The Holy Suffering of Motherhood
“Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ”
― Elizabeth Stone
Much is said about the tender beauty of motherhood. It is one of the sweetest gifts one can experience.
It is full of silly jokes, sweet hugs, and so many beautiful moments. I consider being a mother to my 8 children one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given.
But it is not without its share of pain.
It’s a role that you are initiated into through the pain of pregnancy and childbirth (except in the case of adoption, foster care, etc… which sometimes carries different types of pain). This is usually the first way that mothers suffer but it doesn’t end there.
Mother’s hearts also break through miscarriages and still births, or when their children become sick, experience disabilities, go through bullying, come home too late, endure their first break up, foolishly rebel or walk away from the faith, move away from home, and more.
Some of the things that cause mothers pain are pretty common like watching a child go through their first shots and others are much more serious and tragic such as losing a child or watching them rebel and walk away from God.
Either way, no one can deny that mothering is as hard as it is joyous.
And this is what makes motherhood so sanctifying. God takes the suffering of mothers and makes it holy as he uses it to make us more and more like Him. The more painful the situation, the more ready we are to admit our weakness and fully depend on Him. When we have reached the end of ourselves, we turn to Him in desperation and ask that He heal our child, protect our child, save our child.
It’s in this dependence on God that He makes all grace abound to us so that, having all sufficiency in all things, we are able to abound in every good work.(2 Cor. 9:8) His grace is sufficient for us as we do the good work of mothering our children.
We may not feel that we are enough for this. And honestly, we aren’t. Motherhood takes more patience, more wisdom, more endurance, more strength, more love, more everything than we have on our own. But He has and is all that we need.
All that we can do is turn to him as his beloved children and ask for what we need. It’s in the praying and the dependence that God does his beautiful work on our hearts.
Paul Miller says it beautifully,
"Deserts are God’s best gift to us. A desert is something painful that won’t go away and doesn’t have an exit. Deserts strip you of human pretension. They are God’s answer to the idol factory in every human heart. They are idol-destroyers because you have no life in the desert.
For instance, if you have a child who has walked away from the faith and embraced the spirit of the age, you quickly learn that nothing you say will change them. You begin to despair that they will ever become believers. Now you are ready to pray. You’ve become poor in spirit. You are completely confident that you can’t do anything. You aren’t even sure God can help. You’ve been praying so long, and nothing has happened. That state of despair you are in is the spirit that lies behind powerful praying. I’m not talking long-winded praying or even passionate praying—just desperate prayer. So you tell God your heart’s burden for your child. You just say it. Don’t even think “prayer”—just tell God what you want. Tell Him you aren’t even sure He can fix it. You might hesitate at being that honest with God because it seems to be unbelieving. But if you look at the Psalms of lament, they are filled with statements like, “Where are You God? Why aren’t You doing anything?” And yes, there is unbelief in that prayer."
Suffering gracefully makes us desperate.
It’s a grace because it’s in that desperation that we finally have to admit that we don’t have the answers. We don’t have the power. However, that does not leave us without hope. In fact, this end is where hope actually begins- when we’ve reached the end of ourselves and step into the infinite love and strength of God.
It’s tempting, when faced with suffering, to find an escape. After a day of dealing with tantrums, nursing a sick child, trying to encourage a child who hates school because of the bullies, or trying to reach a grown child who no longer follows God and has left the family, we understandably feel we need a break; a moment to forget about the pain. We may turn to Netflix, a glass of wine, our favorite snack, or just some time scrolling through our phones, but the comfort we receive is short lived. All the while, Jesus is there and able to provide a supernatural comfort and strength if we would only go to him. His death and resurrection made this possible but we settle for cheap substitutes instead and still find ourselves struggling and feeling defeated in the end.
“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
-C.S. Lewis
This momentary pain that we want to quickly come to an end is where God is working. He’s not in the same hurry to end it as we are. It’s where he’s doing the work of remaking our hearts, renewing our minds, and writing his beautiful story of restoration.
Our response to suffering has to be trust. We are free to release our desire for control of the situation and put our trust in the goodness of God. I think we can rest in at least three truths about our suffering:
He will work it out for our good.
He will make us more like Christ in the process.
He will be glorified.
We serve a God who is powerful and able to save. If he is allowing suffering in your life, you can believe that He’s good and trust him with your heart. We can regard our suffering as a holy gift as it brings us closer to him and we can say with Paul:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.
2 Cor. 1:3-5
