babies fly away, that mother bird will let them go. It is in her nature. And she may never see them again.
Not so with God. There is nowhere we can fly to that He does not see, and know, and hear us calling. We will never grow beyond Him. We will never lose our need for Him. And He will never let us go.
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You've hit on something deeply important. Frequently when songs and poems describe the journey of parenting (mothering and fathering both), the image of young adulthood is one of "leaving the nest" and "flying away." But the children we love don't leave on a one-way trajectory. Yes, there's a nostalgic sadness that idealizes the good old days when the kids were little. But there's also a profound joy as the relationship between parent and adult child blossoms into a special kind of rich friendship. It's just as you wrote: "There is nowhere we can fly to that He does not see, and know, and hear us calling. We will never grow beyond Him. We will never lose our need for Him. And He will never let us go." I suspect most parents will see themselves in that description and say "Amen."