Mother’s Day has just come and gone and, as usual, it has left me thinking about the power of relationships.
Pick up any Mother’s Day card and you will find words like love, sacrifice, care, nurture and compassion. We honour mothers because they demonstrate these sorts qualities. We appreciate how selfless they are and how give themselves to their families without expecting much in return.
Mothers have a powerful influence because they invest in others.
The attitudes that create strong and healthy families are the exact same that are needed for a strong and healthy church. In fact, if you read the first 15 verses of virtually every New Testament letter, you will find words of care and affection because these letters were written not only to instruct, but also to strengthen, encourage and nurture.
Churches as a whole, and we as individual church members, make a huge mistake when we think that faith is an individual undertaking. No one would ever say this, but I often see people acting as if they have no responsibility to help, encourage or look after anyone else.
That is simply not true. Churches are not meant to be a group of individuals who keep everyone else at arm’s length.
In Genesis 4:9, Adam and Eve’s son Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He thought that the obvious answer was no. He thought that he was only responsible for himself.
However, God makes it clear that he actually was supposed to be his brother’s keeper. He was supposed to look after him and care for him. His brother actually was his responsibility and he was not supposed to just live for himself.
Rather, he was supposed to care about his brother’s well-being as much as his own.
If you want to make a difference in the lives of those around you, think about what a good mother would do and then follow that example. God’s family needs people, both men and women, who can “mother” one another.
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God” (1 John 4:7).
