This Mother’s Day, Let God Change The Narrative

 

Susan Narjala

 

 

In the first week of May, the marketing messages leveled at women, especially moms, get louder and more insistent. From makeup brands to day-spas where stone Buddhas sit impassively among scented candles, sales pitches pivot around a central memo to women: “Because you deserve it.”

 

Social media is no less pervasive with its “This Mother’s Day, remember, you’re worth it,” type of articles. Mom blogs and Instagram posts, including the faith-driven ones, read something like this: After an entire year of doing thankless tasks and drinking lukewarm coffee and eating leftovers off your kids’ plates, today you’re entitled to put your feet up, pour yourself a glass of wine and be pampered.

 

With 13 years of motherhood under my belt, I can say unequivocally that I get it. Motherhood is lived out in the daily, ordinary, often unappreciated tasks that may go unnoticed by your children or your spouse. A day off from the routine, 24 hours of appreciation, sounds unbelievably perfect. By no means am I dismissing breakfast in bed (served with a side order of spills and sticky fingers) or unwinding at a spa as a special treat on Mother’s Day.

 

But it’s not what we do or don’t do on Mother’s Day that counts as much as our heart posture toward this yearly event.

 

As moms, we do ourselves a flagrant disservice if we buy into the “you deserve” mantra that the well-oiled marketing machine has been drilling into our minds. As Christian mothers, we are called to examine the world’s ideas against the inerrant truth of the Word of God—and to reject those views that detract from giving God glory or those that diminish our calling.

 

Why ‘I deserve’ is a problem

 

The idea of “I am worthy of …” can lead to us having unrealistic expectations of our spouses or our children. And with that there often comes a sense of disappointment that the enemy exploits to create friction in our relationships with our loved ones. Self-righteous indignation can slowly but definitively take over our thinking if we don’t guard against it.

 

While it seems almost childish, I know moms (myself included) who’ve fallen into the social media trap, convinced that their significance is somehow diminished because their families didn’t create Instagram-worthy experiences which match up to the curated pictures they see online. “I deserve that also” can breed a sense of resentment and jealousy—or, on the other end of the spectrum, one-upmanship—in a world driven by likes and shares and cherry-picked photographs.

 

This notion of “I’ve earned this” can also create a culture of entitlement in our families where we may be passively promoting the idea that we serve with the ultimate goal of receiving rewards and recognition for our work.

 

But beyond those reasons, as Christian mothers, holding on to the ideal of earned worth or payback for our work sits at odds with our faith.

 

We don’t earn the blessings that God freely pours into our lives. Every good and perfect gift comes from our Heavenly Father (James 1:17). It’s from the fulness of his grace that we receive one blessing after another (John 1:16)—not from the rewards that we believe are owed to us.

 

It was the very first mother, Eve, who demonstrated the grave folly of believing that she deserved more than what God had given her. She wanted to be like God (Genesis 3:5). She lacked contentment and gratitude for what she had already been given. She wanted more. Did she, perhaps, think that she deserved more?

 

On Mother’s Day, we seem to have given ourselves a free pass to believing that a sense of entitlement is not only our prerogative—but that it also serves to fill a deep need within us.

 

In Jeremiah 2:13, God says through the prophet: For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

 

These marketing mantras that we’ve unintentionally subscribed to, these ideas of self-worth that puff us up and promise to make us feel significant, are our broken cisterns. They fill a void for a while—till the water seeps through the cracks, leaving us depleted and parched.

 

Is there a better approach?

 

No, I’m not advocating that we stop celebrating Mother’s Day. Nor should we put a cease and desist on Starbucks gift cards for mammas or vouchers to salons. Appreciating the mothers and mother-figures in our lives is a good and right thing, just as Jesus remembered his own mother as he hung on the cross. But, what if we spun the “I deserve” narrative on its head and allowed God to deeply impress on us that every gift in our lives is wholly and completely an outpouring of His grace?

 

The fact that we have laundry to fold and dinner tables to set and beds to make is a blessing from God. The fact that we have children to raise and minister to and share the Word with is a blessing from God. The fact that we are equipped with grit and grace for this calling of motherhood is a blessing from God.

 

When we understand just how undeserving we are and yet how much we’ve received, we are filled with a deep awe, a holy reverence for God. Only then can we be freed to take our eyes off ourselves and turn them toward Jesus. Only then can we be freed from self-righteous pride or simmering discontent as we live out our calling—even in times when our work goes unnoticed. Only then can we serve from a place of fulness because the Living Water flows into our lives instead of pouring out from the broken cisterns we dig up for ourselves.

 

This Mother’s Day, let God change the narrative in your mind from “I deserve” to “Even though I don’t deserve.” And, while Mother’s Day rolls around once a year, we have the stunning privilege of celebrating every single day because we’ve been given the title of daughter of the King.