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In his book, Family Survival in the American Jungle, Steve Farrar writes:
Over one hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton asked: "Can anyone tell me two things more vital to the race than these; what man shall marry what woman, and what shall be the first things taught to their first child?" Chesterton goes on to comment that: "the daily operations surrounded her with very young children, who needed to be taught not so much anything but everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, a woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't...Our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world....But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean....If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge (at his work)....But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless, and of small import to the soul, then I say give it up...."
How can it be an (important) career to tell other people's children about mathematics, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe?...A woman's function is laborious...not because it is minute, but because it is gigantic. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
This author states so well what is the overwhelming task of being a mom. While we certainly cannot pay enough honor to our mothers, I know of no collective group who are generally less appreciated nor carry a greater sense of inadequacy. If asked, few moms actually believe themselves to have done a sufficient job at the most important of responsibilities. Yet, Scripture attests that God works in those people and circumstances which may even seem at times to be void of His presence…even at such an impossible task as motherhood. The following example of one mother (from Robert J. Morgan’s On this Day) offers proof of God’s grace even in seeming futility.
What a difficult life. She was the twenty-fifth child in a dissenter’s family. Though brilliant, she procured little education. Though strong-willed, she lived in a male-dominated age. She married an older man and bore him nineteen children. Nine of them died. Her house burned up, her barn fell down, her health failed, and she lived with the wolf at the door.
She was Susanna Wesley.
Samuel and Susanna, married in 1689, began pastoring in dreary little Epworth in 1697. They served there forty years, enduring hardships like these:
Samuel’s salary was so small (and he was so incapable of managing it) that he was thrown into debtor’s prison, leaving Susanna to fend for herself.
They disagreed about Susanna’s ministry. Her Bible lessons drew more listeners than his sermons.
Susanna gave birth to a daughter during the election of 1705. The nurse, exhausted by overnight revelry, slept so heavily the next morning that she rolled on the baby and smothered it.
Susanna herself was often bedfast, having to delegate home duties to the children. But several of her children were so wayward that she called them “a constant affliction.”
Her brother, having promised her a sizable gift, disappeared mysteriously and was never heard from again.
Finally, on July 21, 1731, Susanna described an accident in which her horses stampeded, throwing Samuel from their wagon and injuring him so that he was never well from that day.
A difficult life. And yet the parsonage at Epworth was destined to become the most celebrated in English history, for from it came two of the greatest evangelists of all time, John and Charles Wesley. And the mother who raised them shook the world.
God alone knows the eventual mark that each of our lives will make upon those who know us best. Every child that grows to adulthood will make decisions for which they are ultimately responsible. However, the influence of a mother is unquestionably immeasurable. Even in those most mundane of activities and those most seemingly disastrous moments, God is working in and through our lives. Thank you to every mother that is continually seeking the Lord and allowing His grace to show itself through your life. And in those moments in which it seems that your failures are all to obvious, remember the promise of Scripture: “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it” (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24).
Jason