Dear Mom: A Mother’s Day Letter on Your Highest Calling

Dear Mom, what is your purpose? You’re called upon for every need, serving as the family’s sounding board, obliged to respond to every request, drained of energy and time. If only you weren’t needed so much. If only you had more help. If only you had less time with the children. If only they didn’t pester you so constantly. If only you could get enough sleep.

On your best days as a parent, you feel so blessed, but on your worst days (and there are plenty of those), you struggle against all that is required of you.

But what is your calling, dear mother? Do you know? Do you realize the specific purpose for which God has created you?

Your Highest Calling

Many moms feel called to many things. They feel called to run the kids to and from baseball practice and school, and attend PTA meetings while managing a demanding career. They’re called to keep the house clean and the meals prepped. They’re called to think ahead and have contingency plans in place for every occasion.

But those are not callings; they are life choices and hurdles.

You, dear woman of God, have received one specific divine call from God Himself.

You have the highest calling of all, a calling that mimics God’s role in a way. Your calling is to influence little souls, to guide them, discipline them, and protect them.

No other person, apart from God himself, has quite as powerful and influential a role towards eternal life as you do. Your role is unique and divine. It is wrapped in the plain packaging of dirty laundry and chores, housework and cooking, cleaning and listening, teaching and helping. Your role is to sacrifice yourself for another person your whole life through.

The Manger and the Mother

Your role is similar to that of the manger holding baby Jesus. It seemed plain and lacked anything that would make people stop and marvel. It was an everyday item used for the necessary, messy task of feeding animals so that they wouldn’t die. But inside that ordinary object, there was the king of the universe, the salvation of the world.

You are similar to that manger in that motherhood is not a sparkly, attractive career that draws the world’s attention. You aren’t even noticed by anyone outside of your family.

But you are holding in your care God-given life. Do you know what that means? You have been given an eternal soul to care for. You are charged with influencing actual human beings in a permanent, eternal way. Your role is the most important one there is on earth.

What career could surpass that? How will you ever impact someone as profoundly as you impact your child?

A Calling Broadened

You have a calling from God. That calling started as a wife when you got married. You were called to be a helpmate to your husband.

But then that calling expanded when God Himself blessed you with a child. Your one calling broadened from being a wife to being a wife and mother.

In our culture, it’s easy to credit ourselves with getting pregnant or being able to adopt. We think it was our effort and desire that produced the result of life, and that idea is reinforced everywhere we look with things like IVF treatments and birth control. It’s even in the name, control. You choose. You control. It’s your decision.

We easily forget that it would not have been at all difficult for the God of the universe to prevent us from having a child if he chose to do so. We aren’t actually all that powerful.

God didn’t need your permission before forming your child’s life in the womb, nor did he need your effort in order to give you the gift of life (Psalm 139:13–14). It was a choice, but it was His choice, not yours.

God chose you, out of everyone in the world past and present, to parent this particular child made in His image. He chose you for a reason.

And so, you transitioned from a calling as a wife to a calling as a wife and mother. It’s like a river slowly winding down a mountain, flowing peacefully around rocks and heading toward the valley below. When it is joined by another spring (your husband), the crystal-clear waters grow, and it continues along the path laid out for it.

Eventually, however, another spring feeds into it (your child), and the result is a wider, faster-moving river teeming with life. It is still one river, but that river is broader, deeper, and more impactful than it was before.

Your life has broadened and expanded in eternal and unfathomable ways through your God-given calling to be a mother.

You Are Not Alone

This incredible responsibility is humbling, and this gift to influence a soul so profoundly and significantly should be held in the highest regard.

So when the days are long, and your patience is short, remember that God has entrusted you with someone He loves so much that He died for them. He chose you out of all the people in the world for this child, and He promises to help you. There is no moment in which you are doing this alone.

He now takes you by the right hand to lead you into His glory (Psalm 73:23–24). Hold fast to Him, teaching your child to do the same. In the twinkling of an eye (1 Corinthians 15:52), when this world has passed away, and all these weary labors are over, none of those hardships and struggles will matter as you rejoice in the presence of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

What a day that will be!