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By Myrtle Thompson

Guest columnist

Turning the calendar page for May reminded me how fast the days have passed. Our year has not been static!

May reminds us it’s time to celebrate moms. Mother’s Day is always the second Sunday in May. That’s May 8 this year. Before we become adjusted to a new month, we have a remembrance day we shouldn’t forget: Our mothers need to be honored!

God first created Adam, then Eve, the first couple to whom He gave responsibilities for sharing a life together. We women have the unique privilege and great blessing of being the reproductive part and nurturing children, of training our children, of loving and teaching them to love, of correcting and showing them how to live. We moms can’t be replaced. Thankfully, this day reminds us of our God given purpose.

Have you noticed God also gave the animals the same tenderness for training their litter? The young follow and do what the mother does. The mother bird tenderly cares for the eggs in the nest, keeping them warm, then seeing to her baby birds’ need for food. She watches over the nest until they can fly and be on their own.

It is a God-given honor to be a mom. Right here is where God’s great love lights our world. The Scriptures tell us we are created in His image. When we give our lives over to God, He calls us His children (I John 3:1.) We can rely on Him to help us guide our children in the right way. Because He is God, He is able to do for us what we are expected to do for our children.

I was in a restaurant when a group came in with a 2-month-old baby boy who had just been christened. I knew I had to greet and congratulate them. When I turned my attention to the baby, the little guy immediately smiled.  He already knew he was loved, cuddled and being cared for. That is God’s purpose for motherhood.

This Sunday I feel sure our church like most others will focus on mothers. Since I teach a class, I wanted to review mothers in the Bible. Many were very godly, praying women, a few not so much so. I thought of my mom.

My parents already had seven children when Mom knew she was going to have another baby. She wasn’t sure how they could meet the needs of the ones they already had.

I had never heard that story until the night before my husband and I left to go overseas as missionaries. It was then she told me I was the child about which she had felt so desperate. She said she had gone outside where no one could hear and cried out to God, asking Him to make her love this baby and if He did, she would give the baby back to Him.

God very graciously answered that prayer. With age comes wisdom. I know today she was a wonderful mother who had to make sacrifices. When I put flowers on her grave I stand for a moment and thank God for her. My praise and thanks go to Him for a mother who did all she could with the little they had to see that our needs for food and clothing and shelter were met — not high-class things but our needs.

Solomon set a high standard for women when he wrote Proverbs 31. He asked who could find a “virtuous” woman and said “her price is far above rubies” — not diamonds. He knew high-quality rubies were a rare, very costly stone, worth more than a diamond even today. He put virtuous women in that class.

He then said her husband trusts in her. That’s loyalty, no playing around. Solomon was brilliant and wise, not a particularly good biblical example of what he taught, but he had excellent praise and insight into what God intended for women.

“Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. Give her the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.” (Proverbs 31:30, 31)

May the mothers of today see those godly virtues about which Solomon wrote and become that kind of women.

 

Suffolk resident Myrtle V. Thompson, 94, is a mother of five, retired missionary, writer and author of a book about her life, “Living in Villages, Visiting in Palaces,” available on Amazon.com. Her email address is mvtgrt@gmail.com.