I am an unlikely mother. I am always amazed when I hear a fellow mama say, "I have always wanted to be a mom." When I was a child I didn't have those mommy aspirations. I was the baby of my family with much-older siblings. I was raised as the baby, the first-born and the only child all combined into one. You can imagine the outcome :)
I watched my oldest sister raise three sons and my other sister raise four children...and now an adopted blessing. As I watched them I would always think "I could
never do that. And I don't really
want to do that." The parenting journey looked messy and sacrificial and daunting and
uncontrollable.
But God had other plans. While in college I prayed regularly that God would use whatever circumstances that were needed to grow the fruit of the Spirit in my life. Fast forward a few years:
I got pregnant with my first child only seven months into marriage. And twelve years later, I have five children.
My flesh would have never chosen this path. It wanted quiet and control and job success. Self craved attention and respect and position. There is nothing necessarily wrong with having those things, but I don't think the sweet fruit of the Spirit would have been born in me that way.
Becoming a mother put me in a place of seeming helplessness and insecurity and fear. A place where I needed Someone who would help and I could trust. As I have looked into the little faces of five different newborns, I have realized just how much I am like them...one who is utterly dependent on someone stronger. I thought
I was strong and dominant, but in the face of a newborn I saw the truth:
I am weak and needy.
In weakness and neediness I have begun to learn that I must find my strength and needs met in my Father...the Perfect Parent. And in order to be the right kind of mother, I must know how God parents me...what is He like? A good place to start is to look at the very fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) that have been the subject of many of those early college prayers:
love joy peace patience kindness goodness faithfulness gentleness self-control
Initially those prayers were only for a list of character traits that sounded nice to me...but what I never saw was that those traits are
the very Heart of our Father. I somehow never had made that connection. I viewed that list as a means of self-improvement, or in religious terms, a means of personal character growth...not as
how God is and interacts with me as a child. And I certainly didn't know that those characteristics would never come out of me until I realized that
nothing in me could produce fruit....only He could produce the fruit as I learned to
believe that He is the Fruit and
trust that He can accomplish that work in me. To put it simply, it's all grace.
So even though I never feel like I qualify for the job description "mother" or that I should have been given the responsibility of five children or that I have any maternal gifts to bring to the table, I know that God has chosen me for this: to be brought into humility and need, to be shown His Father-Fruit, and to daily receive the grace to pass that on to these little ones.
May it be so.
