Mother's Day at the Ten Thirty

The flyers went up on the twelfth of April. She saw them going up. She was carrying a coffee urn back to the kitchen and there was a girl on a step stool with a staple gun and a stack of cream colored paper, and the paper said HONORING OUR MOTHERS, and underneath that it said the tenth of May, ten thirty service.

She put the urn down on the counter and she stood in the kitchen for a while with her hands flat on the stainless steel.

Her son died on the ninth of March. He was twenty two. She has one child and she had one child and both of those sentences are true at the same time, which is a thing nobody warns you about.

Since the twelfth of April she has counted the Sundays. Four of them. She counted them the way a person counts the last few stairs in the dark.

Because here is what happens at the ten thirty. There is a moment, somewhere between the second song and the announcements, when the pastor says something warm, and then he says, and would all our mothers please stand, and the room applauds, and the ushers come down the aisles with the little potted plants.

And she does not know what she is going to do.

If she stands, she will have to hold her face together while two hundred people clap, and somebody will hug her afterward and say something about him, and she will say thank you, and she will get to her car.

If she stays sitting, the woman on her left will notice. That woman is kind. That woman will lean over.

And there is a third thing, which is not going, and she has thought about that one at two in the morning more than once, and she cannot decide whether not going would be honest or whether it would be a thing she could never take back.

Four Sundays. She has been bracing since April and the day has not even arrived yet, and the bracing is its own weight, and nobody in that building knows she is carrying it.

If anybody has counted stairs in the dark like that, stay with me a minute. There is a woman in the first book of Samuel who was in a house of worship on a day she could not do, and what the record says about her is going to take something off.

Hannah was in the house of the Lord and she was not fit for it

Here is the scene, and I want you to notice where she is standing when it happens.

And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore.1 Samuel 1:10

That is not a bedroom. That is not a field. That is the house of the Lord at Shiloh, on the feast, on the one occasion in the year when the whole family came up together and everybody was expected to be glad.

She was there. She was in bitterness of soul. She wept until the priest thought she had been drinking.

And the record does not correct her. Not one line of that chapter says she should have composed herself for the sake of the room. Not one line suggests she picked the wrong day to fall apart. The Holy Spirit put her bitterness of soul into the permanent text of the Bible without a single word of adjustment.

You are welcome in that building on that morning in the exact condition you arrive in, and you were welcome on every Sunday since March that nobody noticed. 1 Samuel 1:10 is the written word putting a woman in bitterness of soul inside the house of the Lord on a feast day, and the Spirit who inspired that verse is the same Spirit who stood in the kitchen with a pair of hands flat on the stainless steel.

Now hear the second thing. Eli looked at her and got her completely wrong. The priest, the man with the office, the one who should have known, looked straight at a grieving woman and reached for the worst available explanation.

She was not thrown out. She was not shamed out of the building. She said her piece and she went her way, and the text says her countenance was no more sad, and nothing about her circumstances had changed yet at all.

You have a place in the house of God that does not depend on one single person in that room reading you correctly. That is what 1 Samuel 1 puts on the record, and the Holy Spirit does not take His hand off a mother because an usher misjudged the look on her face.

The room is not asking what it sounds like it is asking

Let me protect that pastor for a second, because Wednesday is coming and I do not want anything sitting between the two of you.

When he says, would all our mothers please stand, he is not conducting an audit. He is not asking who currently has a living child. He has never once, in his whole ministry, thought about what that sentence does to the woman in row eleven whose son is buried, because almost nobody has thought about it, because the church has never been very good at this.

That is not cruelty. That is a man reaching for the warmest thing in the room and not knowing what it costs at the far end of it.

And I am not going to tell you it does not cost. It costs. It lands like a hand on a burn.

What I am telling you is that no verdict is being handed down at ten thirty on the tenth of May. The applause is not a scoreboard. The potted plants are not a census. And whether the reader stands, or sits, or spends that hour in the parking lot with the radio off, not one thing about who she is before God moves an inch either way.

You are a mother at ten thirty on the tenth of May whether you stand up or whether you do not, and you were a mother on the ninth of March and every day of the twenty two years before it. Nothing written anywhere in Scripture makes that title a function of the room a woman is standing in, and the Spirit of God has never once measured her by whether she got to her feet.

Nobody gets to tell you how to spend that morning

Now I have to say the thing this whole site exists to say, and I want to say it slowly.

I am not going to give anybody a plan for the tenth of May.

I could. Sit near the back where the exit is close. Take a friend. Skip the ten thirty and go to the eight o'clock where there are forty people and no plants. Every one of those is a reasonable thing that a reasonable person might do.

And every one of them, handed over as instruction, quietly turns that morning into an assignment a person can fail.

Nobody needs another assignment. There is already one child dead and a Sunday coming and four weeks of counting behind it.

So here is the whole of it. Standing and crying through the applause is not weakness. Staying in the seat with both hands in the lap while the woman on the left leans over is not bitterness. Not going at all, and sitting at your own table at ten thirty with a coffee, is not backsliding and it is not a step away from God and it is not anything at all except a woman getting through a Sunday.

You are free on the tenth of May in a way nobody in that congregation will think to tell you that you are. Galatians 5:1 says Christ has made us free and it carves out no exception for grieving mothers on a feast day, and the Spirit is not standing at the back of the sanctuary keeping attendance.