Many people around the world have celebrated Mother’s Day. Children and families took time to remember their mother and to thank them for their love and care. The Bible tells us the first woman was called Eve, which means ‘life’, “because she would become the mother of all the living.” Every person born into this world has a mother. For most their relationship with their mother is very positive but, sadly, for some the experience is negative. Mother’s Day also may be a sad day for women who would love to be a mother but have had difficulties in conceiving a child or in carrying a baby to full term. Thankfully, some of these women can experience the joy of motherhood through adopting a baby or child who needs a mother.

Our mother’s influence is formative and goes back to the moment of conception and the months when our mother carried us in her womb. In Psalm 139 King David reflects on this, “For you O Lord created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful; I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”

For many people Mother’s Day is a time to thank God for their mother’s love. It was God’s intention from the beginning of time that children should experience a mother’s love. The Lord Jesus experienced the love of Mary, his young mother. One Christmas carol reflects on this, “And through all his wondrous childhood
he would honour and obey, love and watch the gentle mother in whose tender arms he lay.” A well-known hymn says, “Now thank we all our God with heart and hands and voices, who wondrous things has done, in whom this world rejoices; who from our mother’s arms has blessed us on our way with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.”

The love of a good mother points us to God’s eternal love expressed in the gift of his Son, Jesus. In one of his hymns William Cowper, the poet and hymnwriter, says, “Can a woman’s tender care cease towards the child she bare? Yes, she may forgetful be, yet will I remember thee. Mine is an unchanging love, higher than the heights above, deeper than the depths beneath, free and faithful, strong as death.”