Ever since I birthed my first baby, the words “Labor Day” always bring back memories of muscles contracting, pacing the living room in the dark of the night, and the desperate desire to bear down and bless the earth with another child of God.
All mothers know labor and we all learn to deliver lovingly and sacrificially, no matter how we are escorted into our role as a mama: the woman who has born new life from her womb; the one who has adopted the child of another woman’s travail; and the one who spoke the words “I do,” thereby receiving her husband’s children as the first gift of her new marriage.
Mothering is always laboring.
It is always loving others more, first, before, above, and beyond what our hearts ever thought possible before the heartbeat of another human became the beat of love in our own souls.
A mother is the center of a home. The activities, the hopes, the hurts, the joys, and the lives of everyone spins around the axis of her love and care. We are the nurturers, the grace-givers, the soft place to land.
Let a father be the strength and the courage to achieve and conquer, to rescue and win, to fly to new heights, and to do great things for the glory of God. A mother is the brave heart of sacrifice, the strength of trusting in God’s truth, the grace that loves beyond weakness or failure, and the choice to hope for resurrection.
The love of a mother is the North Star of her child’s heart.
The North Star never moves in our sky, sitting directly above the North Pole. No matter how far we roam, it can always lead us home. The whole world spins beneath its constancy.
When the road becomes treacherous, a mother’s love nudges onward because tomorrow always carries hope and possibility in abundance.
Mothers know lost coins, stray lambs, pierced hands, and oil poured out on the feet of Jesus.
Laboring is really just another word for loving.
Mothers labor to clothe and clean, to feed and teach, and to stand in the constancy of faith in God.
A baby is born once from its mother’s womb, and a soul once again by the Holy Spirit.
But a mother labors and births love every day between and all the days after, leading her family home to the God who placed the stars in the sky.
Lead on, brave women of God. Lead on.
