More than a Hallmark holiday

I can remember talking to a friend as we drove by a billboard advertising Father’s Day and hearing “that’s twenty dollars I look forward to saving.” The third Sunday in June is one of the many hard days in a year for a kid growing up without a father. The same is true on Mother’s Day for anyone who feels unworthy or overlooked because, for whatever reason, they don’t get to be a mom. The same is true for anyone who is not married or falling in love on Valentine’s Day.

The Hallmark holidays are hard for the church to do well because they don’t have much to offer when real life falls short. I haven’t seen any cards for kids with a father- or mother-shaped hole in their lives, or for someone spending Valentine’s Day building a healthier relationship with themselves. God has so much more to offer us than these big commercial holidays are trying to sell.

The things we have to be grateful for don’t always fit on a greeting card.

If we go by the Ten Commandments, every day is a day to honor our fathers and our mothers. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank God for my mom and everything she taught me about how much God loves us and thus how much we are all worth fighting for. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank God for filling the father-shaped hole in my life with a love bigger than any one person’s shortcomings can destroy. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank God for giving me what I need to be the father I never had. The things we have to be grateful for don’t always fit on a greeting card.

If Mother’s Day is a happy celebration of all the love in your family, I am so happy for you, and God is overjoyed to see your joy. If Mother’s Day is hard for you, then I want to take a moment to share a couple of scriptures to which we can go to find the loving mother we need in God when other people or life itself have let us down.

I first want to share a passage from Isaiah someone read to me in Texas while we prayed together in a county jail: “But Zion said ‘the Lord has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me.’ Can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these might forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:14-16). Even if we are estranged from our families, even if we have been cut off completely from a parent or our children, we are never cut off completely from God, and God has promised never to become estranged from us.

I also want to share a passage from John’s gospel, chapter 15: “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches” (John 15:4-5). The more I think about this image of a branch and a vine, the more I see God’s love in Jesus as an umbilical cord that breathes for us before we know how to breathe and that nourishes us before we know how to eat.

The more I think about what it means to abide in God’s love, the more I remember speaking to my children and feeling them kick while they were still in their mother’s womb. Whether or not we ever knew the joy of abiding in our mothers or feeling a child abide within us, we can abide in God, and God abides in us.

However this day finds us, my prayer is that God will give us the blessings we need and the eyes we need to see them.

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Rev. John Harrison is the pastor of Nacoochee Presbyterian Church in Sautee Nacoochee, located at 260 GA-Hwy 255 North. Visit them online at nacoocheepresbyterian.org.