Labor of Love

     "And a sword shall pierce your soul, too."
 
      Those words, spoken by Simeon long before Mary had to witness her beautiful boy tortured and mangled, carry a weighty message for all mothers. Mary's case is, of course, unique in all history. But  the truth is: motherhood always brings soul-piercing pain, even when children are God-honoring, fruitful and obedient.

   What is the piercing?  The unavoidable fact is that there is a point when motherhood ends, at least in a certain sense.  God gives mothers the privilege of being the primary means of nurturing, training, discipling, protecting and teaching helpless little people. She gets to be the most important person in the world to these little someones. She gets to fan flickers of talent into flame, see this old world through their new eyes, tell them all her stories and read them other people's. God entrusts her to do as she sees fit, ordering their days and filling them with what seems wisest to her.

  But at the end of it, inevitably, they grow up. They may leave or they may not. But they grow up and they don't need all of that in quite the same way.

    Motherhood, as we have known it from the moment we learned of that little life inside of us, ends. It is not enough to call it a change. It is too radical.

    But it ends in exactly the same way that pregnancy ends.  The baby is safe and comfortable in the womb, all his needs met. Then labor begins.  Great, violent, heaves disrupt the cozy little world. The spasms start out small, but then cannot possibly be ignored. It hurts the mother. But not the baby. It may alarm him, but it doesn't hurt in the same way that it hurts the mother.

     But all of this is necessary for the baby to become what he must become or die -- to breathe air, to eat food, to see and hear and smell, to have room to grow and use his limbs. And all of this also creates a new relationship between the mother and the baby -- she can relate to him in a new way, she can look at him and talk to him. She can now communicate with him in a way she never could before and tell him about things as he sees them for himself. All of that pain is forgotten because now there is a new relationship.
 
    And so it is for mothers. For a time, we have our children in our homes and we know everything about them. We get to talk to them as we walk, as we work, as we lay down.  We get to do for them as we think best. We lay aside our lives and give all we have to raising these.

   And when it is over, we are stunned. But during the labor, we can take heart that these birth pains will give way to a new creation -- an adult child, a beloved friend to whom you can relate to in a different way than before but still different from any other person in the world.

    Like the end of pregnancy, motherhood's "end" brings completely different joys and challenges  as we go even deeper in  learning what it means to love.

    The pain of the loss, of letting go, drives home the beauty of God's promise: love never ends. And He is Love.