A Mother’s Love is Not Always Kind
1 CORINTIANS 16:14
“Let all that you do be done in love.”
LUKE 6:35
“But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great…”
It’s Mother’s Day weekend. Maybe you are off to brunch or there will be a slideshow at church for all the new babies or you need to put an alert on your phone to remember to CALL YOUR MOTHER. Whatever you are doing, I find myself contemplating motherhood more and more these days, specifically what my motherhood looks like now. Yes, I’ve written about it in UNBOUND and all the expectations I didn’t realize I had until they went unmet. But I find myself in a new phase now that the children are a tiny bit older and less fragile and more FORCEFUL than they used to me.
I’ve been mulling over what it means to love my children well. It hasn’t been fuzzy butterflies and tambourines over here lately. Love, more often than not, is lecture and time outs and long conversations about making choices that benefit others over yourself. Love has been me walking out of the room, counting to twenty, and walking back in again so I can speak at a decibel below a yell. Love has been…hard. It’s basically the difference between saying your marriage vows and all those lovey words in Corinthians and then living them for the next year, decade, lifetime.
I think we often mistake kindness for love.
But they are fundamentally different. If we could diagram it, kindness would be a subset of love, the dangling modifier that is only a part of the package. You can be kind from a distance. You can let someone go ahead of you in traffic, pay it forward at Starbucks, buy a newspaper from the homeless man on the street corner, RSVP in a reasonable amount of time to an event, call your mother back. All these things are acts of kindness.
But love requires a greater investment. Love is working through the sharpest points of yourself so that you can help your kids do the same. Love is making sure your children understand the difference between sympathy and empathy and it means letting them cry it out from timeout so the consequences of their actions sink in like stones settling in a river. It means giving the lecture and watching them roll their eyes. It means “nagging” even though you’ve always hated that word and all the connotations it arouses. It means all the icky parts of parenting that you would like to pass along to someone else.
Love, in short, is often unpleasant. It makes you squeamish. It means confrontation and difficulty in a life that could be quite beautifully simple of you were content to stay merely “kind” and keep everybody happy. But, as C.S. Lewis says in The Problem of Pain,“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.” Mere kindness will keep you in everybody’s good graces. But love is what we are ultimately called to. Jesus wasn’t always kind. In fact, if you were on the wrong end of that righteousness, He was incredibly irritating. But irritants, if you think about it, cause discomfort for a purpose. They exist to point you to the splinter, the blister, the sin in your life that needs closer examination. Irritating, yes. But also, necessary.
Kindness is neat and clean and easy. Love is messy and hard, and also the greatest commandment we are given.
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A big thank you from Jamie on The Mom Gene!
